“The sights can be deceptive.” says Sherry Padgett, a Richmond resident whose office overlooks one of the most hazardous sites in the state. “It’s in the most beautiful place in the world, but you can’t see what’s wrong with it.”

As bicyclists pedal along Richmond’s San Francisco Bay Trail in the early morning, the rhythmic sound of the Bay lapping against the shore drowns out the issues hidden within the scenic view. The only clues of the area’s hidden peril are the six-foot chain-link fences topped with rusted barbed wire, dotted interspersedly with bright signs announcing “Hazardous Material: DO NOT ENTER,” leaving room for only a narrow gap to the start of the trail. Yet even then, the eye slides past these warnings in favor of admiring the twinkling San Francisco skyline and the Bay Bridge’s distant silhouette. 

It's difficult to reconcile this natural beauty with the hidden reality just a hundred yards away: the Zeneca site, one of the largest Superfund sites in the Bay Area. The EPA designates “Superfund” status upon some of the most hazardous abandoned waste sites in the United States. Hundreds of potentially lethal contaminants are hidden in the soil due to a century long legacy of contamination— and they may soon surface.

Though not particularly evident today, the city of Richmond sprung to life as one of the United States’ leading manufacturing cities during the Industrial Revolution. The strategic waterfront and proximity to raw resources from inland made the shoreline an ideal location for industrial manufacturing companies. Beginning in the late 19th century, chemical plants began producing herbicides and explosive materials, joining iron and steel processing factories, military manufacturing, and tobacco production facilities on the Richmond waterfront. But this boom in production combined with the lax environmental regulation laws of the time inevitably led to heavy pollution of the nearby air, water, and land.

In 1950, UC Berkeley purchased 100 acres of this contaminated land from the California Cap Company to be used for larger scale engineering projects unsuitable for the main campus, erecting the laboratories and buildings that became what is known today as the UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station (UCRFS). Over the next few decades, they slowly acquired an additional 70 acres of land.

The adjacent Zeneca site is less than a hundred acres of the entire Richmond shoreline, but is one of the most polluted sites in the state. Stauffer Chemical Co. used the land as an industrial explosive manufacturing site until the end of World War II. Stauffer imported pyrite from the Richmond Mine, some of the most acidic mine waters in the world, to produce sulfuric acid. This processing created pyrite cinders, which contained toxic metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium, and were disposed of without consideration on Stauffer Chemical’s own land. In the 1960s, Stauffer Chemical Co. expanded to also producing pesticides, aluminum fulminate, and other heavy chemicals on site. 

However, the contamination didn’t stop there.

When UC Berkeley purchased the Richmond Field Station from the California Cap Company, they accepted full liability for the decontamination of the land. A full cleanup proved to be an exorbitant expense for the university, as the cost to completely remove contaminants according to Class 1 waste regulations would be prohibitive. 

Unwilling to shoulder the hefty cost of legal disposal, the UCRFS instead worked with the adjacent Zeneca site, excavating 300,000 cubic yards of the cinder-laced dirt from the Zeneca property, and 50,000 cubic yards from the UC field station, and mixed it with ground-up limestone to neutralize its acidity. Once the soil was blended, workers redistributed it over the Zeneca site. This ill-executed disposal introduced various contaminants such as pyrite cinders, lead, arsenic, and other inorganic compounds to the Zeneca site— contaminants that had not previously been present.

A 2007 investigation by the Department of Public Health found both Zeneca and the university liable for improper disposal in direct violation of California laws and regulations for storage, treatment, and transport of hazardous materials.

In lieu of removing the contaminants they dumped, UC Berkeley was fined just $285,000 by the U.S. Department of Toxic Substances Control in 2009 and cleared of any further responsibility towards the Zeneca site.

As an end result of years of misuse, hundreds of Class 1 Hazards are present in the soil of the Zeneca site— ranging from metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and uranium, to various commercial pesticides, and to volatile organic compounds like carbon tetrachloride, dichloroethene, and chloroform. All of these substances are known to the State of California for their detrimental impact on human health. 

Although the Department of Public Health determined that these contaminated areas were safe so long as they were closed to public access and regularly monitored, Professor Kristina Hill, an associate Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning professor at UC Berkeley, warns that her research shows these measures won’t be as effective in the long-run. 

Hill explains that when the tide rises, in tandem, it creates pockets of coastal seawater. When these seawater pockets rise, they swell up against freshwater groundwater reserves. While this is typically a temporary problem with the tide, as sea levels rise permanently, groundwater levels will rise continuously.

“We knew that groundwater changes [seasonally], but we hadn’t planned for groundwater to rise in a continuous way.” Hill says. In light of the predicted impacts of anthropogenic climate change, there has been a predicted rise of the Pacific almost eight inches above current sea level. Though not yet published, Hill’s preliminary research is available for viewing on the Earth Space and Science Open Archive and is consistent with other publications on groundwater contamination and sea-level rise.

“The issue is, if this groundwater rises into contaminants that are not yet wet,” Hill adds, “We can see these contaminants begin to leak out of the site.”

Historically, the solution to potential spread of these contaminants through rainwater or flooding has been to “cap” these contaminated sites— layering the polluted sites with cement, dirt, and plastic to isolate them from rainwater, preventing them from sinking in and furthering the spread of the contaminants. Yet this precaution only considers the effect of water from above. What about water from below?

