Toxic Waste Cleanups Take Longer in Marginalized Communities

On warm nights Arieann Harrison used to sit and chat with neighbors on the steps outside her apartment down the street from the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a federal Superfund site. Trucks would rumble by, carting away contaminated soil as part of a shipyard cleanup effort that has spanned 39 years. Harrison says the trucks were often uncovered, and she recalls seeing dirt blow over the street in clouds that looked like smoke. 

“You’d think it was a fire from blocks away,” said Harrison, 58. 

That dust — which she couldn’t avoid inhaling — might have been contaminated with more than a hundred pollutants, some radioactive. Four generations of Harrisons, including Arieann’s grandchildren, have lived in the neighborhood as the cleanup drags on. Marie Harrison, a prominent local environmental justice advocate and Arieann’s mother, died of a chronic lung disease that her doctors suspected was precipitated by toxins. Arieann’s father, who died in 2014, had cancer and her sister has cancer. Multiple tests of Arieann’s blood and urine have detected radioactive compounds including plutonium and toxins like lead and arsenic, which also have been found at the shipyard. Arieann continues her mother’s work advocating for a complete shipyard cleanup through the Marie Harrison Community Foundation. 

The shipyard, a notoriously toxic site, is just one of thousands of contaminated parcels around the Bay Area undergoing remediation. These cleanups take longer in marginalized communities, according to a new San Francisco Public Press analysis of more than 20,000 sites of varying size across the nine-county Bay Area. In areas that scored high on a national index of socioeconomic vulnerability, the median cleanup took more than 450 days longer than in the least vulnerable areas. Many factors, including the type of toxin, the nature of the site and the complexity of the cleanup, could affect how long a remediation takes and explain some of the differences. But in a subset of more than 12,000 cleanups of comparable complexity, the disparities were even more pronounced.

Scientists and community organizers accuse regulators of prioritizing cleanups in wealthier, whiter areas. Regulators acknowledge that work can lag in marginalized communities but say they are hamstrung by insufficient money and staffing. For people living near toxic sites, slow or stalled cleanups mean longer exposure to harmful substances, increasing the risk of sickness. 

While the locations and history of toxic cleanups are well-documented, no public catalog of cleanup durations existed. To create one, the Public Press mapped three agencies’ databases of thousands of cleanups and calculated their durations using start and end dates. As a measure of marginalization, the analysis used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, which combines demographic data with poverty rates, access to transportation and other socioeconomic factors to score census tracts. 

Community advocates and researchers have long believed that regulators prioritize cleanups in areas where residents have the means to prompt action and protest delays. 

“Cleanup standards for communities of color and low-income communities continue to lag behind those of other communities,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of the watchdog group Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. “It’s not that cleanups don’t exist in other communities, but the problem is magnified here.” 

Lindsey Dillon, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the impact of toxic sites on surrounding communities, said the Public Press’ findings are consistent with academic literature on environmental justice.

“Marginalized groups get fewer resources,” Dillon said.

Racial disparities are stark, the data shows. The median cleanup in areas with a very high proportion of residents who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color took nearly a year longer than the median cleanup in mostly white areas. In the subset of similar sites, the difference was more than two and a half years or 47%. 

“We’re seeing the results of racism,” said Shirletha Holmes-Boxx, a Greenaction community organizer and policy advocate. 

Experts warn chronic exposure raises risk of illness

When a cleanup drags on, the exposure period for nearby residents can too, which experts say increases the risk of getting sick. 

Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, who runs the Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program, has tested the blood and urine of people living near the shipyard, including Arieann Harrison, for contaminants. Harrison’s doctors say the toxins found in her body have contributed to a host of symptoms, ranging from dizziness and nausea to a mysterious metallic taste in her mouth. 

In a different family Sumchai tested, every member had the same contaminants in their blood and urine. The older the family members were, the higher their pollutant concentrations. 

“There’s no question that the duration of exposure matters,” Sumchai said. 

In an emailed statement, Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson Joshua Alexander attributed the cleanup’s long duration to its complexity and acknowledged that past fraud by the cleanup contractor Tetra Tech EC extended the timeline. He said the cleanup is moving as fast as it can, responsibly.

“We work with the Navy to prioritize according to the worst risks first,” Alexander said. 

