[CPEO-BIF] "Even simple remediations lag at Bay Area [California] sites in socially vulnerable areas, a Public Press analysis shows."

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Toxic Waste Cleanups Take Longer in Marginalized Communities
Even simple remediations lag at Bay Area sites in socially vulnerable areas, a Public Press analysis shows.

by AUDREY MEI YI BROWN  
San Francisco Public Press (CA)
March 10, 2025

On warm nights Arieann Harrison used to sit and chat with neighbors on the steps outside her apartment down the street from the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a federal Superfund site. Trucks would rumble by, carting away contaminated soil as part of a shipyard cleanup effort that has spanned 39 years. Harrison says the trucks were often uncovered, and she recalls seeing dirt blow over the street in clouds that looked like smoke. 

“You’d think it was a fire from blocks away,” said Harrison, 58. 

That dust — which she couldn’t avoid inhaling — might have been contaminated with more than a hundred pollutants, some radioactive. Four generations of Harrisons, including Arieann’s grandchildren, have lived in the neighborhood as the cleanup drags on. Marie Harrison, a prominent local environmental justice advocate and Arieann’s mother, died of a chronic lung disease that her doctors suspected was precipitated by toxins. Arieann’s father, who died in 2014, had cancer and her sister has cancer. Multiple tests of Arieann’s blood and urine have detected radioactive compounds including plutonium and toxins like lead and arsenic, which also have been found at the shipyard. Arieann continues her mother’s work advocating for a complete shipyard cleanup through the Marie Harrison Community Foundation. 

The shipyard, a notoriously toxic site, is just one of thousands of contaminated parcels around the Bay Area undergoing remediation. These cleanups take longer in marginalized communities, according to a new San Francisco Public Press analysis of more than 20,000 sites of varying size across the nine-county Bay Area. In areas that scored high on a national index of socioeconomic vulnerability, the median cleanup took more than 450 days longer than in the least vulnerable areas. Many factors, including the type of toxin, the nature of the site and the complexity of the cleanup, could affect how long a remediation takes and explain some of the differences. But in a subset of more than 12,000 cleanups of comparable complexity, the disparities were even more pronounced. 


…

For the entire article, see
https://www.sfpublicpress.org/in-marginalized-sf-bay-communities-toxic-waste-cleanups-take-longer


—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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