The US Navy: War Games under Americans' Radar

(Similar article under the header "Gaming the System: Dumping the Navy Way" published in Counterpunch Sept 30) 

During the Bush Administration – it continues under Obama – the Department of the Navy (DON) divided the coasts and oceans into a series of “testing range complexes” (TRC) driven by five-year plans to conduct warfare exercises. They already conduct these tests in the Atlantic (and recently announced a notice of intent to expand this area), the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific.

Additionally, after the public comment period ends on October 11, 2010, the Navy will conduct a plethora of war exercises along 122,400 nautical miles of air, surface, and subsurface space in Northern California, Oregon, and Western Washington.

To be sure, such testing is in accordance with Title 10, Section 5062 of the US Code that provides:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped primarily for prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea...responsible for the preparation of Naval forces necessary for the effective prosecution of war...with Integrated Joint Mobilization Plans...to meet the needs of war.

Perhaps people take war games for granted because such testing is provided for in this Code (fewer conspiracy theories if information is public?). But this information is not trickling down to the people it will affect. If anything, DON appears cagey about how it informs the public about its intentions.

Treat 'em rough...and tell 'em nothing

Rosalind Peterson is president and co-founder of Agriculture Defense Coalition (ADC). In a recent Raising Sand Radio interview (www.raisingsandradio.org) she said, “In Mendocino County (CA) there was a one-by-one inch ad in local papers of the smallest communities that the Navy could find in northern California, Oregon, and Washington. In Oregon they advertised in tiny communities with a total of about 250 people each. They didn't publicize in the capital, Bend, or Portland or other, larger cities at all.”

Aides in California Senator Barbara Boxer's office seemed to know little, if anything, about the Northwest Training Research Complex (NWTRC) when ADC's Rosalind Peterson contacted them. A spokesperson said Boxer would “look into it.”

Peterson said, “If Senator Diane Feinstein and Congressman Thompson knew about it they did not notify their constituents along California's northwest coast.”

WAR GAMES

Pacific Northwest

The Navy acknowledges that some testing is highly classified therefore the tests are not shared with the public at all. Its 1,000 page NWTRC Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) notes that the tests conducted off the Pacific Northwest coast will “take” an estimated 11 million marine mammals, about 2.7 million per year. A “take” is “a significant disruption in marine mammal foraging, breeding, and other essential behaviors”; death is implied.

The “take” for decimated fish and bird life and the life that supports them is not mentioned. Neither is the “take” for civilians in the zone conducting commercial and recreation enterprises during tests. Beyond directions to websites for “Long-range advance notice of scheduled activities” local fishing, cruise ships, boating, and daily aviation passenger carriers passing through test areas will not be informed on the days testing occurs.

These war games include “a total of 7,588 sorties...[of] fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (“drones ”), and naval vessels conducting exercises for 6,940 hours each year”¹ with mid- and high frequency sonar, underwater constructions and detonations, bombing, missile and torpedo missions with arsenals from Hellfire missiles to drones and the use of air-, land- and water-borne “hazardous materials” (defined as solid, liquid, semi-solid, or gaseous “substances that pose a substantial hazard to human health or the environment by virtue of their chemical or biological properties”).

The list – “not exhaustive” – of chemical byproducts from underwater detonations, explosives, degradation products, failure and low-order detonations, and components of training materials is extensive. Hazardous materials discharged overboard beyond 12 nautical miles include spent acid, alkali (“carefully neutralize, dilute and flush overboard...”); solvents; water with corrosion inhibitors; aircraft washdown waste water; and submarine missile tube waste water that includes heavy metals and cyanide.

Physical debris includes live and expended ordnance and casings, sunken vessels, and blasted underwater construction.

Vessels, aircraft, and military equipment used in these activities carry and use hazardous materials with directives to manage the storage, use, and proper disposal of materials that may be harmful to the environment.

The list of materials to “Containerize for Shore Disposal” includes batteries, hydraulic fluids, insecticides, pesticides, waste oil, sludge, oily solid waste, grease, propellents, PCB, and mercury in the form of fluorescent bulbs.²

Given the Navy's history, how and where are these materials disposed once “containerized”?

