- Chromic Acid - Hexavalent Chrome -

U.S. Navy Deliberate Poisoning

Hexavalent Chromium Genetic and Cancer Toxicity Information and Links

The Murderer U.S. Navy has recently decided to close off access to the Mare Island Shipyard Plating Shop and access to the Radium contaminated Building 101. These are a couple of pictures showing the newly installed fencing installed to keep the victims from being able to vist the places where these death factories operated, robbed them of their health and murdered many others. There is no point in installing these new fences unless too many victims have stopped by recently to see things for themselves.

This fence blocks access to the alley between building 273 and the plating shop. Without access to this alley no one can see the chrome stained concrete at the back of the plating shop.

These two fences complete the blocking of access to building 101 and the plating shop. Building 101 was heavily radium contaminated from radium dial painting that took place there. It was also a sponge for toxic chemicals discharged from the plating shop.

If you are from Mare Island or Puget Sound or another Navy Shipyard and you want to see how far above the U.S. Government OSHA Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) the concentration of Chromic Acid in the air discharged from the Mare Island plating shop was you can use this link:

Chromic Acid Discharges into the Air From the Mare Island Plating Shop Routinely Exceeded the PEL

If you are visiting this page to find out the physical effects of being poisoned with Chromic Acid you've come to the right place. It is a very rare thing to be forced to ingest as much Chromic Acid as I was secretly forced to do and so my experiences are fairly unique. Fortunately, I have been blessed with the correct education in chemistry and chemical engineering to be able to study what happened to me as a result of being exposed to very large amounts of Chromic Acid. Also, I am extremely fortunate to be a survivor of this continuing horrendous experience. The Navy poisoned me and then left me for dead so I'm very lucky to be here to write to you now. I have also learned from listening to the others at Mare Island who were exposed to Chromic acid and have learned from them. You can have the benefit of being able to know all about this universally bad experience without having to live through it. I can tell you for certain that the one and only benefit of my poisoning are these words that you are reading now so please don't let them go to waste. The only thing I have to gain from these words is that you will protect yourself and your family and if you do this it is more than enough reward for me.

If you are Navy or Mare Island and you want to know why and much you are being poisoned you can use these links:

Why You Are Being Poisoned.

