Berkeley to test for radioactive waste, pesticides beneath Cesar Chavez Park - Berkeleyside
Berkeley to test for radioactive waste, pesticides beneath Cesar Chavez Park
The city of Berkeley on Friday acknowledged that the municipal dump beneath what’s now Cesar Chavez Park may have accepted hazardous radioactive waste from a chemical manufacturing plant decades ago.
The city is now being required to test soil and groundwater from within the old landfill for pesticides and radiation, the latter of which it says “can occur naturally but also may be in unnatural levels in the industrial waste in question.”
In an off-agenda memo to the Berkeley City Council released on May 24, outgoing City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley characterized the required testing as “precautionary” and said the city has “met all regulatory requirements,” including meeting with the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board and crafting a draft work plan that outlined how it intended to test for radiation and pesticides in the park. The testing is expected to be completed over the next several months and will “help determine next steps,” according to Williams-Ridley.
The order comes amid the water board’s recent discovery of archival documents that indicate that 11,100 tons of industrial waste — suspected to contain radioactive material — may have been deposited at the former Berkeley Landfill between 1960 and 1971.
The Berkeley Landfill is one of five Bay Area sites that together accepted 50,000 tons of industrial waste from the now-defunct Stauffer Chemical Company’s Richmond plant, according to hazardous waste disposal records from 1980 enclosed in the water board’s January letter to the city ordering it to test for pesticides and radionuclides in the park. Radioactive materials have already been detected by the Department of Toxic Substance Control, or DTSC, at one of the five sites, the Blair Southern Pacific Landfill in Richmond, DTSC spokesperson Russ Edmonson wrote in an email.
Specifically, the city has been ordered by the water board to investigate the presence of DDT, a once-common pesticide that was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, in 1973 and dieldrin, classified by the EPA as a “probable human carcinogen and banned in 1974. The three radionuclides it’s been required to test for are Thorium-232, uranium-238, and uranium-235.
The Stauffer Chemical Company, which was founded in 1885 in San Francisco and primarily known for producing herbicides for corn and rice, was also responsible for contaminating its former site in Tampa, Florida, with pollutants including arsenic, lead, and radium, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times in 2003. (In 1996, the site was put on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the nation’s most contaminated sites.)
The regional water board is concerned that the industrial waste that the Berkeley Landfill accepted from the Stauffer Chemical Company may have contained a substantial amount of alum mud, or sludge left over from processing aluminum from bauxite rock, according to the January letter.
The water board wrote in the January letter that given pesticides and “ technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material” were detected in the Blair Southern Pacific Landfill in Richmond landfill, which also took in alum mud from the same Stauffer Chemical Company plant, consequently, it suspects the same materials may also be present under the Berkeley Landfill.
“The documentation of alum mud disposal at the Landfill, and the confirmation of radionuclides and pesticides present at the Blair Southern Pacific Landfill, suggest that the wastes contained within the Berkeley Landfill have not been thoroughly characterized for all potential contaminants that may be present,” the letter reads.
Blair Robertson, a spokesperson for the water board, declined Berkeleyside’s request for an interview but wrote in an email statement that the water board has “no information to suggest that the sites pose a risk to water quality or human health.” The water board, he added, is requesting more information from the cities of Berkeley and Albany to “assess any immediate threats to water quality, human health, and the environment.”
The city’s draft work plan, submitted on April 1, was rejected by the water board; the city now has until July 1 to revise and resubmit a plan. Once approved, the city will have 90 days to follow through with the plan.
In addition to the landfill at the Berkeley Marina, the hazardous waste disposal records show the Stauffer Chemical Company disposed of its industrial waste at the southern end of its Richmond plant (later known as Zeneca); the Albany Landfill, which has since been converted into the Albany Bulb; Blair Southern Pacific Landfill, in Richmond; and IT Environmental of Contra Costa, in Benicia.
San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board
The DTSC shared the 1980 Stauffer hazardous waste disposal records with the water board in May 2023 while coordinating cleanup efforts at the Blair Landfill, Edmonson wrote in an email to Berkeleyside. In September 2023, the DTSC followed up with a presentation of its findings to 11 governmental agencies.
The 1980 Stauffer letter is addressed to the Department of Health Services’ Hazardous Waste Management Unit, DTSC’s predecessor agency. Edmonson wrote in an email that the DTSC was created in 1991 and that any archives from its predecessor would have gone into the DTSC’s archives once received.