Out of sight, out of mind

The Navy has dumped explosives and vast amounts of other debris in the oceans for years. This is old news to NOAA, oceanographers, environmental groups, and the voiceless directly affected. NOAA has a map showing at least the last 60 years of the Navy's suspected dump zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Greg Gardner of South Beach, Florida reports in Indian River Magazine, “Closing Fort Pierce was a classic case of dump and run....To this day, ordnance washes up on Hutchinson Island beaches several times a year after heavy surf. ”

South Beach Mayor Bob Benton concurs. “They put trucks and tanks on barges and barges and dumped them in the Gulfstream....Tons and tons of Army hardware, hand grenades and bombs.”

Off the California coast drums and canisters leak radioactive material since the Navy dumped them after tests conducted at its San Francisco's Hunters Point facilities.

The ongoing Superfund site clean up of former Naval Air Station, Alameda – at a cost, to date, of $428 million – regularly reveals mysterious contamination zones, sunken vessels, and toxic burn pits. During a recent Navy-sponsored tour, local residents watched from the bus as Navy personnel measured radiation on the vehicle's tires with Geiger counters.

Yet the vast majority of Americans know little about the Navy's dumping and warfare activities. Should We, the People, not know that the Navy's ongoing five-year warfare test plans require only one EIS per TRC? And that any EIS can be extended without informing the public at all? And that these on-going activities affect our own and all other forms of life?

Howard Garrett, president of the Whidbey-based Orca Network’s board of directors, says this includes “almost everything alive in the ocean. Anything with an air pocket in their [sic] bodies.” The Navy says it will conduct fly-overs and set up watchers before performing potentially lethal sonar testing. “But, [for example] Orcas are by nature stealthy hunters. They traverse the entire Pacific Ocean, so they can be anywhere. They won’t be making noise so it will be extremely difficult for the Navy to know whether they are there before beginning testing.”

As goes the Pacific Northwest so goes the Atlantic

Meanwhile, as research and testing continues off US coasts, the Navy recently announced its intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Overseas EIS (OEIS) to evaluate:

...the potential environmental effects with military readiness training and research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) activities in the Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing (AFTT) study area. This covers approximately 2.6 million square nautical miles of ocean area, which includes Navy operating areas (sea space) and warning areas (airspace). While the majority of Navy training and many testing activities take place within operating and warning areas and/or on RDT&E ranges, some activities, such as sonar maintenance and gunnery exercises, are conducted concurrent with normal transits and occur outside of operating and warning areas.
(Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Notice of IntentAtlantic Fleet Training and Testing Notice of Intent )

That is, everything planned for the Pacific Northwest will be repeated – and improved – in the Atlantic.

TRUE COST

ADC's Rosalind Peterson said, “Each one of these five-years-testing programs is immense...and very costly. We, the tax-paying public, will pay to replace all the bombs, missiles, and other arsenal used for these live fire exercises; we will pay heavily for the environmental degradation of ocean, land, and air; we will pay very heavily for the collapse of the marine mammal, fish, and bird populations. We don't realize that one set of activities has a wide-ranging set of consequences.”

The Navy Way

The NWTRC EIS Resource Section: Socioeconomics addresses cost from the point of view of how unobtrusive Navy testing will be and how little it will impact civilians and businesses.

It is important to note that there are no restricted areas in the NWTRC. Normal right of way for fishing boats and all other vessels is honored throughout the range complex. In fact, to prevent interference during the conduct of their activities, Navy ships and aircraft intentionally seek areas clear of all other vessel traffic for conducting their training.³

The Table of Annual Commercial Landed Catch and Value within Washington Waters (2007) carefully records every fish of economic significance – over four dozen, from northern anchovy that, for example, generated $35,883 that year, to Dungeness Crab, $54,479,797, to Sockeye salmon, $89,802, even to “Unspecified bait shrimp”, $219,648.

Then, “Due to the low level of Navy activities, and the lack of interaction between the Navy and commercial interests, there are no expected revenue losses in any offshore industry....”

Unsurprisingly, the EIS Socioeconomics segment concludes, “the Proposed Action would result in no significant impacts. Therefore, no mitigation measures are required.”⁴

A Better Way

Those focused on one-dimensional “national security” in terms of military might makes right – rather than a complex, multi-layered, integral system of living wonders that offer generative mysteries rather than threats – can be assured that the Navy, and the other branches of the US military, already has enough of our planet to conduct testing. It has been doing it for decades. It does not need – and should not have – even more of our precious, already-stressed, and shrinking planet.

