Tetra Tech, an engineering firm that in 2018 admitted in court that it falsified soil samples at the contaminated Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge James Donato today to pay $57 million in a settlement agreement.
Nearly $12 million of the payment will be awarded to seven former Tetra Tech workers who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging they were instructed by the company to replace potentially contaminated samples with “clean” soil. Those samples were subsequently submitted to the Navy, which had hired the company to help remediate the site.
The 2013 discovery that Tetra Tech falsified soil samples delayed a decades-long effort to clean the former shipyard of contaminated waste. In 1989, the shipyard was declared a Superfund site for its high levels of toxic waste, which were remnants of its past use during the Cold War for radiological experimentation.
Following the shipyard’s designation as a Superfund site, the Navy’s cleanup was put under Environmental Protection Agency and state oversight, with the property set to be handed over to the city in phases for future development. The first and least contaminated parcel went to the city in 2004 and then to developer Lennar.
But the allegations that large swaths of the site were still contaminated forced the Navy to re-test much of the shipyard.
Two former Tetra Tech workers, Stephen Rolfe and Justin Hubbard, who were supervisors at the site, were each sentenced to eight months in federal prison in 2018.
The Navy has since found radioactive materials at the shipyard, including as recently as this spring. It may be another decade until the cleanup is complete.
“Over the past two decades, the federal government has dedicated significant resources to ensuring that the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is free from harmful radiation and safe for public use,” said U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian in a statement. “It should have been just as important to the contractor that the government selected and paid to perform radiological testing and remediation at the site.”
Several lawsuits have been filed against Tetra Tech, including by Bayview-Hunters Point residents who fear their health has been damaged by contaminated soil, and by others who say their home values have plummeted since news of Tetra Tech’s falsifications emerged.
Last year, the company agreed to pay $40 million to the U.S. government for violating the Superfund Act, which requires that hazardous waste sites to be remediated.
“By falsifying work claims and manipulating critical data, Tetra Tech put its own financial interests ahead of its commitments to the Department of the Navy,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Brian Merkal of the NCIS Economic Crimes Field Office. “Potentially placing the health and safety of the American people at risk.”
Around July 15, 1945, half the world’s supply of Uranium-235 and components of Little Boy were stored in Hunters Point shipyard awaiting transfer to the USS Indianapolis. The mission was secret and no one on the base knew what the convoy of trucks had delivered.
Around 35 years ago, civilians and Navy officers presented its Superfund cleanup to skeptical BVHP residents. My neighbors and I were in the audience. We were assured that the Navy’s contractor had experience with a Superfund site in Washington where 9 plutonium bombs were built. BVHP’s billion dollar cleanup was small by comparison. Many years later, the public learned that neither cleanup was successful. The schedule for cleanup in Washington has been extended by 30 years to 2089 at an estimated cost of $300-$500 billion. Hunters Point might require 10 more years and the settlement from Tetratech is $57 million?
I worked there in 1987, I think, cataloging old drums that were left in vacant navy warehouses. My recollection was that most of it was hydraulic or transformer fluids.
As often happens, news coverage of the clean-up at the Shipyard gets things wrong. Radiological waste is only one component of the toxic mix which dates not from the Cold War, but from WW2 as well. Some of the waste is simply lead based paint scraped from the hulls and superstructures of Naval vessels as part of routine maintenance. Other kinds of chemical waste were produced by various industrial processes that took place over the whole lifetime of the shipyard as a Naval base. All of this waste is buried in the landfill that most of the shipyard sits on, or rests on the bottom of the Bay adjacent to dry docks and piers. There is no evidence that any waste, radiological or chemical, has ever been airborne, and therefore no reason to think that residents in surrounding neighborhoods have been negatively impacted. The artists’ community at the shipyard, which I have been part of for 40 years, has, as far as I know, no higher rates of any environmental health condition than is statistically normal. This is not meant to diminish the seriousness of the hellish mess the Navy created during its tenure. The Navy’s decades long failure to clean up after itself is as much their own fault as it is the result of Tetra Tech’s duplicity.
What about the workers that were there building even when the posted signs saying don’t drive fast to not disturb the soil. We were directed to drive slow through the dirt lot to not kick up dirt. It’s obvious even the contractor that was building the housing there new the soil was contaminated
Will residents of Hunters Point at that time receive any of the settlement ?