The Toxic Truth About Hunters Point: What's Really Buried in San Francisco's Only Superfund Site
- Act Now Bay Area
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
If you've spent time in San Francisco, there's a good chance you've never heard of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. It sits tucked away in the city's southeast corner, behind fences and warning signs, on some of the most beautiful waterfront land in the Bay Area. It's also one of the most contaminated areas in the country — and the neighborhood has been fighting to get it cleaned up for over three decades.
This is the story of how that happened, who's been hurt, and who's been showing up to fight back.
First, what actually is a Superfund site?
"Superfund" refers to a federal law passed in 1980 called CERCLA (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act). It gives the EPA the power and funding to investigate and clean up the country's most hazardous contaminated sites, and to make polluters pay for it when possible.
Getting placed on the official "Superfund site" list is supposed to be a good thing: it means a place is contaminated enough to warrant serious federal attention, oversight, and resources. In practice, it often means decades of investigation, delay, and, in some cases, outright fraud, while the people living nearby keep breathing the contaminated air and drinking the poisoned water.
Hunters Point Naval Shipyard has been on that list since 1989.
A thriving community, built by people who weren't wanted anywhere else
Before it was a Superfund site, or even a Navy shipyard, Bayview Hunters Point was one of San Francisco's most ethnically diverse corners of the city: home to Ohlone people for thousands of years, and later Chinese shrimping camps, Italian and Maltese farmers, and Scandinavian shipbuilders.
Everything changed in 1940, when the U.S. Navy bought the shipyard to prepare for World War II. The Navy needed workers, so thousands of Black migrants moved to Hunters Point from across the South and quickly built community organizations like the Crispus Attucks Club, founded in 1944. At its wartime peak, the shipyard employed around 17,000 people, and between 1940 and 1950 the population of Bayview quadrupled.
Despite the racism and segregation these families faced, Bayview Hunters Point became a thriving working-class neighborhood. Many single-family homes were built between 1940 and 1970, creating one of the only places in San Francisco where Black families could build wealth and put down roots. To this day, it has the largest percentage of Black homeowners of any neighborhood in the city.
Then in 1974, the shipyard closed. Jobs disappeared almost overnight. And what was left behind in the ground was far worse than unemployment.
How a shipyard became a nuclear waste site
Hunters Point played a direct role in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
On July 16, 1945, the USS Indianapolis left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard carrying components of the bomb known as "Little Boy," including roughly half of all the highly enriched uranium that existed in the world at the time. The ship wasn't allowed to leave San Francisco's harbor until word came through that the Trinity test (the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon, out in the New Mexico desert) had succeeded. Weeks later, that bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
That was only the beginning. A year later, the Navy began bringing ships back to Hunters Point that had been deliberately exposed to radiation during Pacific nuclear weapons tests as part of Operation Crossroads. Workers sandblasted the radioactive material off the ships' hulls in the open air — a process that didn't destroy the contamination, but moved it from the ships to the shipyard, the soil, and the surrounding air. One worker who took part in decontaminating the ships later described one as "hotter than a pistol," saying it "would melt a Geiger counter." Hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive fuel were simply burned on site.
In 1948, the Navy set up the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at the shipyard, where it conducted research using radioactive materials until 1960, contaminating soil, dust, sediment, and groundwater with fuels, pesticides, heavy metals, PCBs, and radionuclides in the process. The shipyard shut down for good in 1974. By 1989, the contamination was severe enough that the EPA designated the entire 866-acre site a Superfund site.
Somehow, it gets worse. Starting in 2010, employees of Tetra Tech, the Navy's own cleanup contractor, began reporting that the company was falsifying soil sample data to make the site look cleaner than it actually was. An EPA review later found that data falsification and quality failures were far more widespread than the Navy had admitted, with an EPA Superfund manager writing that the data revealed potential purposeful fraud, inadequate scanning, broken chain-of-custody protocols, and general mismanagement of the entire cleanup. Federal prosecutors eventually charged Tetra Tech supervisors, with two pleading guilty to the crimes.
In other words: the very organization the Navy paid to prove the site was safe was caught cooking the books.
The cost of living next door
This isn't ancient history. It's an ongoing public health crisis for the people who live in Bayview Hunters Point today.
A 2004 health assessment of Bayview Hunters Point documented cancer rates significantly above regional averages and chronic disease hospitalization rates roughly three times the statewide average. Asthma is so common in the neighborhood that the San Francisco Asthma Task Force was created in 2001 specifically because Bayview Hunters Point community activists demanded intervention.