Nevertheless, after three years and thousands of comments received by people and groups in the Pacific Northwest, Marianne Edain of Washington's Whidbey Environmental Action Network (WEAN) perhaps it up, “I feel like a flea facing an elephant.”

1) NWTRC EIS – Hazardous Materials. Table 3.3-1: Number of Activities or Training Items Expended Annually – All Alternatives. Footnote 2, page 3.3-6.

2) NWTRC EIS – Hazardous Materials. Table 3.3-6: Selected Hazardous Materials Discharge Restrictions for Navy Vessels. Page 3.3-17.

3) NWTRC EIS – Socioeconomics. Page 3.14-7.

Calls to End the False Security of Nuclear Weapons

(This article published in Commondreams, Aug 6, 2010)

Takashi Tanemori stands on a makeshift stage on the back of a truck parked at an intersection near Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Tanemori San's formal traditional Japanese dress and his silver hair riffles in the chill morning breeze. His voice is firm and clear over the roars of large trucks passing.

“I came to the United States forty years ago to avenge the death of my family killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”


In the pantheon of stories about that August 6, 1944 his is both unique and ubiquitous. His parents and his four-month-old sister died that day...along with 200,000 other Japanese.

Tanemori's surviving three siblings ranged in age from four to fourteen; he was eight. For years he fought rats for food scraps, slept anywhere he could, and longed for human comfort. At sixteen he attempted suicide..then he apologized to his father's memory for that “dishonorable act”...and then he vowed revenge. He traveled to the U.S. and was quickly interned in a camp where he had to pick Thompson Grapes. (“To this day,” he says, “I cannot eat grapes.”)
He became ill and was, first, diagnosed with pesticide-related food poisoning. When doctors learned he was Hibakusha (A-bomb survivor) he became, he says, “a guinea pig.” Despite the excruciating pain, doctors repeatedly had nurses hold down their young patient, take his blood, and tap his spinal fluid to test the results of radiation poisoning. When Tanemori, who spoke only Japanese, finally fought them off, he was moved to a psychiatric institution to undergo many doses of electro-therapy.

As Takashi Tanemori speaks, a passing truck driver shouts out. “Bullsh*t! F**k all that bullsh*t!”

This man is a son. Is he also a father? Does he know LLNL is the most sophisticated nuclear weapons research and design facility in the world? Or is he, like most of us, too busy to pay attention? Is he too busy working to pay the bills for the minutiae of his one, individual life...too busy to protest the overwhelming debt he – of us – incur to pay for the perils born at this lab...too busy to recognize his place in humanity's fragile interconnectedness?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, targets for atomic experiments
Norman Solomon, author, and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, takes the stage. “The nuclear age was born in deception of the facts, of the human realities of these weapons... and in silence, avoidance, and through psychic numbing. These weapons are lied about constantly, by our leaders, by our news media, and by ourselves.”

Indeed, in 1979 Solomon researched the first official United States document that listed atomic targets. Titled “Announced United States Nuclear Tests,” at the top of that list is Trinity at New Mexico's Alamogordo Test Range; second is Hiroshima; third is Nagasaki.

Solomon tells us, “The moral opposition to the Nazi regime was grounded in opposing that genocidal mentality and opposing experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed consent. In a real sense, though, the history of the last seven decades has been that of experimentation on human being without their consent: the bombs dropped on the Japanese; the Native Americans sent into the radon ovens of uranium mines; the people of the Pacific and [Americans] downwind of nuclear test sites; tens of thousands of military personnel exposed at test sites; the fuel fabricators at Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats; workers at Los Alamos, Livermore, Nevada, Hanford and other places where radioactive revenues create huge profit for some – and abject misery for others.”

Even as President Obama talks the talk – “pursuing policies to end the nuclear arms race” – he walks the walk of “modernization” that escalates that same arms race.
“This” says Solomon, “is The Big Lie ...that it is 'technological advance' when, really, it is 'technological suicide.'”

At the May 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference participating countries, including the U.S., agreed on a unanimous intent to seek abolition of nuclear weapons.

Yet, years ago Solomon's research included interviewing State Department officials who told him that it is the top officials of Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia labs that “fight tooth and nail to ensure that the U.S. Senate never passes the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty” (CTBT).

