After decades of cleanup efforts marked by scandal, scrutiny and concerns over the looming impacts of climate change, Mayor London Breed has decided that when it comes to the remediation of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, she’s content with the status quo.
That’s a problem for the future of one of The City’s most ambitious and desperately needed housing projects. “While we agree that the cleanup process is complex and often technical and that climate change will continue to affect San Francisco in many ways, overall we disagree partially or wholly with many of the findings and recommendations in the report,” Breed said.
“It’s pretty much the equivalent of sticking your head in the radioactive sand,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Green Action. “As a city that promotes itself as an international leader in addressing climate change and promoting healthy communities and environmental justice, it’s a disgrace.”
“What the civil grand jury did is they added a whole new dimension to this problem of the plan to leave much of the contamination there rather than clean it up,” said Daniel Hirsch, director of the nonprofit watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap. But since the shipyard shuttered in 1974, the cleanup effort has been botched and mired in scandal over falsified soil sampling, eventually resulting in jail time for two employees.