Campus Bay Richmond
Toxic Wake Up Call

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Campus Bay Richmond - Toxic Wake Up Call

Richmond, CA -- At 7 a.m. on Friday, April 29, 2005 East Bay residents, workers and business owners held protest at the Zeneca/Cherokee-Simeon Campus Bay and the University of California Field Station sites on the south Richmond shoreline of the San Francisco Bay. Speakers: Sherry Padgett and City Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin and others.

The protesting groups are also opposed to irresponsible plans by Zeneca/ Cherokee and UC Berkeley for future development that would expose thousands area residents to life threatening toxic substances for years to come. At issue are the two properties that are contaminated as a result of decades of manufacturing related primarily to defense and agricultural chemical production.

Produced by Berkeley Citizen

Press Release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CALIFORNIA ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

May 12, 2005 Jon Myers, CalEPA: 916. 445-1296
Decision Made on Zeneca and Richmond Field Station Sites
Cal/EPA Announces Decision Regarding Lead Regulatory Oversight Responsibilities

Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, Alan C. Lloyd, announced today that the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is the lead regulatory oversight agency for the entirety of the Zeneca/former Stauffer Chemical and the University of California, Richmond Field Station site, contiguous sites located on the bay in Richmond, California.

“The challenges presented by these sites, as well as their close proximity to one another and nearby residences and businesses, warrant a single regulatory oversight agency,” said Secretary Lloyd. “I also believe that oversight by a single agency will provide the public with a single point of contact to foster better communication and understanding of environmental conditions and site activities and ensure that the various site activities are fully coordinated”

In overseeing the site investigation and cleanup activities, DTSC will closely coordinate its efforts with the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board (Regional Board) to ensure that all cleanup activities for both sites fully comply with the Regional Board’s permits and requirements.
Prior to the Secretary’s decision, the Regional Board had been the lead regulatory agency overseeing the wetlands restoration at the Zeneca/former Stauffer Chemical site, and the entirety of the investigation and cleanup of the Richmond Field Station site. DTSC, in an agreement reached in November 2004, had been the lead regulatory agency overseeing site activities on the upland portion of the former Stauffer Chemical site.

With today’s announcement, both agencies will be developing the legal documents necessary to transfer the oversight, and will provide additional information when that process is complete.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control’s mission is to restore, protect, and enhance the environment and ensure public health, environmental quality and economic vitality by regulating hazardous waste, conducting and overseeing cleanups, and developing and promoting pollution prevention.

The San Francisco Water Quality Control Board is one of nine regional boards reporting to the State Water Board and the California Environmental Protection Agency. Among its principal duties, the Board sets region-wide water quality standards and activity-specific waste discharge requirements, enforces both federal and state water quality statutes, regulates cleanup of sites which pose an immediate or potential threat to water quality and educates the public on water quality issues.


campus Bay toxics Campus Bay Richmond protest

 

New Radiation Concerns Prompt Orders for More Campus Bay Testing
By Richard Brenneman Friday March 10, 2006

Concerns about the possible presence of radioactive waste at the Campus Bay site in south Richmond have prompted the state to order new tests for the controversial site.

Previous concerns about radiation hazards at Campus Bay involved the possible contamination by uranium testing in which the radioactive metal was melted with electron beams.

But Campus Bay Project Manager and Cherokee Investment Partners engineer Doug Mosteller also hinted that radioactivity materials tests or experiments may have been conducted at a super phosphate plant that occupied part of the site.

“We don’t know what they were doing for the government,” he said. “It was supposed to be secret. We are also concerned that testing may have been done at different places.”

Simeon Properties—the San Francisco firm which has partnered with Cherokee Investment Properties to develop the site—responded by hiring MACTEC Development Corporation of Grand Junction, CO, to conduct a site radiation survey.

The firm specializes in decommissioning and demolition of former nuclear power plants and nuclear weapon manufacturing facilities.

MACTEC conducted a surface walkover of the sites of five demolished buildings, using a detector held at two to six inches above the ground.

