True America: Navy's Radioactive Treasure Island

CVL-22 before,

Treasure Island near Oakland, California holds no buried gold or silver, but it does contain a lot of hidden nuclear waste redevelopment authorities had no idea was there because the former owner, the US Navy, did not tell the public about it. The island was created by landfill in 1936 for the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition by the Army Corp of Engineers. The name Treasure Island came from the fact that fill material dredged from San Francisco Bay originated from mining the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After the exposition the artificial island became a naval air station and dockyard. In the post-war atomic era the 400 acres were used for radiological training schools by the Navy. Declared surplus in 1993, the former base is being turned over to San Francisco authorities who want to use the scarce vacant land for a second downtown. Journalists from the Center for Investigative Reporting found records of Treasure Island's radioactive past in previously classified, dusty archive records stashed in the US National Archives in San Bruno, Ca and elsewhere. The presence of radioactive waste on the island is complicating civilian redevelopment plans.

and after Baker bomb test

The Navy kept its radiological activities on the island largely secret for more than forty years. Its nuclear war training schools used radioactive isotopes including radium, plutonium and cesium 137. The Navy knew the hazardous material was on Treasure island and not always handled in a safe manner. The island's dock and salvage facilities also berthed target ships exposed to atomic testing at Bikini Atoll, and a full scale mockup of a patrol boat named the USS Pandemonium on which students would practice nuclear decontamination. A once secret 1947 Navy memo declared ship decontamination efforts to be insufficient. The wrecked and warped USS Independence (CVL-22) was so dangerously irradiated it was sunk near the Farrallon Islands in 1951 where it contaminates the wildlife refuge to this day. Of course the Navy claims it cleaned up its mess properly during the years since the facility was slated for closure. It denied civilian residents of former Navy housing were at risk from radiation levels. Workers involved in clean up operations repeatedly found radium pieces, some too hot to handle, in former waste pits and in the soil around military housing built in the sixties and seventies. Later it was discovered that some of the Navy housing was built on top of a garbage dump site during a time when it was common practice to simply bury radioactive waste in ordinary dumps. The Navy contracted for a historical review of radiological activities on the island in 2005. The assessment selected 18 out of 542 potential contamination sites for further review. It only identified five "impacted sites" of low residual radioactivity that did not pose a "substantial risk to human health or the environment". Finally in May 2012 the Navy confessed to Treasure Island residents that the former base had housed ship overhaul and salvage operations that were a possible source of radioactive waste.

Baker shot, Bikini 1946

The island's clean up operations have been mismanaged and shrouded in bureaucratic in-fighting between state agencies and the Navy. The formerly secret paper trail makes it clear the Navy did not follow standard clean up procedures now in effect for radioactive wastes such as a through survey of the entire property with sensitive detection instruments. In 1978 the Navy was repeatedly cautioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it was failing to follow radioactive safety standards. Auditors were forced to close down the Navy's training classes pending correction of all safety related deficiencies. California's Department of Toxic Substances Control is charged with monitoring the clean up of Treasure Island, but it had to call in the state's Department of Public Health because of its lack of expertise with radioactive material disposal. This "hairy-chested" attitude toward radioactive waste may have sufficed during the Cold War. Now, it is obviously an inadequate approach to protecting public health.