HISTORY IS THE PRESENT: On the unspeakable history of animal cruelty at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard
According to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) Briefing Book, over 5,600 goats, pigs, guinea pigs and rodents were placed in compartments and strapped onto ship decks to evaluate the biological effects of the bomb.
AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI: If spirits haunt the shoreline of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, they most certainly include the spirits of animals. The history of the federal Superfund site is replete with the mass killing of animals. This is not a happy story – it saddens me to tell it. This is a story about the human impact of the loss of animal companions on shipyard shoreline workers and neighbors. It begins in the City of St. Francis, the patron saint of animals…
Chemist Glenn T. Seaburg, longest serving chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Shot Baker “the world’s first nuclear disaster.” Over 42,000 military and civilian personnel participated in Operation Crossroads conducted in the Bikini Atoll in July of 1946…
Plans to expose live animals to radioactivity generated protest letters from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. According to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) Briefing Book, over 5,600 goats, pigs, guinea pigs and rodents were placed in compartments and strapped onto ship decks to evaluate the biological effects of the bomb…
Shot Baker turned the assembled ships into “radioactive stoves that burned all living things aboard with invisible and painless but deadly radiation” wrote a Navy official in a classified cable sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the National Security Archive, Shot Baker created a radiological disaster. Military personnel assigned to salvage the contaminated test ships were exposed to dangerous levels of ionizing radiation.
Mangled but still afloat, six target vessels were hauled back to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. In the months following Operation Crossroads, an additional 18 target ships and 61 support ships were towed to Hunters Point for futile decontamination efforts.
According to investigative journalists Jason Fagone and Cynthia Dizikes: “After the A-bomb tests, Navy leaders realized a special facility was needed to wash the contaminated clothing of sailors at Hunters Point,” and a “radioactive laundry” was installed inside Building 503…
Each wash cycle flushed over 100 gallons of radiation-contaminated water into pipes and drains. That building was demolished, its footprint covered with five feet of soil. Building 606 was constructed in 1986 on top of it. Building 606 is located at the border between radiation-contaminated Parcel D and Parcel E.
On Feb. 13, 1996, Mayor Willie Brown and Navy officials announced the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency would lease Building 606 to the Police Department for $18,000 a month… K-9 officers ran their dogs through the “killing fields” of the shipyard’s most dangerously contaminated regions. According to the Chronicle investigation, a K-9 officer stationed at Building 606 expressed concern over the shipyard’s history of nuclear testing as the K-9 dogs started getting sick.
A sable-colored German shepherd named Crocker ran into a glass door at high speed. At surgery his spleen was found to be full of tumors. “These buildings were ‘hot’ chemistry and biology labs, kennels for animals given lethal doses of radiation and storage vaults for radioactive elements used in experiments. The Navy stashed drums of radioactive waste in temporary shacks in the area”…
The Biological and Medical Sciences Division of NRDL, headquartered in Building 815 on the shipyard’s southern shoreline, conducted cruel animal experiments “to assess, evaluate and prevent radiation injury in humans.” Scientists measured the biological effects of exposure from different sources of radiation including gamma rays, neutron radiation and beta particles at varying doses, rates and exposure pathways causing skin burns, gastrointestinal bleeding and central nervous system damage…
A 55-year-old woman,… who lived 250 feet from the… western fence line that separates the shipyard’s chemical and radiation-contaminated shoreline from “Three Street,” the heart of the Bayview Hunters Point community – less than a mile away,…. has suffered the loss of six animal companions – dogs and cats – from what she has witnessed to be primarily cancers of the head and neck. She recalls a cat with a bulging tumor of the right eye, a beautiful dog Apollo with visible tumors of the neck, animals with symptoms of nerve damage who “went out there [to the shipyard] to die” and a cat who bled to death from feline leukemia…
The Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program is detecting thallium in about 50 percent of screenings conducted on shipyard residents and workers… Thallium is a highly toxic cumulative poison to humans with effects most severe in the nervous system and was banned from wide use in rat poisons and insecticides. Thallium compounds are colorless, odorless and tasteless…
The radioactive metals cesium, uranium, strontium, rubidium and manganese together form a toxic “stew” made even more dangerous when “flavored” with cancer-causing heavy metals like nickel, platinum, chromium and cadmium. The Hunters Point Community Biomonitoring Program has mapped a cluster of cancers proven to be induced by exposure to radiation in shipyard neighbors. (The black pins correspond to animals verified to have died of cancer)…
Ahimsa means lover of animals. Ahimsa Animal Welfare is the philosophy of nonviolence, respect and care for all living things. In Jainism, Ahimsa means to be without harm, to be utterly harmless, not only towards oneself and others, but to all forms of life, from the largest mammals to the smallest bacteria… Ahimsa is invoked in the Mahabharata to condemn cruel practices, the futile destructiveness of worldly existence and to proclaim the sanctity and dignity of life. Peace be with you. SOURCE…
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