The device used, a sodium-iodide detection system, was capable of detecting only gamma radiation—which has the ability the penetrate several feet of concrete.

“[O]ur survey found no indication of radioactive material at the site in excess of normal background level,” wrote Steven D. Rima, the firm’s radiological engineering manager, in an Aug. 13, 2003 letter to Simeon Vice President Susan J. Cronk.

Cherokee Simeon posted the results at the Campus Bay website, www.campusbay.info, but the study has since been removed, a Wednesday afternoon website search revealed.

MACTEC’s report noted that the tests weren’t capable of detecting beta rays, which can be stopped by a layer of clothing, or alpha rays—which are stopped by a sheet of paper.

But alpha radiation can be the most dangerous, especially when inhaled or ingested—and it is alpha radiation which makes plutonium the world’s most toxic substance.

In a Feb. 21 letter to Cherokee-Simeon, Barbara J. Cook, chief of DTSC’s Northern California Coastal Cleanup Operations Branch, specifically noted the inability of the MACTEC survey to detect the presence of plutonium at the site.

DTSC is now demanding tests for all three types of radiation, not only at the site of the uranium melting experiments, but at a potentially much more hazardous site—the location of the plant that made phosphate fertilizers and so-called super phosphate from ore mined in Idaho.

According to GeoNote 40, a publication of the Idaho Geological Survey, those ores contain uranium as well as selenium, another hazardous but nonradioactive metal. (Selenium has been identified as the cause of bird deaths and birth defects in the Kesterton Wildlife Preserve in California’s Central Valley.)

Radioactive compounds (radionucleides) identified in phosphate ores include two forms of uranium, U-238 and U-234, thorium-230, radium-226, radon-222, lead-210 and polonium-210, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Emissions Factors and Policy Applications Center.

In a letter written Feb. 22, Kimiko Klein, a toxicologist with DTSC’s Human and Ecological Risk Division, wrote that phosphate production could have produced increased concentrations of radioactive compounds in the slag (waste) generated by the process, which “may still be present on the site.”

Even before concentration by processing, the radioactive elements present in the ore are found at levels up to 100 times the normal background level, according to the EPA.

The tests won’t offer any means of assessing the exposures to those who lived and worked nearby when the fertilizer plant was operating.

Cook has also ordered Cherokee-Simeon to produce any radioactive licenses held by former site owner Stauffer Chemical prior to 1977 and to identify where the firm stored radioactive materials.

Staffer owned the chemical manufacturing complex between 1949 and 1986, when it was sold to Zeneca—now Astra-Zeneca—a Swiss pharmaceutical and agricultural manufacturing giant.

It was during Stauffer’s control that the electron beam uranium tests were conducted.

Campus Bay-Inspired Bills Clear Assembly Committee
By Richard Brenneman, April 29, 2005

Two bills designed to change the way California handles hazardous waste sites won the approval Tuesday of the state Assembly Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials.

The bills, cosponsored by East Bay Democrat Loni Hancock and Cindy Montanez, a fellow Democrat who chairs both the Assembly Rules Committee and the Select Committee on Environmental Justice, were inspired in part by events at Richmond’s Campus Bay.

Both bills now head to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, where decisions are expected within the next two weeks. If they pass that hurdle, the bills will then go before the full Assembly and from then on to the state Senate. If approved, the bills will go to Gov. Schwarzenegger, himself a real estate developer.

Hancock’s Assembly Bill 1360 (passed on a 5-2 vote) creates a new category of toxic waste site called a “public health priority site” where a hospital, day care center or residential housing is planned on land where toxic waste has been stored and poses a potential threat.

All such sites would come under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which currently exercises sway over similar sites targeted for schools.

Citing her inspiration as the protracted battle over the development of the Campus Bay site—where a developer has proposed to build 1,330 units of housing atop 350,000 cubic yards of buried chemical waste—Hancock said her bill was created to prevent so-called “forum shopping,” a practice whereby a developer could choose a less stringent agency to monitor toxic cleanup.

