By Tom Molanphy : 48hills – excerpt
Community demands excavation and removal of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard radioactive residue, with local oversight.
This past Saturday, while hundreds gathered in Golden Gate Park to pressure the city to keep cars off JFK Drive, a few dozen Bayview protestors asked once more for the City to remove radioactive waste from their doorstep.
“The Tetra Tech scandal was a tipping point,” Kamillah Ealom, BVHP Program Community Organizer for Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, said—citing the massive 2019 fraud case involving the cleanup of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, the country’s largest superfund site. “We know stuff was there. It was a cover-up.”
Saturday’s protest, complete with bull-horned Gospel songs of “Satan We’re Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down” and posters like “Stop Cancer Where It Starts: Pollution,” began at noon on Third and Evans. But the fight to clean up the shipyard started generations ago and remains one of San Francisco’s most powerful but buried stories. And that story is intertwined with San Francisco’s Black history…(more)