AstraZeneca
The Richmond Shoreline Alliance calls for the removal of all
hazardous waste from the AstraZeneca site before homes are built there.
The AstraZeneca site on the Richmond
southeast shoreline has been leaking highly contaminated water and vapors for
decades, from the 550,000 cubic yards of hazardous material left behind after
100-years of chemical/fertilizer/pesticide manufacturing on this shoreline
site. Despite the known risks of sea
level rise, liquefaction (which is more likely as sea level rise progresses),
and health risks should any of the proposed "remedies" fail, in Nov-Dec
2020 the Mayor and small majority of lame duck City Council members in place at
that time approved pouring concrete over most of the 86-acre site - but doing
nothing about the toxic waste flowing underground via groundwater under
buildings on neighboring properties as well as into the Bay. They approved building up to 4,000 condo
units, after removing less than 2% of the hazardous waste there now.
Stauffer Metals' application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission USNEC to melt pure uranium into ingots
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THIS IS NOT A “BROWNFIELD” as it was characterized in the Richmond staff report
written by the City Community Development Director. This is a US-EPA superfund qualified site, and as
such, it " poses a threat to human and
environmental health ." It also qualified very high on the US-EPA scoring of superfund sites, so this is not a trivial distinction. It escaped
federal Superfund listing only because Astra-Zeneca took advantage of the
loophole that allows wealthier polluters to request oversight by the state (CA Dept of Toxic Substances Control)
rather than the federal EPA. Make no
mistake: this doesn’t change the fact that over a hundred types of Class 1 hazardous
waste exist in high volumes in both the soil and groundwater of this site .
When voting to approve the Campus Bay development (aka the "Development Agreement") with 4,000 residential units on the AstraZeneca site, the outgoing Richmond City Council gave no consideration to updated sea
level rise data available from the San Francisco Bay Conservation and
Development Commission (BCDC). They also
failed to heed Cal EPA's more health-protective vapor intrusion standards
announced on February 14, 2020, which apply to the most dangerous and
widespread contaminants on this site. In
addition, the lame duck council members blatantly and arrogantly ignored the
residential and business community's near-unanimous 15-plus years of requests
for a full and complete cleanup of this site before returning this site to
use.
Due to the gross judgement
errors by the slim majority of the prior council, the Community’s ask to the
Richmond City Council is to reopen the Campus Bay EIR and do a complete
health-and-safety review, which includes at a minimum consideration of the
US-EPA TCE health risk standards revised in February 2020 and the global
warming sea level rise predictions which were doubled in January 2021 .
Join Us to protect our shoreline
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to this area now and for generations to come!
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