Overview:
The Heckathorn Superfund site is a waterway in the Richmond harbor that is extensively polluted with dangerously high levels of cancer-causing chemicals, including the banned pesticide DDT.
This is the second cleanup attempt, following a failed one in the 1990s.
The greatest danger comes from eating fish caught in the Lauritzen Channel.
The EPA has released a 53-page, $93.4 million plan to remove dangerous chemicals from Richmond’s Heckathorn Superfund site, but community members who’ve long advocated for a more extensive cleanup aren’t impressed.
While there may be some aspects of the EPA’s United Heckathorn Superfund Site plan that the Richmond Shoreline Alliance (RSA) might agree with, said coordinator Janet Johnson, they don’t consider it a complete cleanup. The RSA and its partner agencies became so frustrated with the EPA last year that they wrote their own cleanup plan, one that has been endorsed by the city of Richmond and Sen. Jesse Arreguín.
The EPA never acknowledged their proposal, Johnson said.
“Because they failed to engage the public in a two-way dialogue, it’s unclear whether they even addressed the (community’s) plan, because our plan calls for a complete cleanup and their proposal doesn’t,” Johnson told Richmondside.
The EPA is holding an open house on Oct. 21 to present the plan and hear public comments.
The EPA’s plan — it will be the second time the agency has tried to clean up the site — was chosen from among a dozen options. It’s the most expensive of the options considered and would be paid for by the private companies responsible for the polluted properties.
It calls for dredging and removing all contaminated sediment from the east, west and northern areas of the Lauritzen Channel and disposing of it off-site; covering the dredged areas with a mixture of activated carbon and sand; and installing an active cap in the north end and shoreline segment. A cap can include several layers of protection such as activated carbon mixed with sand, sythetic permeable fabric, and rocks.
The parties who will foot the bill aren’t named in the plan, but in the previous failed 1990s cleanup they included Montrose Group, Rhone Poulenc, Inc., Stauffer Management Company and Christ-Craft Industries, Inc. as well as Levin Enterprises, Inc. and Levin-Richmond Terminal, Inc., which has a Heckathorn webpage stating that it didn’t cause the contamination (it bought the property in 1981) and has been cooperating with the EPA’s remediation efforts.
The EPA says it picked the plan because it will be the “most effective” over the long-term; will reduce human health and ecological risks; improve surface water quality; and reduce dependence on institutional controls.
The 1990s cleanup was found to have failed by 2016 because, the EPA said, there were still contaminants in the sediment in the channel, shoreline and embankment that weren’t removed. The EPA also notes that there are more recent sources of contamination coming from city and Levin-Richmond Terminal Corporation stormwater management systems.
In 2022, a follow-up study showed that sediments at the central part of the channel had up to 3,800 times more DDT than their target goal in the 90s. DDT is a cancer-causing pesticide that the federal government banned in 1972.
The EPA’s remediation plan also includes installing source controls such as an engineered barrier along the shoreline, sealing pipes, removing wood pilings and cleaning storm drains that empty into the channel.
While Johnson told Richmondside Friday that the RSA is still reviewing the merits of the proposal, they already noted a number of problems. For example, the carbon solution is misleading, she said, because carbon only holds contaminants temporarily before releasing them back into the environment.
She also said the plan to cap just the north end leaves other boundaries of the channel open to further contamination.
“Why not do a complete removal, especially since the prior cleanup failed?” Johnson said.
The EPA plan said dry excavation was among remedial actions that “were not retained for further evaluation” because “most of the contaminated sediment volume in the channel is within water depths that are too deep to allow for dewatering of the channel.”
The community is also concerned that the channel will remain vulnerable to sea level and groundwater rise, Johnson said. There is no mention of sea level rise in the EPA’s proposed plan.
Surging seas will increase flood risks for hazardous sites in Richmond and other overburdened cities along U.S. coasts, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, China’s Nanjing University and Climate Central, a nonprofit science organization. Their findings were published last November in the journal Nature Communications.