These groundwater reserves are not the groundwater used for drinking water, but as they make contact with soil pollutants, their further spread is unpredictable. Although a groundwater treatment barrier was placed between the Zeneca site and the adjacent marshland to protect the at-risk coastal species from any contaminated run-off, nothing at present exists to prevent the groundwater from migrating towards the Richmond community.

As contaminated groundwater water seeps further away from the original site, it poses a significant risk of coming into contact with sewage pipes. In older areas or seismically-active regions, these pipes can develop cracks or become disconnected, allowing for pollutant substances to enter them. And as the Richmond sewer lines extend for miles throughout the city, and are connected to various businesses, homes, and establishments, this could dramatically expand the potential reach of these contaminants far beyond the region of their original source.

The majority of these contaminants are only hazardous to human health if they are ingested orally, inhaled, or through contact with skin. However, a class of contaminants known as VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, pose an even larger threat.

“VOCs have both a liquid component and a gaseous component. The liquid component would travel downhill in the pipe, but the gas component can travel uphill— and as the gas component travels uphill in the pipe, it can travel uphill into buildings,” says Hill.

The design of sewage pipes angle downwards to prevent waste from traveling towards homes, logically impeding the spread of these contaminants. Yet the VOCs gaseous forms mean that while the physical contaminant itself may not travel far, the gasses it produces have the potential to spread far and wide, virtually undetected. These gasses can seep up through cracked foundations and travel out of toilets with cracked wax seals, putting older, non-maintained buildings at significant risk.

Not just a problem for the distant future, these concerns affect the Bay Area community today. In 2020, McClymonds High School in Oakland was shut down for weeks following a discovery of a volatile organic compound, trichloroethylene, in the groundwater beneath the school. The school could only reopen upon confirmation that no trichlorethylene gas was present in the air.

”We’re committed now to a ten foot rise in sea-level.” Hill says. “The solutions we can take are now preventative— and it starts by removing the contaminants from the soil.”

While the greater challenge lies in addressing the sea-level rise, Richmond’s efforts to decontaminate their shoreline have faced significant setbacks of their own. A comprehensive decontamination process— which involves relocating the entirety of the contaminated soil to a remote site and replacing it with clean fill— has never been executed. The legal responsibility of decontamination falls on the shoulders of the companies who polluted them, however, the price-tag on proper procedure has led to slap-dash, less comprehensive removal attempts.

The Richmond Shoreline Alliance’s website says the most ideal form of decontamination would be complete removal of all contaminants and permanent storage in a remote, sealed location. Given the growing reality of what could happen if not checked, it has become imperative for Richmond residents to lobby for this course of action. 

Yet the community has been unsuccessful for the last twenty years. The responsibility of ensuring the companies involved decontaminate affected areas falls on the notoriously overworked Department of Toxic Substance Control. According to Padgett, the DTSC is stretched thin addressing various immediate crises throughout California, and leaving them fewer resources to properly tackle a slower, more innocuous problem such as Richmond’s. 

In order to decontaminate the Zeneca site and other sites along the Richmond shoreline, the DTSC would need to survey the land extensively to determine which pollutants are present to what extent, and then must create a comprehensive plan of action that appropriately addresses the specifics of each contaminant. Even after determining the proper course of action, it is difficult to convince companies to implement total decontamination processes instead of less costly, more inefficient measures.

Knowing this, the city of Richmond has decided to take matters into their own hands.

“We’re a community that faces a lot of challenges. We’re switching from a heavy industrial background to a more sustainable one,” says Gayle McLaughlin, former mayor of Richmond. 

Dissatisfied with the state of her city, as a City Council member, McLaughlin is pushing for the development and implementation of a water-rise adaptation and resiliency plan for the city of Richmond. It would include a detailed inventory of the toxins on Richmond’s shoreline to both properly inform residents of the risks and gain an understanding of what action needs to be taken to completely remove contaminants. 

“This plan would really be the first of its kind around the country,” McLaughlin claims. To be developed alongside Professor Hill, the plan not only will address the issue of contaminants, but also the various other after effects sea-level rise will have on a community just above sea level. Mclaughlin hopes that Richmond’s plan will serve as a blueprint for other waterfront cities to implement across the country. 

Given the university’s own role in contributing to pollution of the Zeneca site, what responsibility does that leave the Berkeley student body to ensure the future of the Richmond shorelines?

“The only thing that I ask is that you tell two more people— talking about it helps,” Padgett said, adding, “Some of us do more, some of us do less, but talking about it makes a difference.”

 The Richmond Shoreline Alliance and Sherry Padgett jointly host “Toxic Tours” of the area surrounding the Zeneca site. They encourage both members of the Richmond community and Bay Area residents to attend and stay informed on progress. In the future, they also hope to raise money to install VOC gas detectors in nearby residential homes and apartment buildings and contact plumbers to inspect older toilet seals. 

The Richmond Shoreline Alliance asks community members to attend Richmond City Council meetings as speakers to pressure the City Council to stay on top of community desires. Ideally, continued community support will ensure the implementation of McLaughlin’s proposed resiliency plan. 

The most impactful action Berkeley students can take is remaining aware and supportive of Richmond’s community efforts for a better, cleaner Richmond.

Interested in spreading greater awareness?