Februray 17, 1988 Secret Massive Chromic Acid Release into Employees Faces

My poisoning began when I began work at Mare Island in 1983 and was assigned to Building 273 at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I was young and healthy and glad to have a job and felt very fortunate to have a good job. At that time I was gripped by the painfully expensive bad idea the U.S. Navy was a good employer. The pay and benefits were also very good and I liked the people I worked for and with very much. It is a rare and wonderful thing to get to work with so many very fine people who worked so hard. Perhaps these good things helped me to not seriously regard the little indications that all was not quite right with the building I was assigned to work in: buiilding 273 . I'm not a clothes horse or a fancy dresser. Working at the Shipyard involved going aboard submarines undergoing overhaul. A submarine in overhaul is a dark, cramped, stuffy dirty place filled with welders and people using grinders. It's dirty and so I bought clothes I thought would last but they didn't. About every three to four months I'd open the washing machine to find that everything in it had been shredded. I got into the habit of buying new clothes very often and didn't wonder much about what was destroying the strength of the clothes. There was a man who had a daughter he loved very much and he took a lot of pictures of his family. He would put these pictures under the glass that covered the top of his desk. The pictures would fade very very quickly yet the sun did not shine on them at all. I would wonder about this from time to time but was never able to associate it with anything I could taste, feel or see anywhere. People would on occasion bring in a plant in a pot and would try to grow it. These plants would not last long but just shriveled up and died now matter how much they were tended, watered or fed. Then, every now and then I'd have a problem with my vision going in and out of focus. I attributed this to exhaustion because I worked very hard. Looking back I can see all of these little indications add up to an atmosphere full of acid. This web site is about Chromic Acid but the plating shop used a number of highly concentrated acids that were exhausted into the air. It also plated toxic metals like nickel, cadmium, lead and others that were released into the air. But among all these things Chromic Acid is the worst. It's also the one the Navy has worked hardest to hide and is working the hardest today to get away from. I suppose that perfect hindsight would allow anyone to look back and see that the Electroplating shop being so very close to Building 273 would be a huge source of suspicion. But the door was always kept shut, there were no tours, we were never told anything about what went on in it and we were never told anything about the equipment installed in and on it. We were never told about its many many problems. The simple fact is that when you trust someone this trust overcomes a lot of little nagging problems that can develop in a relationship. Trust makes you overlook big problems. Everyone trusted the Navy and the Shipyard would do nothing that could ruin our health. This was completely unimaginable. But the whole thing came to a tipping point on the night of February 17, 1988. That night I went to work on the Swing Shift from 3:30 in the afternoon until 12:00 at night. When I left for home I didn't know it but my health had been completely ruined for good and ever during those hours of work by an uncontrolled spill into the ambient air of Chromic Acid being spewed out of a device supposedly installed to protect us from Chromic Acid, but things had gone badly wrong with it and since that night things have never been the same. In the past 25 years I've gotten used to being very uncomfortable living in this body that was once very strong and healthy. When I was poisoned on that day the first symptom was vomiting. This lasted for two weeks. After this I was affected by a very strong, loud and persistent ringing in the ears that has continued up until now. This noise causes sleep deprivation in a very big way and I can tell you for sure nothing ruins your life like a lack of sleep. There was also a lack of endurance and a general feeling of bad health kind of like what a person feels like a day or two after getting out of bed after a good bout of the flu. As they years have gone by there have been many other problems that I believe are directly related to being poisoned by the Electroplating Shop emissions of Chromic Acid, toxic metals and acids and these will be described in the following. But, before you read on let me advise you as strongly as possible to get as far away as you can from any metal plating shop or facility no matter how many or what kinds of reassuring words the owner or operator may tell you. The fact is your health can be undermined without you knowing it or being able to feel it happening if you are exposed to the kinds of chemicals used in a metal plating bath and it will not fully recover. I can tell you, from direct personal experience, that no one can be trusted to protect your health around these toxins other than you. You cannot trust anyone, ever, with toxic chemicals that can undermine and destroy your heath. You cannot trust your senses and you cannot trust any person. You cannot trust those who are supposed to ensure safety. You can only trust yourself and distance and of these two distance is the best by far.

To put it most simply and briefly the overall, long term, irreversible, progressive effect of Chromic Acid poisoning is that the healthy cells of the body die and are replaced with scar tissue. This results in increasing pain, disability, weakness and other medical problems including diabetes, weight gain, heart disease and cancer that do not stop until you die. There is no cure and there is no antidote. It may not be the worst thing that can happen to you but in all of my experience I can find nothing that is worse that lets you live long enough to experience it. Chromic Acid is something I now know you should do your best to stay away from and my personal advice to you is to run away from it as if it was the plague or Ebola. I don't know of anything that is so good it is worth risking the permanent ruin of your health by exposing yourself to it.. Chromic Acid (Hexavalent Chrome in general also) is just too big a risk to be anywhere near it. If you want to know more about the details I invite you to read on. If you do read on you'll find out I repeat myself from time to time. There is a reason for this. If you get poisoned by Chromic Acid, even by a tiny bit of it, I don't want you to ever come back at me and tell me I didn't warn you enough.

The things I've learned about the symptoms of chromic acid poisoning are from over 25 years of personal experience of having to live after being poisoned by it, from observing the lives of others who worked with me and who were also poisoned and by interviewing others who were poisoned but didn't know it. Let me sum it up like this: Chromic acid can totally wreck your life for good and it only takes a little bit to do this and you don't see it coming. Chromic acid has no warning properties and so if you've been exposed to it the way you find out is the hard way just like the English women working with TNT. Before deciding to start a fight with the U.S. Navy over its deliberate release of chromic acid into the air I went around the shipyard (Mare Island) and interviewed over 180 professional employees represented by my Union to see if I was the only one suffering from chromic acid poisoning. These interviews were all located at varying distances from the plating shop. I didn't tell anyone I was interested in the Chromic Acid released from the plating shop, but just made a visit as their Union President to see what they might happen to say during a friendly conversation. The result of this was a pretty universal observation, from about everyone I interviewed, that prior to moving to Vallejo they had been healthy and happy and now they were tortured with allergies, were tired most of the time and their relationships with their families were wrecked. This has been part of my personal poisoning experience. You will not find this in any medical text book or authority on poisons. To this date no one has undertaken a study of the long term adverse health effects of exposure to chromic acid except for its great power to cause cancer. Hopefully soon this will change. In the meanwhile you'll just have to take my word on the things I'm going to say about its effects.

