Burning Mad

Hard feelings existed between the community and the Navy long before methane gas became a problem. In August 2000, the shipyard landfill caught fire, and Navy officials allowed it to burn for nearly three weeks before alerting the city, the EPA, or the public. Nearby residents reported green smoke wafting over their heads. But by the time health officials learned about the fire, it was all but impossible to determine the impact on those residents. The EPA fined Navy officials $25,000 for not notifying proper authorities. More significantly, an already skeptical community stopped trusting the Navy about most everything.

This hardening of attitudes may impinge on the Navy's plans for dealing with the landfill at Hunters Point Shipyard. To date, the Navy has taken the unusual position that it does not know, precisely, what is in the landfill, but that excavating the landfill is too environmentally risky to contemplate. The dump must therefore, in the Navy's eyes, be capped and left permanently in place.

In the eyes of shipyard neighbors, the landfill is a continuing danger that must be eliminated.

"We still have a lot of questions," says the Restoration Advisory Board's Lynne Brown, adding that the controversy over methane has simply solidified the community's long-term goals for the landfill. "The only thing they can do, really, is remove the landfill."

Jesse Mason agrees. Looking across the area from the hill above, he reminisces about the things kids used to do growing up here, playing on the hillsides, innocent of methane and dioxins and the shipyard's many, many other toxins. Then Mason's conversation takes a more serious tone. "We want the landfill gone," he says. "We want it gone."