Radioactive waste: Old records reveal history of Navy shipyard dumping

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2002 by Davis, Lisa

Ocean dumping

No one, but no one, keeps in touch like military veterans. The National Association of Atomic Veterans graciously allowed me to post a note in its newsletters, seeking vets who'd been at NRDL and/or Hunters Point Shipyard. Every once in awhile, someone would call. And for every veteran who called, there were two others he knew.

One day a man from Pennsylvania called and said that he had not been at Hunters Point, but remembered talking to someone who'd worked on a ship based in San Francisco that was dumping barrels of radiation into the ocean. That's how I met John Gessleman, a gunner's mate in the Navy in the 1950s, whose job included escort duty on a barge that carried containers of radioactive waste under the Golden Gate Bridge out toward the Farallon Islands, where they were dumped at sea. He and others followed orders to shoot the barrels full of holes to make them sink.

Through old newspaper stories, I learned that there had been congressional hearings on the Farallon Island dump site in 1980, and I found some of the scientists who'd testified. As time passed, I contacted federal, state and local agencies trying to find out who monitors the dump site. The answer, as it turned out, was that no one monitors a nuclear waste dump in a national marine sanctuary. In fact, no one has ever determined how much waste had been dumped, or exactly where it is located.

I also connected with Dr. W. Jackson Davis, a professor of international environmental studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who had studied the Farallon Island dump in the 1970s. Davis was helpful, not only in sharing the findings of his research, but also in helping me to understand some of the more technical aspects of handling radiation and its waste. Davis suggested that some of his graduate students might be interested in an internship that included environmental journalism. I brought the idea to my editor. We hammered out an internship agreement with the dean of the school, and within a few weeks we had a solid group of five students assigned to review documents relating to the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard. Over several months, I chased down environmental-impact statements and other supporting documentation on the base cleanup from the San Francisco Public Library and from the EPA for the students, and met regularly with them in Monterey.

By this time, I also had a working history of what radiological substances had actually been used on the shipyard. The students created a database from my documents and then, under Dr. Davis' supervision, analyzed the environmental cleanup work that the Navy had done at the former base. (The database was modified and used as part of the Internet presentation of "Fallout.")

As my editor and I began talking about how to put a year's worth of research and reporting into words, it became obvious that the material centered on two distinct locations- the Hunters Point Shipyard, where radioactive waste was created, and the Farallon Island Nuclear Waste Site, where at least some of it was dumped. So we organized the series in two parts: one concentrating on Hunters Point and the second on the Farallons.