San Diego Coastkeeper
Law & Policy Clinic Campaigns
Shipyards
San Diego Bay is one of the crown jewels of San Diego..a treasure that is central to the region's identity, economy and way of life. Sadly, the Bay's beauty is tarnished by what lies beneath its surface from decades of industrialization and neglect. With 56% of sediments acutely toxic to marine organisms, San Diego Bay now ranks as the second most toxic of 18 bays studied nationally according to a 1996 National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration report. Human health is also threatened as these chemicals travel up the food chain. San Diego Bay has been posted for 10 years with warnings about eating bay fish because of elevated levels of mercury, PCBs and arsenic.
Shipbuilding and repair facilities that serve the U.S. Navy and commercial oil tankers, dry cargo carriers, ferries and cruise lines are major contributors to this contamination. Studies have revealed high levels of zinc, copper, tributyltin, mercury, petroleum, chromium, lead, PAHs and PCBs in the sediments adjacent to Southwest Marine, National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO), Continental Maritime and the now-defunct Campbell Industries shipyards.
Coastkeeper's Litigation Campaign
Coastkeeper has focused on addressing shipyard pollution since the organization's inception in 1995. Our first efforts were aimed at preventing ongoing and future pollution by suing shipyards over chronic stormwater permit violations. The threat of litigation helped Coastkeeper negotiate a 1997 settlement agreement that required NASSCO, the largest ship builder on the west coast, to conduct a complete environmental audit of its 75-acre facility, to reduce contaminated runoff from its site, and fund restoration of least tern and clapper rail nesting sites in the nearby Sweetwater River Refuge.
Coastkeeper next turned its attention to Southwest Marine. This historic case reached its conclusion in June 2001, when the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the shipyard's final appeal of a September 1999 U.S. District Court ruling against the shipyard. District Court Judge Rudy Brewster, who blamed "a pattern of poor housekeeping" for causing the leasehold around the shipyard to be "devoid of life", had fined Southwest Marine $799,000 and ordered the shipyard to build a stormwater diversion facility and increase toxicity sampling and analysis. Southwest Marine now touts its environmental record as a model for others, going so far as to highlight an industry award they have received for its "voluntary" and innovative diversion system.
Coastkeeper continues to oversee the Court Order against Southwest Marine, and we are working with a coalition of local environmental groups to ensure that protective sediment remediation levels are set for the leaseholds around Southwest Marine and NASSCO to ensure these facilities cleanup the historic pollution they have contributed to the Bay.
Cleaning Up Their Act? - Shipyards & Sediment Remediation
Coastkeeper is now challenging these mega-companies to undertake sediment remediation efforts to undo the damage they have done over the past 40 years. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board recently tried to use the Apparent Effects Threshold (AET) methodology, previously proposed for the Campbell site, to set cleanup levels for Southwest Marine and NASSCO. AET values, which are the contaminant concentrations at which negative biological effects are always observed, would have left San Diego with among the most contaminated one percent of sediments in the nation after "cleanup."
With Coastkeeper threatening litigation if such levels were set, the Board decided to allow the shipyards to conduct their own assessment of the site in order to determine if more stringent cleanup levels are feasible. The integrity of this study is questionable given that it is being funded by two shipyards that have long maintained that the expense of removing all of their contaminated sediments is prohibitive. Unprecedented profits and lucrative contracts, though, tell a different story as NASSCO (a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics Corporation) was awarded a $709 million Navy contract in 2001, while Southwest Marine (owned by the Washington, D.C.-based The Carlyle Group) has been awarded over $200 million in Navy contracts over the past two years.
Coastkeeper is also working with the San Diego Unified Port District to undo the damage done by previously imposed AET sediment levels at the Campbell site. After taking over the site and conducting its own assessment, the Port determined the volume of toxic contaminants - initially estimated at 20,000 cubic yards - may be as high as 120,000 cubic yards, stalling remediation efforts. The Port has agreed to work cooperatively with Coastkeeper and the local environmental community to determine effective remediation levels and strategies for the site.
Coastkeeper continues to challenge local and state regulators and elected officials to demand that shipyards undertake comprehensive sediment cleanup levels to remove all the contamination they have caused over the past four decades are restore the health of this fragile ecosystem. Litigation options will be reviewed if agencies fail to do their jobs to regulate companies that have long profited from operations that wash toxic chemicals into our bay without having to pay for the damage done to our public resource.