At an Earth Day rally in 2025, residents didn't mince words about what that looks like in real life. All Things Bayview director Kamillah Ealom described going to funeral after funeral for neighbors dying of bone, breast, and brain cancer, and watching people die at 50, 45, even 35 years old from respiratory illness, saying these atrocities are not normal. Another resident, Rachelle Holmes, recalled being a teenager and going to school with a classmate who had cancer in her jaw, and how she'd thought cancer was "an old people's disease" until then.
Today, roughly 27% of the neighborhood's 35,000+ residents live within a quarter mile of contamination risk. And climate change is making the long-term picture worse, not better: the Navy has acknowledged that within roughly a decade, rising groundwater driven by climate change could bring buried, potentially toxic material closer to the surface at the site.
What the government is supposed to do — and what it's actually done
Under the Superfund law, the Navy is required to investigate and clean up Hunters Point, while the EPA acts as lead regulator, with the California EPA and Department of Toxic Substances Control providing additional oversight. That's the plan on paper.
In reality, the cleanup has dragged on for more than 35 years, been compromised by a fraud scandal, and is still incomplete. The Navy has invested nearly $1 billion in the shipyard cleanup and awarded Tetra Tech alone $250 million in contracts — and yet, as of a 2018 NBC Bay Area investigation, only a portion of the shipyard had ever actually been tested for radiation, with hundreds of buildings and sites never surveyed at all.
Meanwhile, the site is also one of the biggest planned redevelopments in San Francisco history. The Candlestick Point–Hunters Point Shipyard project could eventually bring more than 10,000 new housing units to the area. Community advocates worry the pressure to hand land over to developers is moving faster than the pressure to clean it up properly. Even the most recent step forward — a 2024 plan to finally address contaminated underwater sediment in the Bay — was criticized by community advocates as a "back door deal" that doesn't fully address the radioactive contamination the Navy left behind. Greenaction's executive director, Bradley Angel, has been blunter still, calling the Navy's plan to leave radioactive and toxic waste buried near the rising shoreline "blatant environmental racism."
The people who refused to let this be forgotten
If Hunters Point has gotten any real attention over the past 40 years, it's because Bayview Hunters Point residents and grassroots environmental justice organizers made it impossible to ignore. It's always been ordinary people, not government agencies, who have driven almost every meaningful step forward.
Marie Harrison, a longtime member of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, spent decades as one of the neighborhood's fiercest advocates: organizing a 2006 protest that helped shut down a polluting PG&E power plant in Hunters Point and demanding independent retesting when the Tetra Tech fraud came to light. In 2016, she publicly demanded that Tetra Tech be fired and that a trustworthy, independent entity be brought in to fully retest the shipyard and surrounding area, warning that leaving radioactive waste along a rising shoreline was "a disaster ready to happen." Her daughter, Arieann Harrison, continues that work today through the Marie Harrison Community Foundation.
Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice has been organizing in the neighborhood since the 1980s. When whistleblowers first exposed the Tetra Tech data fraud, Greenaction filed formal petitions with the California Department of Public Health and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to revoke Tetra Tech's license, organized community protests, and helped push for retesting. In 2024, Greenaction went further, filing a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Navy alleging inadequate cleanup of radioactive waste at the shipyard.
Alongside Greenaction, groups including the Bayview Hunters Point Mothers and Fathers Committee, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, All Things Bayview, and 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations have kept up sustained community pressure organizing rallies, filing legal comments on cleanup plans, and refusing to let the story fade from the news. As recently as April 2025, residents and organizers marched nearly two miles from Bayview Plaza to the shipyard gates on Earth Day, demanding a full and honest cleanup.
Their message, then and now, is remarkably consistent: this community was never told the truth, and it deserves nothing less than a complete cleanup, not a capped-and-covered shortcut.
What you can do for Hunters Point
You don't have to live in Bayview Hunters Point to help push for justice there. Here's where to start:
Follow and support Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice — they're the community watchdog group most consistently on the ground at Hunters Point, and they welcome volunteers, donations, and people showing up at hearings and rallies.
Show up. Community rallies, public comment periods, and EPA/Navy public meetings are open to anyone. Physical presence, especially from beyond the neighborhood, sends a message that this is a Bay Area issue, not just a Bayview issue.
Support Bayview-based organizations directly, including the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, All Things Bayview, and Literacy for Environmental Justice, who center the voices of the people actually living with this contamination.
Talk about it. This history isn't widely known, even among longtime Bay Area residents. Sharing it is a small but real way to build the kind of public pressure that has moved this issue forward before.
Stay engaged with local government. The Navy, EPA, and San Francisco city agencies all respond to sustained public attention. Comment periods on cleanup plans and redevelopment proposals are opportunities where organized community voices have made a documented difference.
Bayview Hunters Point built the ships that helped win a war, and welcomed generations of families who couldn't find a home anywhere else in the city. It deserves a real cleanup. The people who've spent decades fighting for that haven't given up. Neither should the rest of us.
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