The first thing to understand about Chromic Acid is that it is used to tan leather and it tans it quickly. In industry Chromic Acid tans leather in about six minutes whereas the natural process using tree bark and other natural products takes a year. When you are exposed to Chromic Acid you are being tanned and it happens quickly. If you breathe it in your lungs are tanned. If you ingest it your stomach and intestines get tanned. If it gets into the body it tans everything it touches like the pancreas and liver, heart, blood vessels and other organs.. Living tissue that is tanned takes a long time to recover and in most cases I believe it never completely recovers. Leather is leather. Chromic acid tans and kills living tissue painlessly. If you are poisoned with it slowly you won't know it until the cumulative effects become so great you are weakened to the point where you notice it. By the time this happens you are a long long way down the bad road. Being poisoned with Chromic Acid throws you into a situation of coping and working around the little things of daily life. Everything you do becomes an effort. You don't get as many hours per day to do things as you used to. When I was first poisoned I was out of bed only 9 hours per day. Today, twenty years later I get 12 hours per day out of bed. If I overdo it and pushy myself I pay a price the next day. I've had to get used to this because Chromic Acid ruins just about every working part of your body to some degree or another. All of the body parts and systems are no longer in synch and don't work together the way they used to. It's a lot like being 38 years old and then suddenly becoming 85.

I have a deviated septum. This is a hole in the tissue that separates both sides of the nose. A deviated septum is caused by exposure to Chromic Acid. This poison, when inhaled through the nose, causes the death of nose tissue resulting in this hole. It's a cause of severe nasal congestion along with frequent sinus infections. Every now and then, while at work I would have a strong irritation in the sinuses. When I would blow my nose the result was some blood. Now I know this is a symptom of being exposed to very high levels of airborne Chromic Acid but didn't know this at the time. I just figured it was allergies. But now, with perfect hindsight supported by all the incriminating documents I've found I know it was deliberate poisoning and I, along with many others, have had to live with it since then.

My thyroid gland is dead. My doctor diagnosed this accidentally with a blood test for a substance called Thyroid Stimulating Hormone or TSH. The higher the level of TSH in the blood the less thyroid function. My TSH was so high my thyroid gland was diagnosed to be completely dead and that it had been dead for a long time. I have no doubt this is an effect of the massive poisoning that took place on February 17, 1988. You won't find thyroid toxicity in any book describing the toxic effects of Chromic Acid yet. I have no doubt in good time a great many bad things Chromic Acid does to ruin the workings of the human body will be discovered and described. I can think of no other thing other than this Chromic Acid exposure that could have killed my thyroid gland.

I am certain chromic acid causes a massive amplification of pre existing allergies. If you have a very small allergy to pollen and you're poisoned with chromic acid you will find yourself massively allergic to it after you are poisoned. My experience is that I've had to learn to live with a permanently bleeding nose. Chromic acid also ruins the lungs if it is breathed in. Chromic acid is used to tan leather. If leather is tanned using the natural method it takes about a year and if chromic acid is used it takes about six minutes to tan a half inch thick cow hide. So, what chance do the delicate thin tissues in your lungs have when they are exposed to chromic acid? The more chromic acid you breathe in, the more the tissues in your lungs will be converted into leather permanently and instantaneously. The prime allergy symptom is asthma and when this is combined with the loss of useful lung tissue the result is learning to permanently live with a shortness of breath. The feeling is like being constantly strangled. Sometimes its better and sometimes its worse but it never goes away. The lung tissue that is not tanned will be made subject to the development of lung cancer tumors later on. The main symptom of any allergy is asthma. The combination of asthma and the lungs becoming tanned into leather is a huge reason for people who are exposed to it feeling tired all the time. They can't get enough oxygen into the blood or enough carbon dioxide out of it. There's another reason for tiredness. An allergy is when the body's immune system turns on the body as the result of exposure to a harmless substance. When chromic acid amplifies the allergies it also increases the amount of bodily strength taken by the immune system to fight phantoms and turn on the body and further weaken it. The combination of the body fighting itself, taking strength from itself to fight itself, and being subject to asthma all at the same time takes all of your strength and lowers your endurance to just about nothing.