Most contaminated sites are not nearly as toxic as the shipyard. But even relatively minor sites can generate low levels of chronic exposure, said Ian Wren, lead scientist at the watchdog organization San Francisco Baykeeper. Petroleum from leaking underground storage tanks at former gas stations, for instance, can cause short-term effects like nausea and dizziness. In the long term, they can cause liver and kidney damage, and increase cancer risk, according to the EPA.

“It’s that chronic exposure that poses the greatest risk to communities,” Wren said.  

Residents in socially vulnerable communities are often already managing health conditions that can be exacerbated by toxic exposure, said Dillon, the UC Santa Cruz professor. 

“All of those socioeconomic factors and health conditions make people even more vulnerable to the health risks of contamination,” Dillon said. “Socially vulnerable neighborhoods should be at the top of the list in terms of cleanup priority.” 

What’s taking so long?

Several regulators acknowledged that work has been slower in marginalized communities, though officials gave differing characterizations of the disparities. Cheryl Prowell has worked more than 17 years at regulatory agencies overseeing cleanups in California. Prowell is assistant deputy director of site mitigation and restoration at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control and formerly a supervising engineer at the State Water Resources Control Board, two of the agencies responsible for the cleanup sites the Public Press analyzed. She has seen slower action on cleanups in marginalized communities. 

“I could see the difference. Understanding why that was true, I don’t know, but both agencies are working to try to change that,” Prowell said. 

Though she saw the inequity, Prowell said, officials had not been applying an environmental justice lens to the data until now.

“I hope you will start to see these numbers change. There is so much to do,” she said.

Working-class communities can face hurdles to protesting slow cleanups, said Julio Garcia, executive director of the South San Francisco environmental justice organization Rise South City. People in these communities working one or more jobs often don’t have the luxury or ability to take unpaid time off to attend public meetings where they might exert pressure on regulators. It also takes time to learn about the risks of pollution and toxic exposure, Garcia said.

Socially vulnerable neighborhoods also tend to be on or near current and former industrial sites. Many are close to the former military installations that pepper Bay Area coastlines. These areas bear the brunt of the region’s worst pollution, which may take more time to remediate.

“As a rule, the most polluting activity is put where people least can resist it,” said Cade Cannedy, program director at Climate Resilient Communities in East Palo Alto. “The most polluted sites will be in communities of color. Smaller sites will also take longer to clean up in those communities, often because they have less power to resist it.”

Conversely, more powerful communities can usher cleanups along, said Wren, the Baykeeper scientist.  

Affluent communities can exert pressure on regulators to act, Wren said, adding that officials have told him resource-strapped agencies will not manage a site proactively unless a community forces them to do so. 

“It’s really a case of, the squeaky wheel gets the cleanup,” he said.

Cleanups also happen faster when property owners can pay — and that’s often the case for sites of planned redevelopment, said Prowell, of the Department of Toxic Substances Control. Developers have the money for cleanups and can pressure regulators to speed up the process, she said.  

“The consultants and attorneys that work on the redevelopment projects are very persistent, so there is that element of ‘squeaking’ on redevelopment projects,” she said, responding to Wren’s “squeaky wheel” analogy.

Others contend that money doesn’t buy influence in the cleanup process, at least not from the government side.

“That’s not my reality,” said Marikka Hughes, branch chief at the Department of Toxic Substances Control, adding that the agency works to complete cleanups fairly. 

But cleanups that don’t have sufficient funding or persistent attorneys can fall through the cracks. The process regularly stretches on for decades; dozens in the Bay Area have dragged on for more than half a century. More than a thousand have lasted longer than three decades. 

“The idea that communities are waiting that long is heartbreaking,” said Phoenix Armenta, manager for climate equity and community engagement for the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

Image

Hunters Point residents are concerned about the health effects of living near the contaminated Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a federal Superfund site. The cleanup has lasted nearly four decades.

Jason Winshell / San Francisco Public Press

The correlation between social vulnerability and cleanup duration is not perfect. Census tracts with a “moderate” social vulnerability index had some of the longest cleanups, in some cases longer than sites in “high” social vulnerability areas. However, some of those “moderate” tracts are in communities like Bayview-Hunters Point, South San Francisco, East Oakland and East Palo Alto, widely considered marginalized relative to their immediate surroundings.