In keeping with The Big Lie, the Obama administration's budget for fiscal year 2011 – to “modernize the nuclear weapons complex” – authorizes the largest nuclear weapons budget ever: 14 percent larger than last year's budget and larger than the average budget during the Cold War – even adjusted for inflation. It includes building three new bomb plants: one at Los Alamos (NM) to enable plutonium production: one at Oak Ridge (TN) to build uranium secondaries; one in Kansas City (MO) for other weapons' components. These facilities enable the build of 80 entirely new nuclear weapons per year...at a cost of $80 billion over the next ten years. “Modernizing” the arsenal itself costs another $100 billion.

It took Tanemori San more than forty years to overcome his rage and his desire to avenge his family. Ironically, the warmth of another nurse touched him and, he says, “began to thaw out my heart frozen by hatred.” But it was his young daughter who issued the coup de grace to his unmitigated desire for revenge.
“Daddy, I know you came here to kill those who killed our family. But isn't there any other way? For the children of those you do not kill – just as they did not kill you in Hiroshima – will come after your children. Is that what you want?”

Tanemori San considered her question. And understood in his heart that the circle of violence only begets more violence. Perhaps We, the People ought more deeply to consider this as we hurtle towards an ever more deadly, expensive, and growing nuclear arsenal.

Rev. Martin Luther King talked about “guided missiles and misguided men”...and said that “a nation that, year after year, continues to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
On this day, outside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Norman Solomon tells that if we continue “to approach building nuclear weapons designed to inflict global nuclear holocaust we will get there.”

We do not want to get there.

Barack Obama, can you hear us now?

Listen to the radio show: "Obama, stop building nuclear weapons"

Confronting a Mindset: “Bombing Hiroshima was Right”

This article was published on Counterpunch, August 5, 2010

Imagine the power to erase, in nine seconds, more than 200,000 human beings and everything surrounding them within a two mile radius. Then imagine that power magnified many times over. Then understand that We, the People, are represented by those who are capable of destroying far more people and property in less time. For, according to President Bill Clinton and reiterated by Barack Obama, “nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of  the policies” of United States of America –  that protector of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Every day of the last sixty-five years since August 6 and August 9 when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have continued to design, test, develop, and stockpile ever more awesome nuclear weapons.
Researchers at the non-profit think tank Tri-Valley CAREs based in Livermore, California found that, contrary to their assumptions, Congress, the Pentagon, and the President do not commission such weaponry. “We found,” says Executive Director Marylia Kelly, “that [members of] the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory rather forcefully sell ideas for and promote weapons to the U.S. government. We'd always thought that the lab responded to the sorts of weapons these entities wanted but found the opposite is true. The weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore (CA) and Los Alamos (NM) really are the tap root of the nuclear arms race.”
It began during the Cold War...and, Kelly says, “this one-nation nuclear arms race has continued ever since. As long as these labs are unimpeded that tap root of continued weapons design and development will flourish.”
There are three main test facilities that simulate nuclear explosions and develop ever more sophisticated – and lethal – weapons. The Nevada Test Site has an underground sub-critical test facility. Los Alamos Laboratory has a new hydro test facility dedicated to the beginning stages of nuclear weapons' explosions. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has an ignitions facility that explores the physics of nuclear weapons with respect to the later stages of nuclear explosions.
This testing has, to date, cost the American tax payer more than $90 billion...and that does not take into account the cost of cleaning up the environment and addressing current and future health. Developing this ever-growing arsenal pumps out an ever-growing amount of mortally toxic material.
Lawrence Livermore tests estimate the radiation 'dose' - beyond the heat of the blast - released in Hiroshima deposited about one million curies. (One curie of radiation is 37 billion radioactive disintegrations per second; radiation has a half life of 28,000 years.)
Tri Valley CAREs documents that more than one million curies of radiation have escaped from this laboratory into surrounding communities. During tests performed at the lab's Site 300 – located in the hills between the cities of Livermore and Tracy – non-fissile depleted uranium replaces plutonium 239  (the fissile material in the core of a nuclear bomb) and is exploded on outdoor firing tables to atomize into the wind.
Not only is there  no workable, long-term, safe solution to deal with toxic materials – including  plutonium, tritium (the radioactive hydrogen of the hydrogen bomb), uranium, and cesium – clean up is endless. There are already tens of thousands of known Superfund and National Priorities List sites around the U.S.  According to EPA officials and the GOA's report, Superfund: EPA's Estimated Costs to Remediate Existing Sites Exceed Current Funding Levels, and More Sites Are Expected to Be Added to the National Priorities List
EPA regional officials estimated that from 101 to 125 sites – about 20 to 25 sites per year – will be added to the National Priorities List over the next 5 years...higher than the average of about 16 sites per year listed for fiscal years 2005 to 2009...At over 60 percent of the 239 nonfederal NPL sites with unacceptable or unknown human exposure, all or more than half of the work remains to complete the remedial construction phase of cleanup.... By the end of fiscal year 2009, EPA had expended $3 billion on 75 sites with unacceptable human exposure and $1.2 billion on 164 sites with unknown exposure....