The next thing chromic acid does is to ruin the liver. What happens is that the liver tries to detoxify the body by processing the chromic acid in the blood. But in doing this the liver is poisoned and severely danged because it was not evolved to handle chromic acid. Chromic acid does not exist in nature and is completely man made. It is totally foreign to our bodies the liver and all other organs. When the liver is damaged by chromic acid the damaged part does not regenerate or heal. Chromic acid stops the liver from consuming its natural food, which is fat, and converts to consuming protein. This causes the level of the fat in the blood to raise to an unsafe level. This extra fat in the blood can have two fates. It can be deposited in the arteries or it can be deposited in the muscles as deposits of fat. If it is deposited in the arteries the poisoned person will develop early and unsuspected heart problems and arterial blockages and if it is deposited in the muscle the result is the person becomes fat without knowing why. If you don't increase your consumption of protein in your diet the result will be the liver will rob protein from your body and your muscles will deteriorate.

The big thing to understand about chromic acid and why it is so damaging to your genetics is that there are actually two kinds of acid in nature. Most acids are the kind you come up against in normal life. The most common acids are sulphuric acid used in car batteries, acetic acid that is in vinegar or the nitric acid used in industry. All of these acids are called "protonic" and this is their common operating principle. But there is a much rarer kind of acid and it is called "electronic". Most electronic type acids exist only as very rare chemical oddities and can only exist for a very small fraction of a second when they are generated in a laboratory. Chromic Acid is unique in that it is an electronic acid and it lasts a long time. It takes a protonic type base like lye to neutralize a protonic acid and we've all seen the demonstration where vinegar is neutralized by adding baking powder to it. It takes an electronic base to neutralized chromic acid and these are very rare. Once chromic acid enters your body it can move around in it for a considerable time before it finds something that is a suitable electronic base in order for it to be neutralized. In the human body the most abundant electronic base is the genetic material or the DNA in the cells. This explains why Chromic acid is such a powerful genetic poison and cancer causing chemical. If you add baking powder to sulphuric acid, vinegar or nitric acid these acids will be neutralized. If you add baking powder to Chromic acid nothing will happen. If you add sulphuric acid to a cow hide the cow hide will be destroyed. If you add Chromic acid to a cow hide it will be tanned. Another word used to describe the action of Chromic Acid on flesh is to de nature it. To de nature a thing is to remove it from nature. This is what Chromic Acid does and it only takes a tiny tiny amount to ruin your DNA for good.

The genetic poisoning physical effects of chromic acid develop with time. Chromic acid is a genetic poison and it is perhaps the most powerful one anyone can be exposed to. When you are poisoned with chromic acid various cells in your body will suffer genetic damage to some extent or another with some being poisoned more than others. This will vary within the body and from person to person. When a cell is genetically damaged, when it reproduces, it will not be as good at doing the job it did before it was poisoned, it will not live as long or it may not reproduce at all. Also, there will be fewer of these cells than before because some will not be able to reproduce because the damage to the chromosomes will be too great to allow the cell to reproduce. An example would be a cell with a lifetime of five years. For five years after being poisoned the cell would go on and continue to do its function well until it was time for it to reproduce. If it had been poisoned so that it could not reproduce it would just die and if it could reproduce it would do so and would produce a weaker and less efficient and shorter lived cell. This complex process results in the poisoned human body undergoing a very slow but irreversible deterioration in just about everything it can do. The overall effect is accelerated ageing. It is as if every normal year you life becomes like two, three, four and more years and this effect accelerates the older you become until you die. It is this reason why, if you are poisoned with even very large amounts of chromic acid you will not feel the full effects for some time; perhaps years. Because the amount I was exposed to was very great I felt the immediate effects. When I was first poisoned I went home from work, went into the bathroom, and started to vomit. This vomiting and flu like illness, but without an elevated temperature, lasted for two weeks. After I returned to work I never felt well but had to drag myself through every day. The labor of working became more difficult and more difficult with each passing year and this process of a loss of strength and endurance has continued up to this day and has never stopped. Finally, and most terribly, chromic acid can damage human sperm and eggs and it can damage the organs that produce these so that the sperm and eggs are permanently genetically defective. These genetic defects can be transmitted through one's children and into subsequent generations.

