High-Rises Planned on Richmond Toxic Site

Developer says Fans will disperse fumes 

KELLY ST. JOHN / SF Chronicle 31aug04

[related article below]

Building 1,330 high-rise dwellings on land once named one of the most toxic sites in the Bay Area might sound crazy, but that's what a Marin developer wants to do near the popular Point Isabel Regional Shoreline in Richmond.

Marin Developer Russell Pitto wants to build 1,330 dwellings on 45 acres of Richmond land — not far from Point Isabel Regional Shoreline, and the Marina Bay neighborhood. (The Campus Bay business park to the northeast is already built.)  Map sources: ESRI, GDT   Mindfully.org note:  Building on so-called brownfields is becoming increasingly more popular amongst developers that are searching for the cheapest land to build on. Corporations such as this pesticide manufacturer destroy land with toxic chemicals,  radioactive substances, or both. The EPA even has an office to handle such work — Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment EPA Region 9 Brownfields (CA, NV, AZ) U.S. EPA - Region 9 (415) 744-2237  Or see map of all regions

Not only that, he wants to rely on fans — powered by bay breezes — to pipe away fumes released from chemicals dumped in the ground decades ago.

As workers prepare to dig up a polluted marsh next to the site this week, the proposed development is drawing fire. Opponents say it is dangerous and that state watchdogs are asleep at the switch — so they've enlisted the help of Contra Costa County's public health chief and an attorney who usually represents the developers of such sites .

"This is beyond the pale. It's irresponsible," said Peter Weiner, a San Francisco attorney. Weiner's clients usually are folks who want to clean up and build on polluted sites, including former military bases. This time, he is working pro bono for the other side.

But Richmond redevelopment officials don't think the plan is crazy at all. They note that several Bay Area developers have successfully built and sold homes on once-polluted land, from the nearby Marina Bay development to former military bases in Alameda and Novato.

The Richmond plan includes construction of townhouses. Because there is a risk of carcinogenic vapors from the ground below, builders would build vented crawlspaces underneath the dwellings and install pipes to carry fumes out through the roof. The vapors would be pushed through the pipes by wind-powered turbines.

"It's an absolute outrage to tell people that, 'Yeah, there are a lot of volatile organic compounds in the ground, but we'll have fans to whisk those away,' " Weiner said.

Developer Russell Pitto says his proposal to build the 45-acre Campus Bay community of 1,330 condominiums, townhouses and three high-rise residential towers will bring needed housing and revenue to financially struggling Richmond.

City redevelopment officials agree, saying high-density housing is an ideal use for land with such picturesque bay views. They praise Pitto for initiating a $6 million cleanup of wetlands surrounding the San Francisco Bay Trail, marshes that will be protected as habitat under the management of the East Bay Regional Parks District.

Opponents are fighting the proposal on many fronts. Some argue that bringing in 3,000 new residents will threaten endangered clapper rail birds. Others complain that 18-story high-rises will block views.

But questions about possible danger to people have attracted the attention of Contra Costa County's public health officer, Dr. Wendel Brunner.

The project cannot move forward with an environmental impact report until the Regional Water Quality Control Board declares whether homes could safely be built there.

But last month, Brunner asked the state's Environmental Protection Agency to transfer oversight to the Department of Toxic Substance Control, which he says has been in charge of every other complicated toxic site in Contra Costa County over the past 25 years. Brunner thinks the water board is ill-equipped to evaluate the risks to human health.

Last week, the EPA wrote Brunner that there will be a meeting about the issue soon. For now, the water board is the lead, and department scientists have been asked to help evaluate the plan. But Brunner said the matter is more urgent because the developer will begin restoring the marsh on Wednesday.

Pitto, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, said Campus Bay will be a safe and vibrant community where people want to live. He has complied with all the requests of state regulators thus far, and he said he will abide by whatever changes to design they might require.

No one disputes that the 85-acre area at the center of the controversy has a history of toxicity. The Stauffer Chemical Co. opened a plant there in 1897 to make sulfuric acid, dumping the iron pyrite cinders left over from its production into the marsh.

The company later expanded its operations, developing and manufacturing fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. The plant — which through corporate mergers came to be owned by Zeneca Corp. in the 1980s — closed in 1997.

The land was so polluted that in 1998 the state water board named it a toxic "hot spot" — one of the 10 most polluted sites in the Bay Area.

In 2002, Zeneca spent $20 million to neutralize acidic soils, haul away contaminated dirt and cap the land to seal in any remaining toxins. Zeneca sold the land to Pitto's Simeon Commercial Properties and its partner, developer Cherokee Investment Partners.

State water regulators said the land was safe for industrial use. Zeneca had used research-and-development labs on some 20 or so acres that are now rented out as a business park. Pitto plans to build more R&D office space on the remaining 40-plus acres where the land had been cleared and capped.

But the real estate market for such space went soft, and homes became a more profitable prospect. Housing is in high demand in fast-growing Contra Costa County, which is expected to add 250,000 people in the next 25 years. Pitto plans to sell the owner-occupied units for $260,000 up to $650,000 for townhouses closest to the shoreline.

Environmental standards are much higher for homes than for industrial areas, because children and the elderly will be present 24 hours a day. In Campus Bay, the groundwater and soil still contain volatile organic chemicals that could escape from the ground in gas form, especially if cracks ever develop in the cap.

Exposure to these chemicals has been associated with a range of human health problems, from throat irritation and nausea to central-nervous-system damage and cancers.

Environmental consultants say removal of the chemicals would be too expensive, would take as long as 10 years and might not work over the long term. Instead, they propose to use "engineering controls" to reduce the risk of toxic vapors ever affecting future residents.

Homes would be built over open breezeways or ventilated garages. Bay winds and fans would be used to blow any accumulating toxic vapors away.

