The historical Hunters Point Naval Shipyard site lies on more than six hundred acres southeast of San Francisco. The shipyard started out at the first dry dock repair facility on the US West Coast in 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War. However, the yard would not become an official US Navy facility until late November 1941, less than two weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the start of American involvement in World War II.
For the next thirty-three years, crews at the shipyard carried out ship construction project, upgrades and repairs on hundreds of US naval vessels. The naval base attached to the yard also housed many of the sailors, officers and workers who called the area home. The base also held scientific research facilities that dealt with the effects of radiation exposure and methods to defend against it.
Shortly after the war, the Navy created the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) and built their labs at Hunters Point. The mission of the NRDL was to decontaminate and dismantle many of the ships that had been deployed to the South Pacific for the early stages of atomic bomb testing. The labs often stored radioactive materials, conducted animal experiments and nuclear cyclotron field-tests as part of that mission. The research efforts at Hunters Point were relocated to a different facility in 1969.
In 1974, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was closed and placed on industrial reserve. The Navy leased many of the facilities to a ship repair business, Triple A Machine Shop, until 1986. Local residents and business owners complained that Triple A failed use environmentally-safe methods to dispose of much of the toxic waste left over from their efforts. The local prosecutor’s office investigated twenty instances of illegal dumping at the Triple A site.
Due to the pollution at the site, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed Hunters Point on its “Superfund” list to receive government funds to effect cleanup projects in 1989. The site carries such pollutants as waste oils, paint thinners and polycholorinated biphenyls (PCBs) left over from its wartime shipbuilding duties. Some portions of the site that housed NRDL facilities are also radioactive.
As cleanup efforts at the site continued, the Navy entered into an agreement with the City and County of San Francisco to lease the land from local officials. In exchange, the local government and businesses would create plans to develop the abandoned site and build new housing and commercial properties in the area. Hunters Point sits near one of the most economically depressed areas of the city, so officials welcomed any ideas on improving the outlook of the neighborhood.
Since 2003, the Navy transferred the first remediated parcel of land from the site and transferred the ownership to the City of San Francisco. In turn, the city gave the land to a local development firm. This firm has recently completed the grading and other major infrastructure work required to begin building single-family homes on the decontaminated sites. The residential construction portion of the project began in late 2008 and will continue for some years to come.
