Highway and city planners saddled a once-proud Black community with freeways and diesel fumes, while more affluent white neighborhoods were spared the traffic and toxics.
Homes are demolished to build a USPS distribution center and Bay Area Rapid Transit station.Sources: 1946, 1958 and 1971 aerial imagery via USGS; 2022 aerial imagery via the National Agriculture Imagery Program
While many communities nationwide bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination, in the Bay Area, the environmental injustices stand out. Residents of Richmond, Hunters Point and West Oakland cope with a legacy of pollution amid some of the most affluent and desirable real estate in North America.On a Monday afternoon with a pretty blue sky, Gordon carefully prepared her apartment to entertain guests.
When she was younger, Gordon hopped on a three-step ladder to clean the residue. Now, she said, “I’m not getting on too many ladders at 75 years old. I know better than that.” Emissions from heavy-duty trucks alone result “in the largest contribution to the overall potential cancer risk levels in the West Oakland community,” a California Air Resources Board study said in 2008.
Gordon’s former neighborhood was home to the shipyard for nearly 30 years ending in 1974. For 12 years ending in 1960, the shipyard was joined by the Navy’s largest nuclear testing lab.nuclear blast exercises were hauled to docks a few feet from a thriving community. More than 600,000 gallons ofThe Environmental Protection Agency listed the abandoned shipyard as a toxic Superfund site in 1989.
Harrison believes the bay’s strong winds have blown trace amounts of contaminated soil from the base throughout her community. Sumchai and another doctor tested her urine and detected several of the chemicals found at the shipyard. Three years before owners started taking possession of the homes in 2015, whistleblowers came forward to accuse the engineering firm of fraud. In 2018, a judge sentenced two of its supervisors, Stephen C. Rolfe and Justin E. Hubbard,From grandma to activist
But she spent most of her time in West Oakland. That’s where her grandmother lived in a big, three-level house with several bedrooms and a convenience store on the first floor. The Cypress Freeway, which cut through the community and divided neighbors, left a deep wound that eventually drove residents away. The Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority also built an above ground station that ran along West Oakland’s center of commerce on 7th Street, turning its vibrant business hub into a dead zone.
For a second time, Caltrans essentially ignored West Oakland’s pleas against rebuilding the freeway through the community. The agency vowed to build back bigger — even though in an affluent part of San Francisco, it relented to city wishes and tore down the quake-damaged Embarcadero Freeway.
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