"We think it is pretty clear on a technical level that there won't be any real exposure to vapors," said Jim Levine, founder of Levine-Fricke, the environmental management company working with Pitto on cleanup issues.

Still, the use of wind-powered turbines or fans to propel fumes out of living spaces is unusual, said Barbara Cook, chief of the toxic substance department's Northern California coastal cleanup operations.

"That's something new for us," said Cook. "We haven't seen that." Her staff is currently researching the issue, she said.

The fate of homes is undecided, but the water board has approved the restoration of 22 acres of marshes nearby. The scars left by nearly a century of pollution there are clear — most visibly in the form of a red-orange pond reflecting the color of iron pyrite cinders dumped there.

Opponents say that while they think the marsh desperately needs to be cleaned up, they have little confidence it will be done safely.

Among them is Sherry Padgett, who said she saw from her office next door how Zeneca managed its cleanup of the property in 2002. She watched as tons of contaminated soil were trucked away and said crews did little to control the dust.

The company was permitted to monitor the cleanup and used only one air quality monitor — installed behind a building where the wind was blocked —

to check for toxic air pollution, she said. Padgett admits her interest in the issue is personal. Last year, a rare tumor called a chondroma, a precursor to bone cancer, was diagnosed, and Padgett had surgery to remove four ribs and part of her sternum. This summer, a different kind of rare tumor in her thyroid was diagnosed, she said.

"I don't know if it is related," Padgett said. "But there was no governmental agency out there protecting us, 24 hours a day, during the dismantling of one of the most toxic sites in the state of California."

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Rotten Egg Smell and Brown Dust

Life in Seaport — next door to a plant making pesticides 

KELLY ST. JOHN / SF Chronicle 31aug04

When Pauline Reed thinks back to her girlhood in Richmond, she remembers the smell first.

It was a strong odor — "just putrid, putrid," she recalls — like rotten eggs wafting over the neighborhood. When the stink settled, it left a fine mustard-brown dust on the cars parked outside.

Reed didn't think much of the near-constant smell back then. Nobody did. It was 1945, and it was just a fact of life that the Seaport war housing apartments where Reed and her parents lived — along with more than 400 other families — were adjacent to a pesticide plant run by the Stauffer Chemical Co.

"We ignored it. We didn't think anything of it," said Reed, now 68. "We were kids."

Urgently needing to house the boom of war workers flooding the Bay Area during World War II, authorities rushed to build thousands of new apartments in Richmond, especially near bayfront industrial sites.

Seaport, opened in 1944, was the last to be built. A cluster of about 50 apartment buildings, it was wedged in a parcel of land bordered by the bay, a rail line and Stauffer's chemical plant. Whites and blacks both lived there, but in segregated housing.

In 1956, Seaport was deemed a slum and torn down to make way for commercial development and Interstate 580. Production at the chemical plant continued, and through corporate mergers and restructuring, the property ultimately fell into the hands of Zeneca Corp. in the 1980s. Zeneca closed its operations there in 1997.

Today, a developer wants to build high-rise homes on the 85-acre swath of land that Stauffer had polluted over the decades. Activists oppose the plan, concerned that toxic materials have not been properly cleaned up and fearful the site is too dangerous to ever be safe for homes.

The controversy has stirred up former Seaport residents like Reed. They wonder what long-term health effects they may have suffered.

"It's just a big question mark," said Reed, who has difficulty breathing because of growths in her lungs. A lung specialist told her it could be connected to her environment years ago, she said. Other former Seaport residents, like Ethel Dotson, are more blunt about their anger. Cancers have plagued Dotson's family, and she said she also has been given a diagnosis of tumors.

"It's like they were using us as the guinea pigs," said Dotson, 62, whose family moved to Seaport in 1944 and stayed for six years. "I was just a little girl."

Dotson has been using public meetings and debate about use of the land to try to learn more about what she might have been exposed to. She has learned that arsenic, heavy metals, lead, nitric acid and volatile organic compounds were found there after Zeneca finally closed the plant in 1997.

Dotson and Reed recall that the children of Seaport could see Stauffer's open-air ponds and sulfur beds through the chain-link fence. The boldest children disobeyed their parents, trespassing onto Stauffer's land to skim rocks in the yellow chemical ponds.

Most also tramped through the nearby marsh, fishing or playing in the rocks by the bay, they recalled. That was where Stauffer openly dumped the iron pyrite cinders used in its production of sulfuric acid.

The "mucky stuff" on the rocks along the bay is one of the few memories that Charles Dillard, now 60, still has of his time at Seaport. His family moved to San Francisco when he was 5, shortly before his father was committed to a mental institution.

"Living right there in that chemical plant had to have affected all of our health in some way or another," said Dillard. "But how are you going to prove that?"

He acknowledges what Dotson and others have been disappointed to hear from health officials — that it would be nearly impossible for an epidemiological study to give solid answers. They lived in Seaport for a short time and could have been exposed to other hazards since then.

Still, for all their concerns, former residents have mostly fond memories of living in Seaport.

The African American community there was close-knit and friendly, with families attending the same school, church and recreation center. Kids played baseball on the community diamond, and wives chatted as they hung laundry on the clotheslines that flapped in the backyards.

Dotson has old photographs. In one, taken in 1948, the men who formed the Seaport Garden Club smile broadly, one holding a 26-pound cabbage.

"We all came from different areas, but in Richmond, we were one," Reed said. "Families looked out for each other's kids."

Today, Reed said it matters little to her what is ultimately built on the land near her former home — as long as it is built safely.

"I wouldn't want to see anybody purchase a home on soil that could affect them in some kind of way, now or later," Reed said. "But if they can clean up the site, more power to them."

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source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/31/MNG318H4OE1.DTL&type=printable 1sep04