Posted on Sun, Jul. 07, 2002

POLLUTED PLAY SITE

By Greg Cannon and Kate Darby Rauch

CONTRA COSTA TIMESS

RICHMOND - John Bolds stared out at the toxic waste cleanup site one recent morning and recalled the time more than 50 years ago when it was the playground of his youth.

Back then, at the tail-end of World War II, the land next to the cluster of hastily built war worker apartments that Bolds called home was a chemical factory whose sight, sounds and smell dominated his Bayside neighborhood.

The fence between the Seaport War Apartments and the Stauffer Chemical company, coupled with a mother's admonishment to stay on the right side, were all the inducement a young boy and his playmates needed.

Standing at the corner of 49th Street and Seaport Avenue, a block from his childhood home, Bolds recalled: "It was kind of a no-no for kids to get up under the fence and get close to the sulfur beds."

But that's exactly what they'd do, tossing rocks into the stinky yellow alum drying ponds and playing in the nearby marsh, which state regulators have since labeled one of the most highly polluted sites in the Bay Area.

Now 60 years old and living in San Leandro, Bolds was among the younger of dozens of former Seaport residents to assemble recently on the streets of their old neighborhood. Small industry long ago replaced the wood apartments built to house the flood of World War II homefront fighters drawn to Richmond to build and supply war ships.

The former residents had come to reminisce. Pointing to younger images of themselves in old Seaport photos, they talked of what were, despite the sulfur smells and the daily grind of the working poor, good times in a thriving, tight-knit community that was torn down just a dozen or so years after it was built.

But this loosely organized group of 30 or so also came to wonder about the health effects of a decade spent living next door to land tainted with a soup of toxic contaminants that may take years to clean up.

"We have no way of knowing if it was bad or good, how could we know what it might mean two, three, five, 10 years down the line," said Pauline Reed, 66, of Richmond, who lived in Seaport for about eight years starting in 1945.

"I'd like to see the health side acknowledged."

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Two years ago, the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency regulating local water pollution, ordered the chemical plant's owner, Zeneca Corp., to clean up the site, a multimillion dollar project expected to take several years. The company that did business as Stauffer Chemical during the war ultimately came to be owned by Zeneca.

News of the cleanup surprised Seaport residents, many of whom still live in the area but had no idea their former neighbor was so toxic.

Today much of the Zeneca site is marked by "toxic hot spots," patches of soil, water, and vegetation where pollutants are especially concentrated. Work to shake that dubious distinction is proceeding at a steady pace with an eye toward redeveloping the property and improving the local ecosystem.

Zeneca Corp., which inherited Stauffer's liabilities along with the company, is working on the cleanup with UC Berkeley, which has a nearby field station that sits on similarly tainted land.

Both sites are testament to the Richmond shore's long industrial history. Much of the area has undergone remediation and cleanup for chemical contamination.

For business reasons unrelated to the cleanup, Zeneca idled its production lines in 1997, moved its Richmond operations and dismantled the old chemical factory. Cleaning up the pollution is its final job in the city.

By mid-June this year, 800 soil borings and 125 ground-water monitoring wells had been drilled in the 86 acres being cleaned. Testing revealed toxic metals, PCBs, arsenic, lead and DDT.

Ten thousand cubic yards of soil, or 666 truckloads, from areas with the greatest concentrations of metals, arsenic and other contaminants, had been dug out and hauled to hazardous waste landfills.

Another 32,000 cubic yards of less-contaminated but particularly smelly soil has been removed as well.

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Built as temporary worker housing in 1944 and torn down sometime around 1956, Seaport's presence was just a blip in the life of an area with industrial roots reaching back to the 1870s when gun powder and mining explosives were first manufactured there.

Today, only Seaport Avenue and a grid of surrounding streets hint at the old community. About 50 small apartment buildings and a community center were built on seven blocks.

The property that became Seaport was carved out of a triangle of farm and vacant land wedged between the chemical plant, the Bay, a creek and rail lines. Today it is home to a collection of mostly small industries, including a chrome-plating shop and a solar technology company.

A huge propane storage tank sits on the corner where Bolds and his family of 12 once lived. Few today would deny that it's an appropriate use of the land.

But during World War II the wisdom of land use planning, nationwide and especially in Richmond, often gave way to the imperative to build homes quick and cheap for the war workers.