Historical amnesia
If We, the People, are unaware of this ongoing pollution so, too, have we lost sight of our history. How many Americans understand that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki had almost nothing to do with the end of World War II? Rather, these horrific deeds positioned the U.S. so that we would not have to share influence with the Soviet Union and Asia; the A bombs were used to intimidate the Soviets for the post-war period.
The Emperor of Japan understood by 1944 that the war was lost. He changed governments and the mandate of the new Japanese government was to negotiate a peace treaty with the U.S. with a fundamental condition that the Emperor remain on the thrown and avoid a trial as a war criminal.
General, later President, Dwight D. Eisenhower opposed dropping the A bomb. “Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Admiral William D. Leahy, Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against the Japanese...already defeated and ready to surrender. ...in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was taught not to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying woman and children.”
J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that, while, experts continue to disagree on some issues...critical questions have been answered [among them that] “alternatives to the bomb existed and that [President] Truman and his advisers knew it.”
Yet, powerful forces within the U.S. continue to fight against the American people understanding this history. In 1993 the Smithsonian, for example, suggested the launch a major exhibit as an opportunity for people to understand more deeply the effects of the atomic bomb and to surface the circumstances surrounding its use. Controversy ensued for two years and included twenty-four members of Congress sending a letter on August 10, 1994 to the Smithsonian expressing “concern and dismay” that the planned exhibit portrays Japan “more as an innocent victim than a ruthless aggressor” in World War II.
The Smithsonian canceled the greater exhibit on January 30, 1995 and began work on a completely different plan, one that displayed only the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the bombs.
When even that trimmed down, more palatable exhibition finally closed in May 1998, it had drawn almost four million visitors. Imagine if the original exhibit had gone ahead as envisioned. Four million Americans would better understand how deeply enmeshed we are in war as a nation and a society. Perhaps then we would face real facts...and remove our sense of legitimacy in preparing for nuclear holocaust.

Voices in the wilderness
As Direction of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and AFSC'ss National Disarmament Coordinator Dr. Joseph Gerson advances U.S. and international movements for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the ratification of the limited “New START” treaty. He served as co-convener of the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review International Planning Committee, a network of 25 leading disarmament organizations created to help ensure a successful NPT Review Conference.
During this service a U.S. senator's aide told Gerson that “the Bombing of Hiroshima was Right.”
“ This,” he says, “just reflects enormous ignorance” sixty-five years after the cataclysmic events in Japan.  “The reality is that each thermo-nuclear weapon today has the capability to kill far more people than were killed at Auschwitz. Yet, such genocidal, if not omnicidal weapons are the cornerstone of U.S. policies. It is in every American's interest to understand this element in our society and to transform it.”
The opportunity is there. For the last 55 years there has been an annual international conference to commemorate what were, says Gerson, “war crimes and the memory of the victims of those war crimes..and to press for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
In a recent Raising Sand Radio interview Dr. Gerson told of his first visit to Hiroshima twenty-five years ago. “I fully engaged with the pain of what happened there and with the ongoing damage, including genetic, from radiation.”
While there, however, he did not dream at all. After he returned to the U.S.  his dreams resumed and, at first they were crowded with images of cinders and destruction. But, “The “waking image I had was of the colors and angles of the peace cranes – symbols of peace and affirmation of life.”
The letter versus the spirit of the law
The U.S. signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Essential elements of this, one of the seminal treaties of the 20th century, are that:
1) non-nuclear nations - excepting Israel, Pakistan, and India - commit not to obtain nuclear weapons;
2) nuclear nations promise they would a) provide technology and recognize the inalienable right of all nations to produce nuclear power for peaceful purposes and b) engage in good faith negotiations to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
When non-nuclear nations see the nuclear nations ignore this second promise (Article 6) they suggest it undermines their commitment when they are threatened by nuclear nations. So, despite President Obama's rhetoric, the May 2010 conference saw the U.S. beat back the non-aligned and other non-nuclear nations pressing for a mandate that nuclear nations negotiate to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
As signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (the Senate has never ratified the CTBT) the U.S. abides by the letter of the law by following the moratorium on above-ground testing. It does not, however, abide by the spirit of the law when it tests nuclear weapons' components, simulates explosions, and extrapolates the results to develop yet more deadly weaponry.
During May's review conference the Arab League initiated a demand – followed by the non-aligned nations – toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Israel balked. Dr. Gerson said that the Obama Administration in not particularly interested in this either although if finally agreed to the demand in order to advance Obama's larger strategies and to avoid the collapse of the conference. Israel finally agreed and is now named in the document.

