Organized Labor

Dear Brother Roland Sheppard:

Please forgive me for my delay in responding to your letter of 19 July 2007, posted on LaborNet 24 July. I have read it to our delegates, as I believe you intended, and I have discussed it with representatives of Operating Engineers Local 3, the affiliate whose members have been most involved in any excavation at Hunters Point.

I myself have indeed received training in asbestos safety and have worked in respirator and protective clothing in asbestos containment areas, and so I am well aware of the danger of asbestosis and mesothelioma from asbestos exposure. I note, however, that the asbestos in the downtown buildings to which you referred and in which I worked was highly refined and concentrated, whereas even though it is present in the serpentinite that underlies much of the Hunters Point shipyard it is neither refined nor concentrated. When I questioned a geologist who currently specializes in brownfields restoration, she told me that adequate wetting of serpentinite areas undergoing excavation is enough to protect workers and neighbors from asbestos danger. The Operating Engineers assure me that they have insisted on this wetting and on other prescribed measures at Hunters Point even to the point of making their own work more difficult on steeper slopes. If the geologist was accurate in her representations to me, the Operating Engineers have thereby protected not only their members but the neighborhood.

It is my understanding that serpentinite is one of the commonest rocks in Northern California; it is in fact the official state rock. It underlies not just much of Hunters Point, but such well-to-do areas as the Tiburon Peninsula. It is present in many other locations in San Francisco. I have seen a recent statistical study that seems to indicate a link between residence close to California serpentinite deposits and increased risk of mesothelomia; it shows a 6.3% reduction of occurrences of non-occupational mesothelioma at a distance of ten kilometers from serpentinite deposits. On the other hand, the Operating Engineers have been excavating in serpentinite here throughout their more than one hundred years of existence. Their safety director, in response to a question I directed to him through a local business representative, says that he is not aware of any study linking construction excavation in serpentinite to mesothelioma when that excavation is performed with the prescribed measures, on which his agents and workers have insisted here and elsewhere. Operating Engineers business representatives I have questioned tell me that they are unaware of any clusters of asbestosis or mesothelioma among their members working in excavation. We will of course act on credible information that the excavation at Hunters Point requires measures beyond those already taken, but we have not seen that information. We do not sacrifice the safety of our workers for anything, least of all “partnerships” with a developer.

I have chosen not to participate in the public debates over the excavation at Hunters Point for a variety of reasons.

I believe that the Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhood has every right to question Lennar/BVHP, the developer, on its excavation practices and safety measures and that Lennar/BVHP has every obligation to reply truthfully and straightforwardly to the neighborhood’s questions. I would not presume to speak for a neighborhood that is not my own, however, nor to judge for it whether or not a question has been truthfully and straightforwardly answered. Beyond this, I began to discern quite a while ago that the debate over the excavation had moved past the question of the safe handling of serpentinite and fractured along the lines of other divides in the City. It began to be a question of some members of the Board of Supervisors against others, of members of the Board against the Mayor, even – as we have seen recently – of the Nation of Islam against Christian ministers. As you have not-so-subtly implied in your letter, it became also a question of “Black and White.”

I welcome the recent decision of the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to involve itself in oversight of the project. I would welcome also any information from yourself or local residents about violations of prescribed measures for dust control. I note that you produced and published your “open letter” without ever having offered me such information, or indeed without ever having contacted me beforehand on the subject, even though such information would have done much more to safeguard both the workers and the neighborhood than so highly rhetorical a letter.

Fraternally yours,

Michael Thériault
Secretary-Treasurer
San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council