Navy warfare schools permanently poisoned Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay

For 60 years the Navy held nuclear, bacteriological and chemical sources in their Treasure Island ABC schools that were set up to train sailors in Atomic, Bacteriological and Chemical warfare A note to the reader:

Watching the attached video will immeasurably enhance your enjoyment and understanding of the story.

Introduction: Two islands in San Francisco Bay

On Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, a toxic tour of Navy warfare schools took place on Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island.

The tour was sponsored by Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and organized by Carol Harvey, investigative reporter. Carol Harvey and Bradley’s team, Skylar Sacoolas, Kamillah Ealom and Shirletha Holmes-Boxx, shot video during the tour. James Pepper and Carol Harvey did research.

Bradley drove Skylar, Kamillah, Shirletha and Carol to each school.

An overview of the tour: Radiation schools created a radioactive community

At the start, Bradley Angel asked the key question: “How did the radioactive contamination get (onto Treasure Island?) Didn’t they (the Navy) intentionally contaminate Treasure Island to train the sailors?”

The answer to the question of intentionality is a guarded “Yes.” After the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, the Navy suddenly possessed new weapons – radiation and chemicals – that they barely understood. Navy schools set up to teach sailors how to used these weapons exposed instructors and students to dangerous nuclear material and chemical weapons and, in the process, contaminated Treasure Island. The Navy’s own watchdog, RASO (the Radiological Affairs Support Office) determined that instructors didn’t understand their material. The mishandling of these schools became clear as we followed Treasure Island’s northeastern shore, visiting four sites where the Navy established schools.

We began at the top of Yerba Buena Island looking down on Treasure Island at Building 2, which once housed the Navy Reserves school. Then we descended to Treasure Island and followed the northeastern shore west along Avenue M to the contaminated footprints of Building 233, the RADIAC schools and the Firefighting School.

Finally, we visited the existing community ranged along the shore facing the Golden Gate Bridge and the City of San Francisco. For years, radioactive objects have been found in yards, under sidewalks and front steps of old Navy townhouses. As recently as December 2024, a resident videoed a tech scanning the soil for radiation over the footprint of the demolished townhouse at 1126 Reeves Court.

Building 2 on Clipper Cove: The Naval Reserve School The history of Building 2

Treasure Island was built in 1936 for the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Designed to function as airplane hangars lining the Clipper Cove shore, the only structures remaining from the Golden Gate International Exposition are Art Moderne Buildings 1, 2, and 3.

Curvilinear Building 1, visible across the Bay from San Francisco, was erected in 1938 to be the Exposition’s Administrative Center and ultimately the San Francisco International Airport terminal – a plan that was scuttled when the realization hit that the loose fill and rocks out of which the island was built did not create a stable enough base to handle planes.

Building 3 at the mouth of Clipper Cove facing Oakland housed a lab where night vision glasses with radioactive foils were made and repaired. These highly radioactive foils contaminated Treasure Island soil in major ways.

Building 2 was called The Hall of Transportation. From 1938 to 1945, Pan American Airways’ China Clippers landed at Building 2, then headed east across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong.

According to Anne Schnoebelen, vice president of The Treasure Island Museum, the white bas relief sculpture above the side entrance of Building 2, is “based on a number of Greek-Roman figures. The figure is described in the ‘Art of Treasure Island’ by Eugen Neuhaus as ‘The Spirit of Aerial Transportation.’ She is holding a globe transversed by an airplane. The artist was Carlo Taliabue.”

In 1941, following the Exposition, the Navy took the island by eminent domain to be the administrative center for its many Bay Area bases. Treasure Island was also to be used for warfare schools for sailors.

Declassified Navy records located by researcher James Pepper indicate that the Navy Reserves conducted Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare courses in Building 2.

For the chemical weapons courses, they stored deadly instruments of war – tear gas, Lewisite (an arsenic-based blister agent), chlorine, mustard and Sarin gas. Recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad exposed hundreds of thousands of his own people to Sarin, a lethal nerve agent that can cause death within 10 minutes. Mustard gas is a chemical warfare agent used during World War I and the Iran-Iraq war that caused more than 100,000 casualties. Mustard is a carcinogen that forms blisters on skin and in the lungs resulting in illness and death. 

For classes in nuclear warfare, they stored radioisotopes with half-lives of thousands of years, like radium, uranium and plutonium.

The Navy’s typically sloppy disposal of radiation, chemicals and biological agents caused the continued contamination of Building 2, the shoreline groundwater around the structure, and nearby Clipper Cove where people have reported skin sores after contact with the water.

A production company, Island Creative, has occupied Building 2 for 25 years, apparently unaware of the toxicity.