Glimmers of hope
While it is dispiriting to see how little progress has been made toward a nuclear weapons-free earth in the sixty-five years perhaps one can take comfort in such micro increments. If Israel is finally named in the latest treaty document – despite the deep consternation within that country and within the American community for whom Israel can do no wrong – perhaps there is a glimmer of hope.
Moreover, Hiroshima is, today, a beautiful, modern city. And the Japanese – a community that knows deeply, genetically, the reality behind nuclear warfare – have a deep commitment to life and a peaceful world. Perhaps there is hope for humanity....

Play ball! ...on a radioactive site. Or, denial is a river in Egypt

On a recent visit onto a usually-closed-to-the public former naval station - now a Superfund site - I snapped the picture, below. And remembered the aphorism, "denial is a river in Egypt"!

Lonesome basketball hoop on a radioactive field along Oakland Estuary and San Francisco Bay. Insets: gate leading into the site; notice on a fence surrounding the site. What does it say about human beings who disregard the well-posted area to play ball? Yes, denial is alive  and well...(Photo Susan Galleymore, July 17, 2010)

I live on the landfill section of an island that is the transitional zone to the former US military base, Naval Air Station, Alameda. It is beautiful here...humane, 'downscale' enough to maintain the homey feel lost when sterilized by class consciousness...families gather here and children play in the park beyond the trees on the my fence line...and music from every culture in the world wafts through the trees: salsa and mariachi, reggae, dastgah, rai, blues, rock 'n roll, occasional drumming circles...
This spot once sported 'public baths' and roller coasters.  Once known as Coney Island of the West, Alameda is the birthplace of the Kwepie Doll, Skippy Peanut Butter, the Doors' Jim Morrison, and other notables. Today Fish and Wildlife staff introduce kids to the miraculous critters that live in water and upon and around the beach.

But...
...a short distance away is a Superfund site. These 1600 acres of dry land and 1000 acres of submerged land have been under CERCLA clean up for over a decade at a cost, according to an EPA official's estimate, of $428 million; the clean up is just more than 50 percent complete.
Hundreds of thousands of gallons of benzene, naphthalene, and jet fuel pool underground. Among other chemicals and substances such as PCB, pesticides, VOC, and PAH there is evidence that radionuclides were flushed into drains -- and into the bay -- back in they heyday of war-time airplane manufacture.
And it is not just fallout from the US military. "Marsh crust" derives from the days of Standard Oil (precursor to Chevron), a borax plant, coal energy generation across the estuary, and other industries operating before the city sold this land to the Navy for $1.00. (Today, the City of Alameda's Marsh Crust ordinance requires a home-owner in the marsh crust area to obtain a permit to dig into the marsh crust. This permit requires that a home-owner spend about $5,000 in professional services, and hazardous waste disposal fees and taxes, for simple tasks like planting a tree. Right now, not too many of us live in the worst marsh crust zones but with plans to develop residential housing, a VA facility, etc, things will change rapidly.)


Recently, Alameda's active and effective Restoration Advisory Board (CERCLA mandates a RAB interface between Navy, local residents, EPA, and other regulatory groups) requested the Navy's Base Environmental Coordinator - "BEC" - arrange a tour of a few key areas. Accordingly, a bus load of interested and affected parties spent Saturday morning  learning more in the field about the clean up.
For some on the filled-to-capacity bus, it was the first visit ever onto closed sections of the base.

The edited basketball picture of the basketball hoop was taken at Installation Restoration Site 1, a former dump site and burn pit. Among the cocktail of "usual suspect" chemicals found on the base (some listed above) this 36-acre patch is contaminated with radium. I took the picture through the fence before we climbed aboard the bus to tour Site 1. Once on the site, we were not allowed to disembark the bus. A Geiger counter measured radiation exposure on the tires before we departed Site 1.

