Alan Montecillo: Hi, I’m Alan Montecillo in for Ericka Cruz Guevarra. And welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. For years, residents in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood have sounded the alarm about nearby pollution, especially from a Superfund site called the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Activists worry that this pollution has already caused health problems in the community.
Alan Montecillo: They’ve also worried that human caused climate change could make this problem worse by pushing toxic groundwater close to the surface. Back in August of 2022, we released an episode about the people in the Bayview who’ve been pushing for more information and solutions. In late January of this year, the Navy released a report that says by 2035, contaminated groundwater from heavy metals and, quote, low level radiological objects could surface in an area that was once used for ship repair and radiological research.
Alan Montecillo: This could pose a threat to both current residents and future plans for the neighborhood, since the city also has big plans to build thousands of homes nearby. For long time activists, this news was vindication. But the story is far from over. Today, we’re going to take you back to that episode. You’ll meet activists who are on the frontlines of protecting the Bay of you from climate change. Stay with us.
Alan Montecillo: This episode originally ran on August 1st, 2022. In it, you’ll hear Ericka Cruz Guevarra speaking with KQED climate reporter Ezra David Romero.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: As you are reporting a series of stories about how communities across the Bay area are responding to climate change and in particular, sea level rise. Your first story takes place in Bayview Hunters Point. Why did you want to start there?
Ezra David Romero: I started off in Bayview Hunters Point because this whole project was based off of listening to people around the Bay.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Ezra David Romero is a climate reporter for KQED.
Ezra David Romero: And when I listen to a bunch of community members, Bayview Hunters Point stood out because there’s all this work happening there, and they’re also worried about sea level rise.
Arian Harrison: I want you to know that this community is super inundated with, with toxicity. We were always claiming that we we we were sick. You know, that a lot of people were dying of cancer and different stuff like that.
Ezra David Romero: I met a woman named Arian Harrison. She’s a fifth generation Bayview Hunters Point resident.
Arian Harrison: I’ve been actually working, working and the community since 2005.
Ezra David Romero: She actually has a job, a day job where she helps veterans find housing. But then the rest of her time, she advocates on behalf of people in the community who have health issues. And the big goal is to get, that pollution out of the community so it doesn’t affect their health anymore.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And what exactly does Arian say is happening in the in the Bayview?
Ezra David Romero: From our perspective, people are getting sick. They’re finding contaminants in their bodies. They’re getting cancer. They’re having all these health ramifications.
Arian Harrison: I. I cannot fathom how big it really is. You understand this. And just from being here.
Ezra David Romero: What they pinpoint. The community pinpoint is this Superfund site in their community called the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. The Navy ran this site. They basically cleaned big ships during the Cold War when they were testing atomic bombs out of the ocean. When they brought them back, they cleaned them there. They had like a radiological laboratory there and all that.
Ezra David Romero: And so it’s well documented that there are contaminants in the soil there, and there’s a process of cleaning it up to a certain point. And some of it’s never been cleaned up. Some of it has. And so their whole point is that because they live just feet away, their lives are affected. But it’s not just that one Superfund site. Bayview Hunters Point also has like Recology there, which is like trash, right? They also have the water treatment facility for all of San Francisco in that community.
Ezra David Romero: There’s also all these other polluting industries there from like cement factories and things like that. So it’s a myriad of issues there. And the Superfund site is the biggest one, like the eyesore in the community from their perspective. Ariana and I met in her office. She was just telling me that, like, she started this work because her mother, Marie Harrison, passed away in 2019 and her mother was very active in trying to get this area cleaned up and for fighting for the health of Bayview Hunters Point residents.
Arian Harrison: Her heart and her desire was was to save this community from the impact, the health impacts. So she knew what’s coming.
Ezra David Romero: She even chained herself outside of the Superfund site once at at another site another time. And the family believes that her lung cancer was tied to her time working at the Superfund site when she was a teenager. And then all of her community living there, and then all of her advocacy, like going and doing these tours of these toxic sites and things like that.
Arian Harrison: My mother didn’t smoke cigarets, none of that stuff. Right? But she did do toxic tours and all the different stuff to see that she would do in her and, and her profession.
Ezra David Romero: Arian Harrison: got her start at that funeral in many ways. You know, before then, she I think she was tangentially involved or because her mother. But she said she had this like this awakening moment.
Arian Harrison: We find out a lot about yourself at a funeral. I did therapy all of my. But I had a lot going on inside my soul and my spirit. You know, how can I heal making this? Not for the few, but for the many. I know they thought that it was gonna go away once my mother was gone.
Ezra David Romero: She realized all these people are saying nice things about her mother. And she had this like was like, if I don’t stand up after this point and do this work, like, who’s going to do it?
Arian Harrison: We have to stand on the courage. And champion our people and child on the shoulders of those that stand here before us. What I learned in that moment was that love is in action work.
