By Laura Waxmann, Staff Writer Nov 17, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)
Gift Article
Camilla Ealom, All Things Bayview executive director, listens to an audience comment during the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee meeting in San Francisco on Monday.Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle
For weeks, San Francisco residents and officials have been slamming the Navy for waiting nearly a year to disclose that a radioactive heavy metal was found on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site the federal government has been cleaning up for decades.
On Monday evening, Navy officials took a rare step during a community meeting full of angry residents: They apologized.
The Navy took 11 months to report the discovery of plutonium 239, used primarily in nuclear weapons and power plants, to its regulatory partners, which include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California Department of Public Health. San Francisco health officials have told the Chronicle that they weren’t informed about the finding until last month.
“I have really thought about the situation that’s occurred … on this issue, we did not do a good job,” Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator who for the past two years has been overseeing the toxic cleanup at what is now a development called the San Francisco Shipyard, told a room full of residents who gathered at 451 Galvez St. for a briefing from the Navy on the incident.
“We were too busy being engineers and scientists and trying to think through (the data) and did not put ourselves in the community’s shoes,” Pound said. “I can’t undo what’s been done but … we need to do better.”
But for community members who for years have asked for transparency in a cleanup already marked by fraud claims, the meaning of the discovery was clear: The Navy and its partners had failed them, once again.
Hundreds of homes have already been built at the Shipyard, and thousands more are planned for the site but can’t get underway until the cleanup is complete.
Pound described the sample as an “outlier” and attempted to calm concerns: The airborne heavy metal sample measured as a dose of 0.04 millirem — “far below” levels that could pose a health risk to workers and the local community.
And yet, that level was higher than the “action level” agreed upon by the Navy and its regulatory partners in the plan that governs the Superfund site’s cleanup, and triggered a reevaluation of the air sample by a Navy contractor.
“We then had a non-detect,” said Pound, describing a situation in which Navy officials were perplexed by two different results for the same sample: one that showed elevated levels of plutonium 239, and one that did not.
“This was concerning for us,” admitted Pound, adding that the datasets were next sent to a third-party laboratory for analysis. That laboratory’s procedures were subject to an audit, which concluded that “the plutonium results are valid” and that the sample showing the exceedance was an outlier.
Pound said it’s still unclear why there was a higher level of plutonium 239 than expected. The contaminant was detected in an area of the Shipyard known as Parcel C, which sits below a hill where new homes were built a decade ago, and near a community of artists that occupy studio spaces in buildings at the Shipyard. It was discovered as the Navy’s contractors were “grinding” and “moving” asphalt on Parcel C. But the asphalt, which Pound said was placed around 2015 — decades after irradiated ships that were brought to the shipyard after atomic bomb tests could have contaminated it — was an unlikely source.
Pound said that the Navy received the “outlier result” in March and that the laboratory analysis was completed by April. Between May and September, the incident was further investigated — it took months before an audit of the laboratory’s procedures was finalized, he said.
Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, medical director of the Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program, which screens residents and workers of the area for toxic metals and other hazardous chemicals, was angry about the situation. She pointed out that the Navy had a real-time dust monitor placed on Parcel C, meaning the Navy should have known about the contaminant sooner.
Sumchai described the Navy’s failure to disclose information about the plutonium 239 sample after it became aware of it, as “proof of concealment and fraud.”
Steve Castleman, an attorney specializing in environmental law, pointed out that the Navy has assured the community in the past that parts of the Shipyard were cleaned to regulatory standards — and yet, radioactive objects have continued to turn up.
“In Parcel A, you found a (radioactive deck) marker you claimed could never be there,” Castleman said. “In Parcels B and C, you found another deck marker and a glass shard that had high concentrations of radioactivity that you also said could never be there. In Parcel G you found 62 strontium 90 samples that exceeded the cleanup goal. … And you ask us to trust you?”
State and federal regulators tasked with overseeing the Navy’s activities at the Shipyard said Monday that they were also kept in the dark.
“Unfortunately the EPA did not learn about this until Oct. 23. We were sent an email with the details. I have adequately expressed to Michael Pound how we feel about that. We were not happy about the late notification,” said Michael Collins, a remedial project manager with the Environmental Protection Agency.
But Collins said the EPA agrees with the Navy’s assessment that the plutonium 239 sample did not pose a “human health risk” even though the agency had yet to fully verify the Navy’s data as of Monday, having only received it last week.
“They haven’t given us everything we asked for or require,” he said, when pressed by community members about the timeline.
Michael Howley of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control said the state agency “did not learn about this until about the same time as the public.”
“Our agencies have not been able to participate in the Navy’s review to date,” Howley said. “We have prepared our own information request to make sure we can validate the Navy’s analysis.”
Others, too, said they were still waiting for the Navy to share all of its data supporting how it arrived at the conclusion that residents are safe.
Castleman, the attorney, confronted Navy officials: “When are you going to provide the data to the public?”
Danielle Janda, the Navy’s base closure manager for the Shipyard, said the Navy was still finalizing its report on the incident — but promised it is working to “get it up on our website shortly.”
Nov 17, 2025
Reporter
Laura Waxmann covers the business community with a focus on commercial real estate, development, retail and the future of San Francisco’s downtown. Prior to joining The Chronicle in 2023, she reported on San Francisco’s changing real estate and economic landscape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for the San Francisco Business Times.
Waxmann was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany, but has called San Francisco home since 2007. She’s reported on a variety of topics including housing, homelessness, education and local politics for the San Francisco Examiner, Mission Local and El Tecolote.