The worst symptom of being poisoned with large amounts of chromic acid is tinnitus or "ringing in the ears". Tinnitus is well known from antiquity to be one of the three worst things that can happen to a human being. Tinnitus from chromic acid poisoning begins suddenly and does not stop, ever. It may become less loud with time over years but it never goes away or stops completely. It is always there and it ruins all of your friendships and relationships and each and every pleasure you take in anything you may like to do in life. It makes you permanently angry. When I was poisoned it took about six months for the tinnitus to develop. It made me so miserable I went to a friendly co worker and told him that the ear ringing was so bad and was ruining my sleep so thoroughly I'd be glad to have my ears amputated if this would solve the problem. He had also been poisoned with me on the same night but hadn't developed tinnitus yet. About two weeks later the tinnitus began with him. One night I overheard him talking to another co worker. He told him about what I had said that that he had not believed me but that he sure believed me now. Let me tell you if you do not yet have tinnitus it would be worth it to have both your legs amputated above the knee if this is what you had to do to avoid it. If you develop tinnitus as a result of being poisoned by chromic acid, and you go to the doctor, he will give you a hearing test and will tell you it is noise related. What this tells me is that Chromic acid damages the nerves in the ear the same way loud prolonged noise does. The one and only good thing tinnitus does is it very considerably reduces the fear of death and sometimes it makes death seem to be a very desirable thing.

When I was first poisoned I had a real problem with color perception but was not completely aware of it. At that time I was a photographer and being poisoned with my color perception ruined put an end to that. I did not notice my color perception was ruined except that the color prints I made in the darkroom started to come out with very bad colors and it was impossible for me to correct them to make them good. Over the long run this problem has diminished to some degree but as yet I've not made a color print and so do not know exactly how much improvement there has been, if any. Management knew about the loss of color perception. They sent a stooge to me showing me color prints that had been badly made to see if I could identify what was wrong with them. He did this over a period of a couple of weeks while acting as if he was my friend. At that time I did not know I had been poisoned and so it's a sure thing they did. You should understand that if you are poisoned, you may not know it for a long time. I think the reason for this is that there is something in the human mind that equates poisoning to be so deeply cowardly and beneath allowable human behavior it rejects the thought. It is only when one is confronted with real evidence that one has to begin to wrestle with the fact that people who were supposed to protect and help you allowed you to be poisoned, checked you out to make sure you'd been poisoned, and then abandoned you and robbed you of any right. This can happen to you too. I can tell you from personal experience you cannot trust anyone with access to or control of chromic acid. The risks are just too permanent and too great and it is just too dangerous.

