RACHELLE HOLMES was a teenager when she first started noticing that her peers and friends from San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood were disproportionately experiencing adverse health problems like cancer and respiratory diseases.
“I thought cancer was an old people’s disease when I was a kid, and then I had the misfortune of going to school with someone that had cancer. We were teenagers, she had cancer in her jaw,” Holmes said in an interview . “She was born and raised in Bayview, and unfortunately she passed.”
On Tuesday, Holmes joined dozens of Bayview Hunters Point residents and environmental justice advocates in an Earth Day march to demand a full cleanup of one of the state’s most polluted sites: the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
Bayview Hunters Point lies in the southeast portion of the city, geographically isolated by highways on the neighborhood’s western border and San Francisco Bay on the eastern side. It contains the city’s largest Black population and a higher proportion of people living under the poverty line compared to other districts, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The region has historically been an industrial hub of the city, containing a former PG&E power plant, a former naval nuclear research facility, a large sewage treatment facility, over 100 brownfield sites , and several metal scrap lots. Brownfield sites are abandoned industrial properties that are difficult to redevelop due to the potential presence of hazardous contaminants.
Going to funeral after funeral because of different types of cancers, bone cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer is not normal.
All Things Bayview Director Kamillah Ealom
The pollution emitted from the neighborhood’s historic concentration of industrial activities has been a contributing factor to poorer health outcomes for its residents, who have increased rates of asthma, respiratory diseases, and cancers compared to the rest of the city, according to the San Francisco Environment Department.
The life expectancy of people who are raised in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood is about 14 years less than those from the affluent Noe Valley elsewhere in the city, according to the San Francisco Environment Department.
Members of environmental justice organizations like Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, All Things Bayview, and 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations marched nearly 2 miles from Bayview Plaza to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard on Earth Day to raise awareness of a decades-long battle to remove hazardous chemicals that contaminate the soil, groundwater, air, surface water and sediments at the former naval facility.
“Going to funeral after funeral because of different types of cancers, bone cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer is not normal,” shouted All Things Bayview Director Kamillah Ealom during a speech at the rally. “Seeing your neighbors die at 50, 45, 35 because of some type of respiratory issue is not normal.”
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was occupied by the Navy from 1945 to 1974, during which the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory conducted research on the effects of radiation and atomic weapons. The site was also used to decommission radioactive ships, leading to the accumulation of radionuclides contaminating the surrounding soil and water.
In 1989, it was designated as a federal Superfund site, which are areas contaminated with hazardous materials that require long-term cleanup. The site now consists of abandoned buildings and a shoreline that is blocked off by fencing, with signs warning people of the hazardous contamination in portions of the land that have not been cleaned up.
The Navy is leading ongoing cleanup efforts with oversight from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Environmental Protection Agency and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The cleanup has been divided into multiple phases, focusing on different sections at a time on the 934 acres of land.
The Navy has split the former shipyard into parcels to prioritize highly polluted areas and so that land determined to be safe from contamination can be transferred for use to San Francisco for commercial and residential development. One parcel already has newly constructed condominiums just several hundred feet from the shoreline.
But some Bayview Hunters Point residents and environmental justice activists are skeptical of cleanup efforts, saying that only surface-level remediation has been done for some parcels.
“The Navy and city agencies responsible have failed to do a proper cleanup of the shipyard,” said Skylar Sacoolas in a speech at Tuesday’s rally. Sacoolas is a member of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, an activist group that has been campaigning to remove pollution sources in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood.
“It has taken decades, yes, decades, and impacted generations here in Bayview,” Sacoolas said. “We know that this is not an accident. It is environmental racism.”
According to the EPA, part of the cleanup efforts include soil excavation and disposal, removing radiologically contaminated structures, groundwater treatment, covering contaminated soil, and constructing landfill caps.
The decades-long cleanup devolved into controversy in 2012 when the EPA accused Tetra Tech EC, one of the Navy’s contractors for the cleanup, of falsifying radiological data of soil tests and misrepresenting soil samples. Several lawsuits against the company have so far resulted in a $97 million settlement and two engineers from the company being sentenced to prison.
While several parcels are still being cleaned up, last year the EPA and the Navy announced that they would be starting the final phase of remediation in 2027. The last portion to begin cleanup efforts is the underwater sediment of the Superfund, which spans approximately 443 acres.
The plan involves the removal of sediment as well as placing caps to trap contaminated material.
‘There’s only one Bay’
But environmental activists warn that rising sea levels and potential storms demand urgency to clean up the hazardous sediment underwater.
“We need to see efficient action and the complete cleanup of the entire Bayview Hunters Point shipyard and all other contaminated sites in the area,” Sacoolas said. “We have already seen dangerous flooding from storm surges and atmospheric rivers. We can only expect flooding to get worse with sea level rise and groundwater rising in the near future.”
Demonstrators think that all San Francisco residents should be concerned about the slow cleanup since air and water contaminated with toxins can spread to other areas beyond Bayview Hunters Point.
“There’s only one Bay, it’s only one body of water,” Eamon said. “The air that we breathe, it doesn’t just stay in Bayview Hunters Point.”
“It should not have to be a privilege to be able to have your window open and breathe clean air in your home,” Sacoolas shouted. “We are here today and every day to demand clean air, clean water in a healthy and livable environment.”
Holmes suffers from asthma, a chronic respiratory illness that is a key issue in Bayview Hunters Point, according to the San Francisco Asthma Task Force which was created in 2001 after Bayview Hunters Point community activists advocated for intervention strategies to address the asthma epidemic.
Air pollution is one of the causes of asthma, according to the EPA.
Halfway through the march, Holmes began feeling nervous of potential asthma symptoms surfacing, which can be triggered by exercise and exposure to outdoor air pollution. But she was able to push through against the main issue she was trying to raise awareness of.
“I just slowed down a little bit,” Holmes said. “When you get that momentum going, you don’t want to stop because this is an important event, the event you’ve been waiting for.”
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