Rising Waters Bring New Toxics Threat to Hunters Point

“Caution. No trespassing,” reads a sign lashed to the chain link fence separating Parcel E-2 of San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard from the surrounding residential neighborhood. At that spot during last year’s storms, Shirletha Boxx-Holmes watched the shipyard flood.

“Mother nature did not read the signs,” says Boxx-Holmes, a Bayview native and community organizer with Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. She watched soil from the shipyard run into neighborhood streets with the floodwater. Her stomach sank.