Being poisoned with chromic acid will make you highly liable to develop type 2 diabetes. The reason for this is damage to the liver. Once the liver has been poisoned with chromic acid and it is converted from consuming fat to consuming protein there is a big problem and this is that you need a lot more protein in the diet but don't know it. The minimum daily requirement for protein for a normal healthy adult is 52 grams per day. But, if you've been chromic acid poisoned, and your liver is consuming protein rather than fat, it becomes about 150 grams per day. When the liver believes the body is starving it begins to produce a lot of sugar and inject it into the blood. This is called the starvation response. In a normal person the liver's starvation response is triggered by excessively low levels of fat in the blood so it's not a problem. But if a liver has been converted to protein consumption it measures the level of protein in the blood and the starvation response is based on protein rather than fat. There is no outward detectable symptom if your liver starts to dump sugar into the blood. You also don't feel hungry if your liver is starving for protein. When the liver dumps extra sugar into the blood the organ called the pancreas will sense the additional sugar in the blood and will produce additional insulin to allow the extra sugar to be absorbed into the cells and so the level of sugar in the blood will be maintained in the normal range; but not forever. As time goes by and the liver continues to pump more and more sugar into the blood, sooner or later the pancreas will begin to loose the capacity to produce the large amounts of additional insulin needed. At this point your blood sugar will begin to rise. It is when the symptoms of extra blood sugar become evident that a person prevents himself to the doctor. Sometimes this is very late after the person has been unknowingly living with high blood sugar for a long long time. A liver damaged by chromic acid will sense the level of protein in the blood and only eating extra protein will cause it to shut down the starvation response extra sugar production. My current requirement is to consume an additional 30 grams of protein every six hours. If I don't do this then my blood sugar level will go very high suddenly. I've been living with this chromic acid caused diabetes for 24 years but didn't discover it until about six years ago. The symptoms of diabetes are very subtle. And if you've been made to be constantly miserable by the other symptoms of chromic acid poisoning it's almost impossible to perceive them. It's only when the symptoms of very high levels of blood sugar become obvious that you are able to suspect you're diabetic and present yourself to the doctor. The key thing to keep in mind is that the sensation of hunger or an "empty stomach" does not come from the stomach. Hunger comes from the level of sugar in the blood which is typically 65 to 100 and this is where a normal body maintains it. If the level goes down to 65 you are very hungry and if it goes up to 100 you feel very full. But with diabetes there is a second feeling of hunger that will develop at an unhealthy blood sugar level of about 140 and this "fake" hunger will go away after the blood sugar level rises to above 170. So hunger tells you nothing about the level of protein in the blood and it tells you nothing about the amount of sugar in the blood if you are a diabetic. It fools you into overeating. The feeling of hunger can become very confusing because it will turn of and turn off at two different levels of sugar in the blood. Diabetes is a complication resulting from chromic acid poisoning that can come on quickly or be delayed. If you suspect you have been exposed to chromic acid it would be a very wise precaution to buy a blood sugar meter and test strips and to test yourself on a regular basis because the earlier you catch diabetes and the better you control your blood sugar the less will be the long terms consequences of diabetes and the less serious they will be.

Being poisoned with Chromic Acid, even tiny amounts of it, is just totally bad. It is truly the worst thing that can happen to you. I am sure the only word that applied to the Chromic Acid poisoning experience is torture. It's just pure torture. There is, as yet, no medical authority who can sign his name to a claim form to say any of the effects of this poison are due to chromic acid and so if you are poisoned with chromic acid you are surely out of luck. The very best thing you can possibly do to protect yourself is to find another job or move to another location if you work with chromic acid, work at a place that uses chromic acid, or live within a twenty mile radius of any place that uses chromic acid and releases it into the air; like a Navy shipyard. No matter what happy or reassuring words any company or government mouth piece may say to reassure you the problem with chromic acid is the risks of the total, complete and irreversible destruction of your heath, and the health of your descendants, by it are just too great for anyone with a hint of common sense to take the risk of being exposed to it for any amount of money or benefit no matter how great these may be. The problem with chromic acid is that it is a military necessity and economically too valuable. People who derive a benefit from it are more than willing to expose you to it for their benefit because they know it is currently impossible for you to make any kind of claim if you are poisoned by it. They are, to my way of thinking, worse than Nazi death camp guards who poured Zyklon B poison pellets onto the heads of the millions they murdered because it is sure that over following generations many millions will have to live with the genetic effects of chromic acid people are poisoned with today.

Let me just sum it up for you. Chromic acid is prolonged, continuous unrelieved suffering without any pity or help from anyone. If you are chromic acid poisoned you are truly on your own in a bad place. Take my word for it: nothing and I mean NOTHING is worth having to go through what I have been forced to go through as the result of being deliberately exposed to very very large and harmful amounts of chromic acid. If you think it cannot happen to you the fact is it may already have happened to you but you don't know it yet. You might not even see it in yourself but may have to wait to see it in your grandchildren.

