Toxic Acres

The next summer, the Navy dug up and replaced 11,300 cubic yards of contaminated soil from Halyburton Court. But the deserted and overgrown enclave-within-a-neighborhood by no means enjoys a clean bill of health. As recently as last December, the same month that San Francisco Unified School District abruptly shuttered the elementary school (the middle school had already been closed) to cut costs, new tests within Halyburton Court revealed PCB levels of up to 1.5 parts per million, well in excess of acceptable health standards.

The units there, dating to the mid-1960s, are among the oldest structures in Area 12, built on the site of an old storage yard. Navy officials cannot say for certain what may have been the source of the off-the-charts PCB levels. Speculation is that they most likely derive from hydraulic fluids or leaky electrical equipment, says James Sullivan, the Navy's base-closure environmental coordinator for Treasure Island.

Sullivan insists that neither Halyburton Court nor any of the other fenced-off areas represent an unacceptable health risk to the residents of Area 12. "We're confident that the steps we've taken along with the city and state agencies to restrict access to certain areas sufficiently limits exposure for residents," he says.

But that may assume that the fences actually keep people out.

"You've got people going into [the restricted areas] all the time," says Melanie Williams, 38, a formerly homeless mother of three children who was among the first tenants to move to the island seven years ago. She and others complain that Halyburton Court and other closed-off "environmental investigation" areas have become magnets for illicit activities, including drug-dealing and prostitution.

"They're like squats," says another longtime tenant, who asked not to be identified. "You see people going into [cordoned-off] units with sleeping bags. They party in there. Cars show up late at night and people get out and just disappear."

The intrusions aren't restricted to nighttime. On a recent visit, two teenagers could be seen skateboarding in a cordoned-off zone along the northwestern waterfront, not far from where there was a large hole in the fence. Residents say adults have been known to dig up plants in the off-limits zones for transplanting in their yards. "I doubt that the fences are any more of a barrier to contaminants than they are to people," says Emily Rapaport.

As for Halyburton Court, Navy officials say that none of the units were made available for lease before the contamination was discovered there. But that doesn't speak to the potential exposure of countless military families who resided in Halyburton Court and other now-off-limits units where high levels of contaminants have been found, from the 1960s until the base closed in 1997.

Asked about them, Sullivan, the environmental coordinator, says that there are no records available indicating who lived in what units. "We no longer have any records at the base or anywhere else that would tell us that," he says.

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In contrast to Halyburton and other ex-housing quarters where environmental conditions are suspect, no visible evidence remains of another neighborhood legacy — the radiological training school that existed there from 1957 to 1969. The facility occupied several acres in the neighborhood's southwest corner, facing the San Francisco shoreline. The spot is now home to dozens of families living on Westside Drive and at the south end of heavily built-out Gateway Avenue.

The Navy began radiological warfare instruction on Treasure Island in 1946, at about the same time the U.S. military began conducting landmark nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The training went "live" in 1957 with the "commissioning" of the USS Pandemonium, a full-scale, above-the-waterline mockup of a 173-foot-long patrol craft. Built from salvage, the fake ship was plopped on the island for a singular purpose: to train sailors how to deal with radioactive contamination.

During the last several years the mock-up was in use, the exercises conducted there used short-lived radioactive isotopes with half-lives of only a few weeks. Records show that the training drills consisted of spreading radioactive material over the ship's surface and having sailors spray and scrub it down until it was decontaminated. Contaminated wastewater that didn't seep into the ground was funneled into huge above-ground tanks and stored until the water was no longer considered harmful, and then dumped into the bay through a drain pipe.

But during the Pandemonium's early years, until 1963, highly radioactive cesium-137 was routinely placed aboard the vessel in sealed containers in at least 11 locations, Navy documents show. Using cables from a central position, an instructor would withdraw one or more of the cesium sources from shielded wells, enabling students with monitoring equipment to locate "radioactivity" during training exercises.

In 1970, the ship was hauled to the northeast corner of the island away from the present-day housing tract, and the area was cleared to build more houses for base personnel. "I doubt that anybody ever even knew what had been there; I don't remember anyone in our family ever mentioning it," says Brett MacLean, 38, a self-described Navy brat who spent part of his teen years on Westside Drive during the 1970s.