Building 233: The site of the worst radiation spill on Treasure Island

We next drove north toward the San Francisco Bay side of the island opposite Oakland. In the northeast corner of the intersection of Fourth Street and Avenue M, a metal fence surrounded a field containing a pile of rocks. This field was the radioactive footprint of Building 233, a RADIAC Instrument Calibration School.

RADIAC is a Navy acronym for Radiation Detection, Indication, and Computation. In the RADIAC schools, instructors trained students in instrument maintenance and calibration.

In January 1950, the largest radiation spill in island history occurred in Building 233.

The radioactive footprint of Building 233- today just a pile of rocks – sits inside a metal fence.

In 2014, through the window of a Navy toxic tour bus, I photographed the fenced-off footprint of Building 233 on Avenue M. 

Navy documents state that during a training session in a first floor lab where students were being taught to calibrate radiation survey instruments, someone dropped a capsule containing radium salts. Before the spill was detected, dry powdery radium sulfate was tracked on shoes throughout the building and spread to students and staff, then to cars, driven across the island and into San Francisco.

A huge cleanup operation was conducted. The Navy’s 2006 Historical Radiological Assessment states, “Decontamination and follow-up surveys required almost 9 months.” More than 200 barrels of radioactive waste were stored aboard the USS Independence at both Hunters Point Shipyard and Treasure Island, “prior to being disposed at sea in water deeper than 100 fathoms.”

In 1951, the Navy loaded 200 barrels of radioactive waste from Building 233 onto the USS Independence and sank it south of the Farallon Islands at the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary off the California coast near Half Moon Bay. 

In another stunning example of neglect, the Navy left radioactive Building 233 standing for 61 years before they demolished it in 2011. Five years later, in 2016, I documented on video that the Navy had finally removed the radiation signs from the fence and the surrounding area along Avenue M.

Three RADIAC school buildings on Avenue M included an underground radium vault where cesium 137, radium 266 and plutonium sources were stored

We drove about a quarter mile west from Building 233 down Avenue M and stopped the car in front of a site where the Navy had erected two quonset hut type corrugated metal classrooms, Buildings 342 and 343, and between them dug a below-ground radium vault, Building 344.

The number 480 painted on a green structure to the right on Avenue M is the only existing marker for the location of the RADIAC schools. After they were demolished, all that was left was an empty field and the concrete pads on which they sat. High radiation levels which, of course, can’t be seen, contaminate the area. Airborne radioactive dust blows far and wide.

Three tan dirt strips stretch away on the ground. The left strip holds the concrete pad for the Building 342 classrooms. The right strip holds the pad under the classrooms in Building 343.

From 2016 to 2019 as they were being demolished, I was able to enter the broken down skeletons of the two classrooms to video their interiors. In the classrooms, sailors were taught how to check sources to measure radiation levels in equipment. 

In Building 342, a centrally raised platform was probably an instructor’s work station. The front of Building 343 contained offices with student work areas at the rear. The floors were painted with red and white circles indicating radiation levels. Two feet outside the rear door of Building 343, a concrete wall stood as a radiation shield. A second concrete wall outside the left corner of the building provided double protection from the radiation within.

Below the middle strip fifty feet underground between buildings 342 and 343, the Navy sank Building 344, a concrete “radium vault” with foot-and-a-half thick cement walls.

Instructors descended steps and opened a padlocked steel door to retrieve radium-226, plutonium, cesium-137 and other radioactive sources from the vault for use in the classrooms. Foot and a half thick concrete walls confined its dangerous contents. On our many visits, we never saw radiation or warning signs posted anywhere.

I shot video through the rebar sticking out of the bashed-in cement roof. The colorful tagging on the inside walls was done by artists unaware of the danger.

In 2015, I encountered homeless people living inside this cold radioactive vault. 

It took two years, 2017 to 2019, for demolition crews to bash in the concrete and destroy the radium vault. On repeated visits, we videoed the holes in the thick cement roof and the rebar sticking out of the top.

Immediately left of the Building 342 footprint is a skate park. The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) builders successfully solicited TIDA’s (Treasure Island Development Authority) approval at City Hall. Consequently, people from all over the Bay Area visit one of the most toxic places on the island to attend competitions held on soil contaminated with radiation from the RADIAC schools. Next to the skate park, residents play tennis in the old Navy courts. West across Eighth Street, at the San Francisco Little League field, children attended baseball games on weekends, accompanied by parents who had not been informed of the radioactivity.