Ezra David Romero: An action word?
Arian Harrison: Yeah, love is an action word.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What is she worried will happen in Bayview Hunters Point?
Ezra David Romero: Her big worry is that people will come into contact with us with those contaminants, whether that’s like in the air, in ground water, just by living in proximity to those places. The next level is because of climate change. That’s an issue because as the water rises, it can come in contact with those contaminants in the soil. I want to give you a little bit of a creative picture to give you an understanding of this.
Ezra David Romero: Like pretend you like, you have a little tub, a kitchen tub, and you put sand and rocks in one side of it and the other side, you pour in water to a certain level and say, that’s the sea. Like where it’s at today, the bay. And then you slowly add water in it over time, right? Like that, sand will slowly become more moist to a point where, like, you can see the water on the top and then it, like, all becomes one. The issue here is that if there’s contaminants in that soil and the water is slowly coming up and it’s mixing with that existing infrastructure, we have and a lot of it’s aging, so there’s fear that the water can get in there.
Ezra David Romero: Lots of these contaminated sites are capped off. That’s where they clean it up to a certain point or don’t clean it up at all. And they put like a cement layer or a chalk layer or something over it, but it’s not capped from the bottom, it’s only on the top. So you so the scientists at UC Berkeley and UCLA say that sea level rise could eat away at that and then like, distribute those contaminants all over the Bay area.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It sounds like the water is pushing those contaminants up to the places that we live.
Ezra David Romero: Exactly.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It sounds like Bayview Hunters Point is sort of maybe of a worst case scenario, because there are already folks there. Do we know how dangerous these toxins are to residents living in the Bayview right now?
Ezra David Romero: So in my research, when I was looking at the Navy documents, they basically determined that safe enough to live in these areas because they have temporary fixes over some of these contaminated spots. Maybe it’s a cap, maybe it’s been partially cleaned up, maybe they’ve tested it and didn’t find enough of a contaminant that could harm human health. So they’ve said in all these ways that it’s like safe. But the community is saying what’s happening to our health? Like, why are we continue getting this sick?
Ezra David Romero: This is beyond just things that happen in communities from smoking or like drinking or things like that, saying that one person’s cancer is caused by this one contaminant in the soil near their house. Like you have to have like a cause and effect, right? And that can be hard to determine when it comes to contaminants. And that’s sort of why the community is testing their own bodies. There’s a physician there named Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: Hi. I’m the founder, the principal investigator and the medical director, of the Hunters Point, community bio monitoring program.
Ezra David Romero: Who grew up in that community who saw these people getting cancer, having these, like, lung disease, like cancer, and really young people, animals dying, all these things. And she was like, we should test people’s bodies.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: There was some of the original work that was done that identified of breast cancer clusters. And there are always been a documentation of disease clusters like asthma.
Ezra David Romero: They’re testing urine and finding out what contaminants are there. And this is showing them what’s in their bodies. It’s it’s still a little bit hard to say like what that actually will do to them. But they’re saying they want to collect enough evidence to like, just even have a sense of what’s going on.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what is Doctor Porter some guy seeing in people’s bodies when she does these tests?
Ezra David Romero: She has all these maps around her office, and there’s. They’re all of Bayview hunters point one map is full of pushpins, each color coordinated with contaminant they found in someone’s body.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: You know, this is lit. It’s mercury, it’s strontium, it’s uranium. Daughters of uranium. Cesium. Thallium. They have no role in the human body. They don’t belong the human body. And there is no justification for any of them being in the human body.
Ezra David Romero: And the other one shows like sicknesses and ailments people have, whether that’s cancer or whether that’s asthma, and that correlates all those. And so she’s tested more than a couple hundred people, at least 1 or 2 times, and they’re seeing all those things in them.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: There’s a woman here who’s got uranium 17 times higher than reference range. There are people here who have, concentrations that exceed maximum detectable A level. Again, the lady when I get the urine specimen back and it had uranium 17 times higher. The reference really just set my hair on fire. I had never seen anything like that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What is she doing with this data?
Ezra David Romero: She’s going to use this information for her own toxic registry. She’s already sending a lot of it to the California Cancer Registry. But she wants to create her own.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: A toxic registry identifies people who have a history of exposure, who have evidence of exposure, and who have expressions of disease.
Ezra David Romero: The whole goal is to have a structured legal settlement.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai: And it certainly is going to help us when we, you know, suck the navy in the jar. You know, that’s what I, what I’m looking forward to.
Ezra David Romero: And why do they want to have a lawsuit? It’s because she says people are going to have all these health cost, right? Like, it costs a lot to be treated for cancer or leukemia or asthma or any of these things.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know Arianna took this test, too, right. I’m curious what she learned from that.
Ezra David Romero: Yeah. She found a number of things, above reference range for a human. Cadmium. Chromium. I asked her, like, what does that feel like in her body? You know, it was like a hard thing to hear.