The Lauritzen Channel, which was created to support Richmond’s World War II ship building industry, sits in a harbor inlet not far from Richmond’s ferry terminal. It became contaminated after companies including the United Heckathorn Chemical Co. disposed of chemicals in the water over more than two decades, from the 1940s to the 1960s.
The RSA is also concerned that the EPA’s plan proposes that it base its remediation goals on comparing surface water tests of the channel’s contamination to other bay waters, calling this a tactic to “sidestep more appropriate, rational, and meaningful cleanup goals.”
They say because the Lauritzen Channel has been dredged extensively for decades, with dredged materials deposited at other bay disposal sites as far as the Carquinez Strait, those chemicals have already been distributed beyond the channel, meaning a true baseline can’t be determined.
It’s risky to eat fish caught in channel, EPA warns
Two chemicals present in the sediment at the Heckathorn site, DDT and dieldrin, a termite and crop insecticide, are known to affect bottom dwelling organisms such as mussels, as well as fish and fish-eating birds. As a result, the area is fenced off and closed to fishing because eating anything caught there presents a health risk.
In 2010, the EPA used an APEN seafood consumption survey of 229 people to update its assessment of the risks of eating fish caught off of Richmond’s shoreline, using 2008 fish tissue data collected from the Lauritzen Channel, Richmond Inner Harbor, Santa Fe Channel and Parr Canal.
Estimating that 50% of their fish diet came from those waters, the EPA calculated the lifetime cancer risk associated with eating fish caught from the Lauritzen Channel to be greater than 1 additional case of cancer per 1,000 people exposed. According to Superfund standards, cancer risks exceeding 1-in-10,000 typically require remedial action. There are also additional health risks aside from cancer, such as changes in the immune system, respiratory irritation and neurotoxicity.
A community proposal to clean up the Heckathorn site calls for draining the channel
Residents and environmental groups have said at previous public meetings that they’ve long felt frozen out of meaningful dialogue with the EPA and other government agencies.
This frustration prompted RSA, the Sierra Club and SF Baykeeper to draw up a separate cleanup plan based on consultations with engineers, environmental scientists, former government workers and community members. Their proposal calls for draining the Lauritzen Channel and removing all contaminated soil, sediment, rocks and industrial debris.
learn about community’s cleanup plan
Organizers say performing the cleanup in a dry environment will be more effective than dredging up underwater sediment in the channel, as the EPA did in the failed 1990s cleanup, and are concerned that working underwater might actually spread DDT unintentionally.
The pace of the process has frustrated Richmond residents, who note that the neighborhoods adjacent to the site are home to low income and predominantly Black and Latinx communities.
“If it was another area, would it have been 30 years to take care of it? I don’t think so,” said Linda Whitmore, a member of the Santa Fe neighborhood council, at a Nov. 6 meeting.
Lejon Fahim Reese, another Santa Fe neighborhood council member, said generations of residents have experienced health issues.
“Just growing up down there, my grandmother passed of cancer, and there’s a lot of people being affected,” Reese said.
Residents are also concerned about where the removed contaminated material will be disposed of, something that isn’t disclosed in the newly released EPA plan.
When the channel was first dredged in the 1990s, then-journalist Vernon Whitmore of Richmond followed the material to a landfill in the Arizona desert. He said he was shocked to see that it bordered a Native American reservation.
“The (Arizona) dumpsite is dirty and dusty. The wind is blowing. That made me think, ‘They’re breathing in all this toxic dust,’ ” Whitmore said. “It was really sad.”
Johnson said the RPA hopes to hold at least two community meetings in response to the EPA’s plan, one before the EPA’s October meeting and another to help residents submit plan comments. The comment period opens Sept. 30 and closes Dec. 29.
Richmondside reached out to the EPA for further comment but didn’t receive a response as of publication time. The EPA’s plan approval criteria does include community acceptance and the approval of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.