While I noticed a few healthy -- acclimated? -- black bunny rabbits hopping here and there, no one on the bus knew about the basketball hoop: when it was erected; if it was ever used; why it is still there.

I am as susceptible to denial as the next woman. Denial can be comforting. But a basketball hoop on a radioactive site? This indicates powerful denial...or someone is not forthcoming about the chemicals wafting from the site... and the mystery basketball players are dangerously incurious; the site's EIRs and other assorted documents present information about the site that should keep the most ambitious basketball player away.

Can't miss these signs, yet...

Last November the Dubai Star spilled a few thousand gallons of fuel oil in the San Francisco Bay. It contaminated our island and, for a week or so, clean up crews were deployed. (Pictures and more on that spill.) What remains today are a few signs...and warning about potential illness.

Warning signs at Crab Cove. (Photo: Susan Galleymore, 2010)

Close ups of two of these signs.

Sign in effect immediately during and after the fuel oil spill remains almost a year after the event. (Photo: Susan Galleymore, 2010)

 The most recent sign, posted in early summer.

"Swimmer's itch"?

Yet, people disregard these signs and enter the water anyway... and allow their children to do that same.


Then again, when I look at the beach, the water, the beauty of the area, I realize that We, the People, should expect to enjoy this natural bounty...we should be able to go into this water, play basketball, plant a tree, make a garden, and revel in our surroundings without fear of toxic contamination, environmental illness, or radiation poisoning.

How has it come to this that we cannot? How did we allow such devastating environmental contamination of  water, air, and even our food?

Storytelling at Indian Canyon

There was an excellent turnout for the annual storytelling event at Indian Canyon this year.
This spot is the only land within traditional Ohlone/Costanoan territory (around the San Francisco Bay section of Californai), or, for that matter, within coastal California between Santa Rosa and Santa Barbara, that is owned by Indian title in trust with the Federal government. So, it is the only 'Indian Country' in this vast region; most other traces of Indian land ownership have tragically been lost and not yet regained.

Descendants of  Ohlone, Costanoan, and other California tribes work hard to raise awareness about this history.

 This year, a storyteller from Australia. Listen to Mamiya's story.

And dancers too...

The audience came from all over the bay area...

and a Jingle dancer....

Learn more about Indian Canyon Village

Listen to Scott Terrapin's story.

The story of Glen Cove

At Glen Cove, in Vallejo, a group gathered to celebrate the success of recent Shellmound Walks. These are ongoing protests by native people to the desecration of sacred burial grounds in what is now Emeryville.
A decade ago, developers eyed potential profits that could be - and have been - generated by building a shopping and entertainment haven at the confluence of major north/south and west freeways. Then, they simply bulldozed over the shell mounds, despite native peoples' explaining the historical significance of the area.
The same thing is happening in Glen Cove where large single family homes are built on sacred burial grounds.

From the Vallejo Inter-Tribal Council website:

Historically Glen Cove has been a traditional meeting place where services such as burials were performed for over one hundred local California Indian tribes. The sacred cove contains human remains, shell mounds, and other artifacts. Glen Cove continues to be a spiritually important area to the local Native Communities. The site was first documented in archaeological records in 1907 by an archaeologist from the University of California at Berkeley. According to a 1988 report by Novato Archaeological Resource Service, is at least 3,500 years old. Many of the sacred items unearthed from the site in previous years remain illegally housed in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley which houses over 13,000 ancestral remains and over 200,000 sacred objects.

Pictures of the celebration in June 

 Organizers recognize what has been accomplished with the Shellmound Walks.
(Middle) Corrina Gould (Chochenyo Ohlone), Shellmound Walk co-Founder and (Left) Indian People Organizing for Change, Johnella Sanchez (Shoshone Bannock) and Shellmound Walk co-Founder.
Wounded Knee De O'Campo (Right) sitting on chair holding staff.

The river runs into SF Bay here...and the largest sugar processing plant on the west coast is visible top right.

 Looking east, a cargo ship just visible....

Listen to audio interview with Wounded Knee

Meanwhile... views of a catastrophe

Sigh! Almost beautiful, isn't it? Who knew disaster could be so attractive...and artistic?


The New York Times answers some questions on the oil catastrophe....

Also, below, news from the US Social Forum


And, the flip side: not quite so beautiful after all!