Arian Harrison: In very tame fluid. Muscle tightness, tingling on feet, hair loss, hair falling out of my head, out of my head like a cancer patient.
Ezra David Romero: Her feet get really bloated.
Arian Harrison: There’s also. I want your eyes feel like they have balls in them.
Ezra David Romero: There was a whole list of things within her body that she believes are tied to. Tied to having these things in her.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, what is the city said about all of this?
Ezra David Romero: I reached out to Mayor London Breed and Shamann Walton. He’s the district ten supervisor over the Bayview Hunters Point area, and their staff said they weren’t available for interviews on this topic. I reached out multiple times. I did get an emailed statement on behalf of them and the city and County of San Francisco. They basically said that we know about this, that we’re studying how sea level rise is going to affect groundwater across San Francisco.
Ezra David Romero: There’s this study that’s happening. That’s what’s to come out in the next couple months. But they said it’s not going to include the contaminants of like, baby hunters, but it’s just going to look at groundwater. So there’s been some complaints from community residents and Bayview Hunters Point. And then the San Francisco civil grand jury put out a report that said, like, San Francisco needs to basically do more. And there are some, like, strong language in there.
Ezra David Romero: That said, like the San Francisco’s and the Navy’s processes around this are like impenetrable, hard to understand and that even experts have a hard time understanding it. So how can community members or San Franciscans know what’s going on with their health or like, know what the exposure rate is if, like, they can’t even understand the documents? So there was this calling out of like, you need to do better, San Francisco.
Arian Harrison: I’m here today on the stairs of the mayor’s office, with all of our huge.
Ezra David Romero: People that were able to make it today. So I met Arian Harrison: again outside of City Hall, this time at a protest. After that, great civil grand jury report came out.
Arian Harrison: We would like to welcome our mayor, as well as our supervisors. To join us in this fight. We need for you to be on our side. We need us to fight together.
Arian Harrison: We don’t want to fight against you. We want you to fight for us.
Ezra David Romero: She basically said, you know, she like, loves that there’s a black woman as a mayor, and she and the supervisor is also a black man. And it’s like, great for representation. But she wants them to, like, care about baby hunters, point people even more through action.
Arian Harrison: And I want to invite our mayor, whom we love, with all the great things that she’s done to show us that she loves us back.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So what does Arian believe needs to be done in the Bay view?
Ezra David Romero: Ariane first would like to see all of that contamination cleaned up, like all that taken out of the Bayview Hunters Point area. Cleaned up to a level where it’s not going to harm human health. You know, and thinking about sea level rise and climate change, if it’s going to stay in the ground, like cap it all around so it can’t get into people’s homes, into their bodies any more than it already is. That’s the first thing. Second, she wants reparations for the community because this is a community that’s like was largely African-American and then also just people of color in general.
Ezra David Romero: Who have lived with racism there, who have lived with redlining because of all the laws in place, they couldn’t move anywhere else. Then it becomes your home, and this is where you live and you love it. And, you know, like, why do you want to live somewhere else? But this is like your history in a place. And so she wants to see reparations, whether in the form of money for descendants of slaves, and then to like for the negative health outcomes that people are experiencing.
Arian Harrison: One thing that you can bet your bottom dollar is that we’re going to need long term care. We’re going to need need professionals for our unique circumstances, you know, choose just to prolong life and also to make sure that this doesn’t happen ever again.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What did you learn, Ezra, about why climate change is also a reparations story?
Ezra David Romero: Yeah, I went into the series not thinking about that. I went into like this reporting like, oh, I’m going to report on sea level rise in these communities because communities of color are like way more likely to feel the effects of climate change, just like well documented across like even the U.S. EPA has a report about it that came out, came out last year. So I started off in that place. I wanted to I wanted to talk to people who are the worst, the most affected. And when I talked to them, they just said, these are the two things we want.
Ezra David Romero: You like want reparations for the past because we want a good future. And the good future includes planning and adapting to climate change as like a shoreline community. And so I saw these things as intertwined because they see them as intertwined. They want like safety, hope. They want like to thrive and not have contaminated water, rush up on them or permeate their homes. I think that’s what I learned. I think that’s why the two are two are one and the same because they’re saying like, these are people who are living it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Ezra, thank you so much.
Ezra David Romero: Hey, thanks for having me.
Alan Montecillo: That was Ezra David Romero, a climate reporter with KQED. Speaking with Bay host Ericka Cruz Guevarra in his most recent reporting, Ezra heard back from Michael Pound, an environmental coordinator with the Navy. He defended the Navy’s work to prepare the site for new housing development. In a statement, Mayor London Breed said that her office is working with the Navy to make sure that the community’s health is protected. Shamann Walton represents Bayview Hunters Point on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, declined an interview with Ezra for his story.