‘Forever chemicals’ at Site Six, the Navy’s Firefighting School

Following the northeastern shore, we drove past the backyards of a row of townhouses along Exposition Way and Northpoint Drive. The homes sit 50 feet from a lane running parallel to a chain link fence bordering the large field the Navy calls Site Six. The lane ends at the shore where surfers launch their boards into San Francisco Bay. In 2016, a surfer passed me. In a moment of unguarded honesty, I warned her that the water was probably radioactive. “I’m a doctor,” she said, apparently untouchable.

Site Six is also a large radioactive and chemically contaminated meadow.

From 2014 to 2016, the Site Six field was used as a radiation storage yard where the Navy kept radioactive waste that had been removed from island cleanup zones in shipping containers before moving these boxcars off the island.

For 50 years, 1944 to 1992, the Navy also conducted a firefighting school on Site Six. Austin Hall, where firefighting classes were conducted, still sits at the back of the field. Students learned to extinguish blazes on ships by setting fires in the field and snuffing them out using Aerosolized Fire Fighting Foam (AFFF). The foam’s ingredients are a complicated combination of chemicals called perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. PFAS are also used in nonstick frying pans, as well as in protective coatings on carpets, fabrics, paper, cardboard and packaging.

PFAS carry serious health risks. They attack the immune, endocrine and reproductive systems and cause birth defects and cancer. PFAS are found globally in human bloodstreams.

Because the PFAS chemical group is so large, and the chemicals are bonded together to resist breakdown, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals.”

Though the Navy deposited PFAS at Site Six starting in the 1940s, they only recently addressed the situation. By EPA mandate, the Navy must clean them up. However, the number of chemicals is so large and the bonding so complex that Navy officials confess they don’t know where to start.

The Navy had other firefighting schools. Their map shows PFAS present not only at Site Six but scattered at 10 additional locations across the island.

Conclusion: Radioactive contamination from Navy warfare schools resulted in a radioactive island and a radioactive community

Treasure Island residents live with radiation, chemicals and heavy metals under their townhouses, around them in their yards and beneath their streets.

In 2017 Bradley Angel and I took photographs to document the 10 to 15 foot proximity of Treasure Island residents’ homes and backyards to radioactive material being trucked out of the Northpoint and Bayside cleanup zones.

On the accompanying map, the radioactivity of objects and soils is marked by the radiation symbols at three townhouses in a row along Bayside Drive ending at a metal bench across Gateview Avenue. The toxic waste seems to have washed from the shore down Bayside Drive from the Bayside solid waste disposal area radioactive toxic dump. This means the entire street is radioactive.

1205 Bayside Drive

In 2014, the Navy evicted families from the townhouse at 1205 Bayside Drive after discovering it was radioactive. In 2016, the Navy erected a fence around it placing it – after the fact – inside a radiation cleanup zone.

1203A Bayside Drive

At the next townhouse down Bayside Drive, in 2019, the Navy removed a basketball-sized clump of radioactive soil from under the front step of unit 1203A. We talked to the resident. She was not told that men in hazmat suits had dug radiation from under her front step. She fell into the hole and hurt her back.

1201B Bayside Drive

At the last townhouse in the row, 1201B Bayside Drive, in 2014, technicians working for the contractor Gilbane extracted a radioactive object from under the front sidewalk where children sat and played. They later developed illnesses attributed to radiation exposure.

The metal bench on Gateview Avenue

In 2013, directly across Gateview Avenue from 1201B Bayside Drive, radiation was found behind a bench where kids still sit waiting for the school bus.

In 2024, they are still searching for radiation on Treasure Island

In 2024, 30 years after the Navy began the toxic cleanup, radiation scans are still being conducted on Treasure Island.

On Monday, Nov. 11, 2024, at nearby Reeves Court a block from Bayside Drive, a resident videoed two men in the parking lot watching a woman scan with a Ludlum radiation measuring wand the footprint where the 1126 Reeves Court townhouse once stood.

In 2017, the Navy moved Island resident Trelease Miller and her family and friends out of 1126F Reeves Court, which stands within 50 feet of the highly toxic Halyburton Court cleanup zone. At the time, the Navy said the building had to be razed because there was lead beneath it. Trelease Miller died in 2022. Now, in 2024, an unidentified entity is searching for radiation in the 1126 footprint where her townhouse once stood.

This raises two questions: How much radiation still pollutes Treasure Island? Is the recent scanning the Navy’s confession they have failed to remove it?

At the end of the tour, noting the multiple radiation exposures, Shirletha Holmes-Boxx asked, “How come they don’t evacuate the whole area?”

To which we responded: Great question, Shirletha! Shouldn’t they evacuate the entire island?

Carol Harvey is a San Francisco political journalist specializing in human rights and civil rights. She can be reached at [email protected].

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