Accompanying the East Bay legislator to Sacramento were three key figures in the battle over the site: Sherry Padgett, an activist with Bay Area Residents for Responsible Development (BARRD); Contra Costa County Public Health Director Dr. Wendel Brunner, and Peter Weiner, a San Francisco attorney and pro bono advocate for BARRD.

Critics of Campus Bay have charged that cleanup of the site where a variety of dangerous chemicals were manufactured for a century was poorly handled under the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Because the City of Richmond issued an over-the-counter permit, demolition of the factory buildings, storage tanks and other remnants of the site’s industrial heritage occurred without an environmental impact report—a sore point with critics like Padgett, who say they were subjected to a wide range of toxins as a result.

Most of the Campus Bay site was transferred to DTSC oversite after hearings last November where Bruce Wolfe, administrator of the regional water board, acknowledged his agency lacked even a single toxicologist on its staff. The DTSC, by contrast, is heavily staffed with toxicologists and other scientific experts.

Padgett, who has worked next door to the site for the last eight years and has suffered from a variety of cancers and other ailments her physicians believe were caused by exposures to toxins, told the committee that 40 of 500 employees near the site have been stricken with unusual cancers, with 14 dead to date.

“The water board is not equipped to monitor such a complex site,” she said. “They don’t have the internal expertise.”

Brunner said the Richmond site was one of the most complex sites in Contra Costa County.

“Over the last several years, the site characterization has changed, and there appears to be no systematic method” to deploy expertise at the site, he said. “The water board does not have the expertise or experience to handle the site... We need a mechanism in the California EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to bring” the DTSC and water board together.

Testifying against the measure were lobbyists for a coalition of home builders, the California Building Industry Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, and the California Center for Land Recycling. The latter group, a non-profit organization that supports development on reclaimed hazardous waste sites, counts San Francisco water board official Steve Morse among its advisors.

While the industry associations charged that Hancock’s measure would conflict with existing law on cleanup sites, Hancock said the bill merely clarifies the law.

“This is a very important step forward,” she said.

“I agree,” said committee Chair Ira Ruskin. “It’s an important step forward in environmental justice.”

The dissenting votes were cast by two Republicans, Vice Chair Van Tran and member Audra Strickland. Ruskin was joined in his vote by Democrats Judy Chu, Hector De La Torre, Fran Pavley and Jackie Goldberg.

Tuesday’s hearing was a reunion of sorts for Goldberg and Wendel Brunner. Both were activists in Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. 

“We’re delighted we got the bill out of committee,” Hancock said in an interview in her office after the vote.

“It’s a very simple bill. It clarifies the process so the developer will know what to do, and it places jurisdiction with the department that has the expertise,” she said. “Note also that the bill passed despite powerful opposition.”

Hancock held off from introducing another bill calling for a restructuring of the state EPA agencies handling oversite of toxic waste sites in order to spend more time refining the bill—which she said will be introduced in January.

Water Board Strictures

Montanez, who represents the city of San Fernando and the surrounding areas of the city of Los Angeles, has waged a long-running battle against the local water board’s handling of a landlocked site in her jurisdiction, making her a natural ally of Hancock.

Her Assembly Bill 597 mandates new rules for cleanups conducted under the aegis of the state regional water quality control boards.

Under current state law, cleanups are designed with no public participation before they are unveiled to the board for approval. The Southern California legislator’s bill would force a major restructuring, imposing the same strict public participation standards as now mandated for the DTSC.

Her bill requires local water boards to:

• Provide public notice of major decisions and planned activities at cleanup sites and gives the public access to site plans and assessments with 30 days to comment on them.

• Post notices in English and other languages commonly spoken in the area notifying the public of their rights of review and comment.

• Hold public meetings in the area to gather comments if requested by the public.

• Consider public comments prior to acting on the site plan.

• Consider posting site data in electronic form for public access and consider forming advisory groups to assist the board in disseminating information and gathering public input and holding public meetings and workshops.

• Evaluate site plans in the context of environmental justice and impacts on low-income and minority populations.


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