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Two high school students from the Bayview/Hunter's Point area assist USF junior environmental science major Michael Payne (far right) in testing water samples of Yosemite Slough for water quality and fecal Coliform. The students are helping Environmental Science Professor Jack Lendvay prove the slough is contaminated by the U.S. Navy and the city of San Francisco.
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USF Science Group Out to Prove Pollution at Hunter’s Point
The estuary at Hunter’s Point is a small tidal inlet where large numbers of coastal birds feed and the occasional abandoned lawn mower appears below the waves. On the surface, little of this placid corner of the San Francisco Bay indicates the virulent poisons that have seeped into its muddy flats, its role as catch-all for sewage, and as a past dumping ground for industry in the area. But a USF environmental science professor and his students are intent on exposing its true damaged state.
“It’s a severely contaminated site,” said Jack Lendvay, assistant professor and chair of the environmental science department, and organizer of a study of the estuary, called Yosemite Slough. Lawn mowers are the least of its problems. The mud and water Lendvay and his students wade into with their beakers and testing equipment is full of PCBs, fecal Coliform, heavy metals, chlorinated solvents, and radioactive materials collected by drains and sewers and by slag from Navy ships cleaned at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard at the height of nuclear testing in the ’50s and ’60s.
In fact, it’s the Navy that Lendvay, a former Navy submarine officer, is inadvertently targeting with his study. Miles of Hunter’s Point was built with landfill infected by radioactive waste produced at the shipyard’s top-secret nuclear laboratory. The Navy has insisted that Yosemite Slough was not the site of any toxic waste dumping (that was done at the Farallon Islands according to classified documents released last year) but Lendvay’s group is out to prove that the Bay’s natural flow has washed large amounts of shore dirt into the waters and infected it with alarmingly high amounts of toxins.
“The Navy has said there is no threat. If its environmental studies were flawless, we wouldn’t have a case,” Lendvay said. “But the more we look at it, the more we believe they are erroneous.”
To collect evidence, Lendvay and his group of four undergraduates have visited the slough twice a month since 2001 to gather water samples and plum the estuary with a sonde, an instrument sensitive to a variety of water quality indicators and the presence of Coliform bacteria. Higher amounts of the bacteria may indicate recent city sewage emissions. The city is supposed to limit the amount of dumping into the slough, but storms and runoff can back up its sewers, requiring the release of excess sewage.
“I hope the testing continues on to other projects and leads to restoration of the slough,” said junior Eliot Metzger, a member of Lendvay’s group.
Ideally, Lendvay said, the group’s testing will force the Navy to remove the polluted landfill and cause San Francisco to rethink its sewage and drain controls.
“Our goal is to get the place cleaned up and stop the continued dumping of waste there,” Lendvay said. “It is one of the most sensitive parts of the city, one of the most polluted parts of the city, it’s right on the edge environmentally. It wouldn’t take much for there to be no birds there anymore.”
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