Making what was once polluted green

Imagine you have a naval shipyard. For 140 years it made all sorts of naval vessels. They dropped lead paint, they spilled oil and grease, they polluted with mercury and other heavy metals. They piled up inches of welding dust. Anything and everything that went into making warships was dropped, spilled or sprayed on that site.

Then, in the 1950s, they started making nuclear stuff there and, presto, the filth became so much worse, radioactively worse. How bad did it get? Even the Navy would not allow anyone to visit unless they were in a class 1 environmental protection suit — and then for just 20 minutes. The shipyard closed in early 1990, and sat, waiting, ticking (literally, measured by a Geiger counter).

The Hunters Point Shipyard on San Francisco Bay, once the U.S. military’s largest facility for applied nuclear research (Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory), needed to be cleaned up.

As anyone with any common sense can tell you, anything on San Francisco Bay connects with the rest of California and the nation, somehow. Trace particle contaminated rain was showing up three states away. Something had to be done. Every year wasted made matters worse as material leaked in rain runoff, blew with the wind and out-gassed into the San Francisco fog.

    u    u    u

In the early years of the George H.W. Bush administration, the EPA calculated the cleanup cost. Their estimate was that it would take 50 percent of the annual Superfund to clean the site and Bush tried to work it out with Congress. The Navy, which had relinquished control of the site, claimed it was a U.S. government problem, not part of the defense budget.

Then for eight years under Clinton, no one did anything; the environment was just an election word, without substance. And of course, during the eight years of the last administration, even less was done. Because of other geo-political arguments (and the dreaded Bolton in particular), the U.N. was never asked nor permitted to evaluate how they could help with the cost and clean-up.

However, this administration, pressed on by a desperate Republican Gov. Schwarzenegger, immediately asked for U.N. help — both money and expertise — and got it.

    u    u    u

The cleanup is now a $500 million project, spearheaded by the EPA and the U.N. Global Compact group. The Global Compact, launched in 2000, is supported by six U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Progress is underway already to clean up and build something new, useful, providing jobs. No, this is not stimulus money; this is U.N. money (mostly). When it is completed in 2012, the new Pacific-rim complex will house a climate change think tank called the U.N. Global Compact Sustainability Center, which will work to find green solutions to the environmental challenges facing the world, a conference center and U.N. offices for UNEP.

“California, in general, and San Francisco, in particular, have been at the forefront of environmental sustainability for many years and all the right ingredients are here,� said Gavin Power, deputy director of the U.N. Global Compact, which seeks to encourage businesses to be better stewards of the environment. “This would also have poignant significance given that San Francisco is the birthplace of the United Nations [in 1946].�

So, it seems there is some use to the United States after all. Skeptics take note. Bush II and Clinton, hang your heads in shame.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.