Hazardous waste laws have “significantly advanced” in the decades since the documented waste disposals occurred, Edmonson wrote. Following the passage of hallmark environmental laws like the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1976) Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1980) — as well as their state counterparts, generators and others were required to notify landfills and the public of hazardous waste disposal and releases to the environment.
It’s unclear whether Berkeley would have been allowed to convert its landfill into a park had the agencies that in 1989 greenlit the city’s landfill closure plan known that hazardous waste had been reportedly deposited there.
The 90-acre Berkeley Landfill took in waste from the mid-1950s until 1983, according to an April off-agenda memo from the Williams-Ridley to the Berkeley City Council. Located on former tidal marshlands, the site was designated as a Class II sanitary landfill by the water board and permitted for the disposal of non-hazardous municipal solid waste, according to a history of the site prepared by SCS Engineers in 2011.
As was standard practice at the time, there was no engineered base liner beneath the landfill to block waste from leaching into the soil and surrounding waters; trash was simply piled on top of the ground, according to the landfill’s 2014 post-closure maintenance plan. The plan noted that in 1980, Berkeley investigated what lies underneath the landfill; it discovered bay mud deposits to depths 60 feet below the waste and stiff clays under that.
When it closed in the ’80s, the landfill was covered with soils and thick clay material ranging in thickness from 3 to over 30 feet in accordance with the state regulations in effect at the time, according to the 2014 plan.
The final cover was installed in five phases between 1981 through 1989. In 1989, a landfill gas collection system — a network of pipes, blowers, wells and a flare station intended to tame explosive methane generated as trash rots — also began operating in the park.
Cesar Chavez Park to remain open while it undergoes testing and repairs
Though the city of Berkeley has not actually begun testing for radiation and pesticides, it has maintained — both in city documents and in meetings — that Cesar Chavez Park remains safe to the public.
“The water board confirmed that it’s safe — this is just precautionary,” Wahid Amiri, a deputy director of the Public Works Department, said during a May 2 community meeting in response to a question about the radioactive waste. “We’ll see what the analysis indicates.”
In January, the water board gave the city until April 1 to submit a work plan outlining how it would test the soil and groundwater. But after reviewing the draft plan, which was prepared by longtime city consultant SCS Engineers, it was deemed insufficient. Robertson, the water board spokesperson, has not responded to Berkeleyside’s emailed question about how frequently the agency rejects draft work plans.
In a May 16 letter from the water board to the city rejecting the city’s work plan, the agency told the city it needed to first address two “deficiencies” related to its proposed method for sampling radiation in the park.
The city now has until July 1 to edit and resubmit its work plan. Once approved by the water board, the city will have 90 days to carry out the plan.
Meanwhile, the park is also undergoing repairs ordered by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in February to address allegations of air pollution, as first reported by. The alleged violations by the air district include allowing methane to leak into the air for more than two weeks and failures to operate the flare station in the park the required amount of days per year.
The current phase of construction, which began on May 6, is expected to last through late June and will cost the city roughly $470,000, according to city spokesperson Matthai Chakko. Small sections of the park will be fenced off as crews dig deep underground to replace outdated parts, add new seals to prevent air from getting into gas wells and install upgraded “vault boxes” to make future repairs less disruptive. The city said it would share weekly construction updates on its capital projects website.
Martin Nicolaus, a retired attorney who volunteers as the CEO of the Cesar Chavez Park Conservancy, said it was “outrageous” that the DTSC only recently shared the 1980 Stauffer letter with other agencies.
For now, Nicolaus isn’t all that worried about the amount of radiation coming from alum mud buried deep below the park, which he continues to visit almost daily. The results of the city’s radiation surveys in the park will determine whether he needs to be more concerned, he said.
“Let’s just put it this way: If I knew the exact spot where the radium was buried, I would not sleep overnight in that exact spot,” Nicolaus said. “There’s background radiation almost everywhere: in the soil, in the water, from the sunshine.”
Berkeley resident Jim McGrath, who served for more than 15 years as a San Francisco Bay water board member and is a former environmental manager for the Port of Oakland, wrote in an email to Berkeleyside that he has been satisfied with how the city of Berkeley has responded to reports of potential radioactive waste.
“Having done risk communication and struggled to maintain credibility with suspicious members of the public, I agree that it is important not to panic people for minuscule risk,” McGrath wrote, adding that he reviewed the city’s work plan for investigating the radioactive waste and pesticides and thought it “looked both competent and responsive.”
"*" indicates required fields