Eddie Ahn, the executive director of Brightline Defense, an environmental justice advocacy organization, has assessed the accuracy of a state screening tool similar to the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index called CalEnviroScreen. Ahn noted that tools calibrated to a statewide or national scale often don’t take into account the high cost of living in the Bay Area. That can lead to an underestimation of economic pain in the region. Moreover, neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District comprise luxury homes side by side with affordable housing, a complicated profile that is difficult to represent in an aggregate score like those produced by the CDC’s index. 

That issue likely led a census tract in Hunters Point next to the shipyard to score “moderate” in social vulnerability. The tract contains new luxury homes whose residents are wealthier than those in the surrounding working-class neighborhood. That inflates the tract’s median household income to $142,321, which is comparable to citywide levels, according to U.S. Census data. The pocket of well-off residents misleads screening tools, resulting in a vulnerability score for the tract that is out of sync with the rest of the community, said Dillon, the UC Santa Cruz professor, who has assessed several such tools.

Duration disparities only deepen with comparable cleanups 

Since the overall dataset includes a range of cleanup types, including exceptionally complex and hazardous sites, the Public Press also analyzed a subset of sites with similar characteristics. That analysis showed even more pronounced disparities. 

Old underground storage tanks are scattered across communities of all levels of vulnerability. Often relics of old gas stations, they frequently leak gasoline into the surrounding soil and groundwater. As cleanups go, they are relatively simple, and the cleanup protocol is consistent across sites. 

The median duration of leaking underground storage tank cleanups in high vulnerability areas was more than two years longer than comparable cleanups in the lowest vulnerability areas. The median cleanup took even longer in moderate social vulnerability areas, where scores may be affected by pockets of gentrification.

“It’s another example of our communities being left behind, forgotten about and disenfranchised,” said Adele Watts, the interim Northern California co-director for the environmental justice advocacy group Communities for a Better Environment.

Regulators blame insufficient resources

The state Water Resources Control Board, which oversees the cleanups of underground storage tanks, is aware that cleanups take longer in more vulnerable communities. Annalisa Kihara, the agency’s assistant deputy director in the Division of Water Quality, said the agency is revising its process to prioritize communities that are most burdened with pollution, and that it has an initiative for expediting stalled cases. 

“We’re holding a mirror up to ourselves,” Kihara said. 

Underground storage tank cleanups in marginalized neighborhoods may take longer because those neighborhoods are more burdened with various kinds of pollution, and there’s a greater likelihood that contamination from a given underground storage tank is interacting with other toxic substances. 

“We’re often finding a soup of contaminants,” Kihara said. 

If multiple parties are responsible for the pollution, that will slow the cleanup too, she said. 

Regulators at the Department of Toxic Substances Control said they aspire to prioritize projects based on risk to human health and whether the site is going to have housing, but that insufficient funding can limit their ability to do so. 

Site remediation in California operates under a “polluter pays” model, where the property owner is responsible for covering costs for testing and treatment as well as agency staff time. When the property owner doesn’t have sufficient money, regulators dip into limited — and dwindling — pools of funding. But there isn’t enough of it, said the department’s Hughes. Other officials agreed more funding is needed to advance cleanups.

The agency representatives described underground storage tanks as a success story. After Congress created a dedicated fund financed by a gas tax to pay up to $1 million per site to clean up underground tanks, regulators closed 95% of them in three decades. The water board says it wants to reproduce that success with other, more complex cleanups. 

‘It’s too late for me’

As the Trump Administration cuts federal environmental programs, researchers and advocates say the region’s most polluted communities need state and municipal agencies to step up. 

Arieann Harrison, the Hunters Point environmental justice activist, is still pushing for a full cleanup of the shipyard — work she hopes will protect future generations. 

“It’s too late for me, the toxins are already in my bones. I just want to see a better outcome for our kids,” Harrison said. “All these protective agencies, they haven’t protected us at all. But they’re doing better now. They are at the table.”  

At the Marie Harrison Community Foundation office, stickers and T-shirts carry the slogan “can we live.” 

“I came up with the rallying cry ‘can we live’ because I felt like we were begging for our lives,” Harrison said. “Can we live? It’s a question. For me, it’s a question.”

Story editing by Laura Wenus and Noah Arroyo. Data editing by John Harden, a USC senior fellow and metro data reporter for The Washington Post.