Bay Area May Be in Hot Water Over Dumping

SAN FRANCISCO —  Over 24 years, the government and private research agencies dumped almost 48,000 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste just a few miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge.

That waste now is leaking into the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary--and no one knows how much contamination it is causing in seafood. Federal officials say they don’t have the money to determine the extent of the damage.

Scientists have studied and mapped only 15% of the disposal site, and the little they did see suggests that most of the radiation leaking from the barrels is not higher than what occurs naturally.

Still, environmentalists say more research must be done to gauge the effect on the area’s rich marine life.

“If it is getting into the food chain, what precautions are being taken?” said Maurice Campbell, a member of Community First Coalition, which has pushed for a government cleanup of radioactive waste in San Francisco’s former Navy base. “There should be an independent study.”

The marine sanctuary surrounds the Farallon Islands, themselves a national wildlife refuge, and protects 1,225 square miles of ocean. The area is home to 36 species of marine mammals, and teems with so much sea life that albatrosses have been known to fly 5,000-mile round trips from Midway Island and back to feed themselves and their young on what they gathered at the Farallones. Commercial and sport fishermen also harvest a variety of deep sea and shallow water fish there.

Only limited testing has been done on sediment and ground fish at the dump site, and no agency has budgeted closer looks at the problem, said sanctuary manager Edward Ueber.

Worried residents and environmentalists hope an ongoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration review of the sanctuary’s management plan will address monitoring of the dump site.

Most agree that cleaning the area could make things worse. Some of the drums were sunk with bullet holes, and most are so corroded that moving them would spread more radioactive waste.

Even with money, getting to the drums would be difficult. They were dumped over 540 square miles in water 300 to 6,000 feet deep along the edge of the continental shelf, an area crisscrossed with canyons and gullies. Most submarines that dive deeper than 2,000 feet aren’t available on the West Coast, Ueber said.

Most of that waste is radioactive material and contaminated gloves and uniforms from national laboratories administered by the University of California and now-defunct Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco. It was dumped between 1946 and 1970 at what then was called the Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Site.

Two other primary radioactive waste dump sites for the United States, located about 120 miles off the coast of Maryland and Delaware, were also used before the Ocean Dumping Act banned such dumping in 1972.

Herman Karl, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, acknowledged that his agency hadn’t surveyed most of the radioactive mess.

“We weren’t able to go to the area where 40-some-thousand were dropped,” Karl said. “We didn’t have the time or the money.”

In the early 1990s, Karl surveyed what he could from a submarine, and unmanned submersibles mapped the barrels. The USGS study concluded that leakage raised radiation levels only slightly in nearby sediments. A 1991 survey by NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency also found only low-level radiation.

“A big concern is that there was so much dumping in the ‘50s, and is it continuing to have problems?” said Janet Hashimoto, of the EPA’s regional office in San Francisco. “All of the balances indicated that there was very low radiation, and sometimes, it was at background level.”

Most of the commercial fish harvested in the region--Pacific herring, salmon, rockfish, albacore tuna and Dungeness crab--live at depths shallower than the nearby drums, and government tests on seafood every few years have not shown cause for alarm, said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assn.

“The last thing we want is to have any tainted fish getting on the market,” Grader said. “That’s just risking consumers’ health and we want to assure them what they’re buying is safe.”

However, elevated radiation levels have shown up in Dover sole and some other deep-sea fish that people eat, according to a study published in 1996 by Thomas Suchanek, then a research ecologist with UC Davis.

To see just how far the radioactivity has spread, more testing should be done on organisms that live their entire lives near the barrels, said Suchanek, now a deputy director of environmental contaminants with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Though a USGS study concluded that currents probably won’t carry contaminants through the Golden Gate and into the bay, some Bay Area residents want more monitoring to make sure the radioactivity isn’t entering the food chain or washing onto Northern California’s beaches.

“The real solution there is ongoing monitoring and taking tissues from the sea life and water fowl,” said Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a public interest group that has followed the issue. “That has to happen on a regular basis.”

But the effect of the waste on the rich life of the sanctuary is unknown, Bloom said.

“As far as I know, we know the most about it, and that’s pretty . . . sad.”