The result was a necklace of communities stretching along Richmond's industrial Inner Harbor. Places like Esmeralda Court, Harborgate, Canal War Apartments and Cutting Annex were among the 24,000 war housing units that contributed to Richmond's dramatic war-time population boom to 100,000 from just 23,000 in a handful of years.

These communities thrived during the war. But by the mid-50s most were torn down in the name of "slum clearance" and redeveloped. Some were demolished to make way for what became Interstate 580. Others were cleared for commercial development.

According to contemporary newspaper accounts and reports from the archives of the Richmond Housing Authority, which managed the federally owned war housing, Seaport was the last facility to be built and among the last to be torn down.

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Life in Seaport meant dealing everyday with the sulfur smell that wafted from the plant as it manufactured sulfuric acid, a compound ubiquitous in industrial manufacturing operations.

Residents learned to live with the smell if for no other reason than they had to.

"We always took the factory for granted," said Reed, who moved to Seaport with her family from Oklahoma. "You needed a job. You needed somewhere to live. The parents didn't fight stuff like that."

But the former residents are trying to reconcile their memories with what they read, hear and see of the toxic waste cleanup.

They wonder if family cancers, early deaths or unexpected illnesses have any connection to the Seaport years.

Some are accusatory, suggesting that the government should have known better than to build homes where it did. Others just want to know more.

Many are quick to point out that most people didn't give any thought to the dangers of industrial pollution back then, in the years before Earth Day and seminal works, such as "Silent Spring," which aroused environmental consciousness.

"That was a fact of life, you had odors all over the place, raw sewage was being dumped in the Bay from Oakland to Richmond," said George Harris Sr., 69, who lived in Seaport from 1945 to 1947.

Most of Seaport's residents were African-American. But some were whites, who lived in the row of apartments closest to the chemical plant.

"We were segregated, even in the projects," Evelyn Farr Patterson, 67, said.

White or black, residents were joined in their common lot -- clinging to employment.

"Mother complained about the smell and fumes, but not to authorities. It was a survival thing at the time. We were poor," Bolds said.

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Zeneca officials say they understand the former residents' concerns and are willing to share any information they have on the company's past. "We're completely committed to an open dialogue," said Dwight Holling, a company spokesman.

Testing indicates the ground water under the plant's contaminated areas doesn't flow under the Seaport property.

But nearby marshlands are polluted and the effects of air emissions during the war years are unknown. "The site's 100 years old and some information is going to be lost in history. Past practices aren't going to be what they are today," Holling said.

Cecelio Felix, the water board engineer overseeing the Zeneca cleanup, said the former Seaport residents pose good questions. "We're trying to put our heads together with other agencies. We're talking amongst ourselves saying, 'OK, where do we go from here?'"

Former residents may never get the answers they want. Proving any link between Stauffer and the health problems of former Seaport residents is virtually impossible, cautions Dr. Wendell Brunner, Contra Costa County's chief of public health.

"I think raising the issue is valuable and important. At the very least, it reminds us what kind of pollution atrocities were tolerated in the past and how important it is to have environmental regulations," he said.

Any epidemiological investigation would be hampered by the relatively small size of the population, the short time people lived in Seaport, the fact that many were exposed to hazardous materials at the shipyards and other work sites, and, especially, by the elapsed decades during which people have likely been exposed to unknowable numbers of hazards from myriad sources.

The issue also serves as a public policy warning about mixing housing with industry that's still relevant today, Brunner said. "We did this in the past, are we still doing it, should we still do it?"

Even newfound concerns about their old neighborhood couldn't cloud the fond memories of those gathered at the end of Seaport Avenue that recent morning.

"This was a happy community. It was like a village," Patterson recalled.

A 1948 community directory features a photo of the Seaport Garden Club, a group of smiling men, most in suits and hats. One is holding a 26-pound head of cabbage.

"These industrious men have taken advantage of rich deposits of soil and managed to raise vegetables for family use year round," reads the photo caption.

As a young girl, Iris Whitaker Morris had a plot in the garden, located near a marshy area next to the creek.

She and her friends would pull carrots out of the ground, rinse them off in the creek and eat them on the spot.

"Nobody thought about contaminants then," she said.