Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a 400-acre former military facility in San Francisco, is slated for a massive residential redevelopment.
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The Navy secured a victory Monday in a case over the radiological cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard near San Francisco.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria acknowledged there were some outstanding questions about the Navy’s handling of the cleanup of the former shipyard; however, they were outside the scope of Greenaction’s Environmental Health and Justice lawsuit, he said.
“More troubling, the Navy has not explained why it has made so little progress toward soil retesting in the eight years since Tetra Tech’s fraud was discovered. And given the lack of reliable soil testing, it is hard to see how the Navy can be sure that radiological contamination is not a risk to people who currently live and work near the site,” he said.
“But Greenaction has made it clear that this is not within the scope of its challenge to clean up Hunters Point,” added Barack Obama nominee. AWARD summary judgment for Navy and dismissal of case with prejudice.
Greenaction filed its lawsuit in 2024, pretending that the Navy’s cleanup efforts violated environmental law by relying on outdated soil testing data and underestimating the extent of potential risks to human health. He says the Navy relied on old soil testing data in its most recent mandated five-year review of the site — released a year later — to recommend safeguards.
To make matters worse, many of the country’s previous soil tests were conducted by Tetra Tech, which the government later sued for falsification of data.
In one HEARING on the party’s contested summary judgment motions, Greenaction argued that the Navy should consider the new corrective tests following Tetra Tech’s erroneous data and redo the tests. In contrast, the Navy claimed to have followed all the measures mandated by EPA and that his cleaning process is above board.
“Greenaction appears to be arguing that instead of delaying long-term protection determinations, the Navy should have concluded that the remedies are not long-term protection. But it was not arbitrary for the Navy to delay long-term protection determinations due to the lack of reliable soil testing,” Chhabria said in his five-page decision.
Chhabria questioned why the Navy had no explanation for why it had not yet completed retesting the soil eight years after the fraudulent testing was found, and seemed skeptical of the evidence to support the Navy’s conclusion that the current remedies are short-term protections.
However, he wrote, given Greenaction’s clarification that it was only challenging the Navy’s conclusions about long-term defense, the argument fails.
The judge similarly ruled that it was not arbitrary for the Navy to assume that the remedies were safe despite the high estimated cancer risks, given that there was a “reasonable explanation” why the estimated risks would be above the true risks, or to delay assessing the cumulative radiological and chemical risks until more complete data were available.
Chhabria further rejected Greenaction’s arguments that the next five-year review should be delivered in 2028, rather than 2029, as the government claims, given that the most recent review was published in 2024.
“In this case, it seems clear that putting a tighter deadline on the Sixth Five-Year Review would not help achieve any of the things that Greenaction wants – namely, more complete and reliable assessments of pollution and the effectiveness of response actions,” he said.
A Justice Department representative declined to comment.
Greenaction attorney Steve Castleman, of the UC Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic, told Courthouse News that “we are digesting the judge’s decision and will discuss it with our clients.”
Soil testing at Hunters Point is on track to be completed by 2032, according to David Mitchell, a Justice Department attorney. The Navy is the main agency involved in the cleanup.
First established in southeast San Francisco in 1939, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Protection Laboratory between 1946 and 1969, which led to the contamination of soil, groundwater, surface water, and sediments in San Francisco Bay. The site was slated for redevelopment in the 1990s.
When complete, the 400-hectare site will have 10,000 new homes in one of the largest redevelopment projects in the city’s history.
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