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Steam-cleaning technology created by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was used to clean a Superfund site in Visalia, in California's Central Valley - and the job was finished a century earlier than first expected. Utility company Southern California Edison used the site to soak wooden utility poles in creosote and other protective chemicals for some 80 years. Those chemicals contaminated the soil and underground water in the area. By the 1970s, the chemicals had seeped down as much as 100 feet in places. The site, called the Visalia Pole Yard, was one of the first Superfund sites, part of a federal government cleanup program for very toxic places. Superfund sites are on the National Priorities List of the Environmental Protection Agency because they may seriously threaten public health.

Steam-cleaning technology created by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was used to clean a Superfund site in Visalia, in California's Central Valley - and the job was finished a century earlier than first expected. Utility company Southern California Edison used the site to soak wooden utility poles in creosote and other protective chemicals for some 80 years. Those chemicals contaminated the soil and underground water in the area. By the 1970s, the chemicals had seeped down as much as 100 feet in places. The site, called the Visalia Pole Yard, was one of the first Superfund sites, part of a federal government cleanup program for very toxic places. Superfund sites are on the National Priorities List of the Environmental Protection Agency because they may seriously threaten public health.

To-date, levels recorded at this monitor have been thousands of times below any conservative level of concern.

This City must be ashamed of itself. There is a fiscal crisis in this City that is affecting thousands and here San Francisco is trying to waste its time and money - trying to figure out - how to build a stadium at Hunters Point on very toxic ground. Build a stadium in the middle of a Superfund Site. Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein do not have time to address serious issues - but can spare their drab time - aiding and abetting a Rogue Company like Lennar to do their dirty business. Shame on this City. We want the Rogue Company - Lennar, out of our community.

The Washington division of URS Corp. will lead a team cleaning up some 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in 177 underground tanks at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington.

For years, the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board has served as the Bayview-Hunters Point community's main voice in the U.S. Navy's environmental cleanup plans for the toxic former naval station. But the committee is suddenly being disbanded just as the cleanup enters a crucial phase. Used for shipbuilding and submarine maintenance and repair, and the decontamination, storage, and disposal of radioactive and atomic weapons testing materials, the shipyard was added to the Superfund national toxic site cleanup list in 1989. But it is also at the heart of where Mayor Gavin Newsom has partnered with Lennar Corp. on the city's biggest development proposal, involving 10,500 homes and a new stadium for the 49ers. As the Navy prepares to release a series of important studies and reports concerning the cleanup of the dirtiest parcels on the former shipyard, community members were outraged by the Navy's announcement in late May that it is preparing to dissolve the RAB in the next 30 days.

April Fool's Day is known as a day for practical jokes designed to embarrass the gullible. But Assembly Member Tom Ammiano's legislative aide Quentin Mecke says the April 1 letter that Ammiano and fellow Assembly Members Fiona Ma and state Sen. Leland Yee sent Mayor Gavin Newsom urging him not to support a proposal to bury a radiologically-contaminated dump beneath a concrete cap on the Hunters Point Shipyard was dead serious. In their letter, Ammiano, Ma, and Lee expressed concern over that fact that federal officials don't want to pay to haul toxic and radioactive dirt off the site before it's used for parkland. They noted that an "estimated 1.5 million tons of toxics and radioactive material still remain" on the site.