It is easy to understand why hexavalent chrome is so damaging to all forms of life, including and most specially, human life. We all know that "free radicals" are extremely damaging to the DNA. A "free radical" is an electrically charged particle that the mechanisms of toxin removal of the human body do not affect. A free radical is free to move throughout the body until it encounters something that can satisfy it's electrical need to become neutralized and become discharged. When a free radical is neutralized or discharged it will cause some damage to the cell it is discharged in. In most cases a free radical can encounter a great number of harmless things in the body that can discharge it and the damage done is of no consequence and the body repairs it quickly, easily and completely. Most free radicals have a charge of +1 and a few have a charge of +2. A free radical will only become discharged in full units of charge. A free radical with a +1 charge will be fully discharged and neutralized when it encounters something that can accept this exact amount of charge. The general rule is the greater the charge a free radical has the greater the damage a free radical can do. But hexavalent chrome has two big factors that make it an astoundingly and uniquely effective and damaging free radical. The first is that it has a charge of +6. This is a titanic amount of charge. This means that there isn't anything in the body it cannot damage and damage very severely. The second is that most free radicals discharge in increments of +1. This means that a free radical with a +1 charge will discharge completely when it encounters something in the body that can neutralize a +1 charge. But the hexavalent chrome free radical discharges only in a unit of +3. This means that it will not discharge until it encounters a thing in the body that, can accept a +6 charge and that when damaged, provides a -3 electrical charge. Hexavalent chrome goes from +6 to +3 and then from +3 to 0. About the only place it can go in the body that can provide both opportunities for a +6 to +3 and a +3 to 0 is the DNA. The amount of damage done to the DNA by hexavalent chrome is massive and it is very likely the damage it causes is so very great it cannot be completely repaired. This is why hexavalent chrome is such a high power cancer causing chemical and why the genetic damage done by it is now known to be inheritable through successive generations. This is why I firmly believe that anyone who intentionally and deliberately discharges hexavalent chrome into the environment, like the U.S. Navy is a criminal entity committing a continuing crime against humanity whose effects will never end. The main reason the U.S. Navy has been able to get away with this is that people exposed to hexavalent chrome do not all show the same spectrum of symptoms. The reason for this is that when a free radical enters the body the way it moves and the places it will go are random and will be different from person to person. The hexavalent chrome free radical does damage in different parts of the DNA in different people. A group of people all exposed to the same amount of hexavalent chrome will be equally effected but they will not all show the same effects. Also, because the physical effects of DNA damage are often delayed there is no immediate cause and effect. In addition to this finely dispersed hexavalent chrome is odorless, colorless and tasteless. But, if you work at a shipyard you can tell the effects by how long your clothes last and by how long the pictures of your family that you post in your work area last. If your clothes only last a couple of months or if your color pictures fade quickly you can know you are in a high hexavalent chrome area.

It is well known from U.S. Navy studies conducted at Mare Island that the hexavalent chrome emitted from a plating shop does not immediately decay in the open environment. It lasts a very long time and can travel a very long way. It will get attached to dust particles or car tires and shoe leather and get carried just about anywhere. When hexavalent chrome enters the body it will not immediately decay but will linger for very long periods of time and circulate through the blood, tissues and cells until it encounters just the exact correct location where it can do its damage and be discharged.

The form of hexavalent chrome used in a metal plating shop is also used to tan leather. This means if you breath in a mist containing it your lungs will become tanned and will become useless, to the extent they are tanned, for the purposes of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. The amount of tanning of lung tissue will depend upon how much and how long you breath the hexavalent chrome mists. Your body has no way of knowing when you are being exposed or how much you are being exposed to, even if the levels of hexavalent chrome are enough to do serious immediate harm. Exposure can result in two sets of effects. You can experience immediate physical effects such as vomiting, blurring of vision and fatigue if you are exposed to very high levels and then a time later, as long as six months later, you will experience the effects caused by the various kinds of DNA damage you experienced. An example of this is you can gain weight due to DNA damage causing your liver to shift from a fat to a protein based energy cycle. You can develop asthma or worsened asthma, sudden high allergic reactions to common substances can erupt. You can experience vision changes, permanent fatigue, ringing in the ears, inability to sleep, skin infections and just about anything else. Hexavalent chrome can seriously damage the most innermost workings of your body and this damage can show itself in an almost limitless number of ways.

The best way to look at chromic acid is that it is much the same as deadly nuclear radiation. They both act the same and have the same effects except that chromic acid is a little bit worse. Nuclear radiation causes cancer in small to moderate doses. Chromic acid causes cancer in very small doses. Nuclear radiation causes physical illness, permanent injury and death in large doses and chromic acid does the same in small to large doses. The effect of nuclear radiation is permanent and so is the effect of chromic acid. Nuclear radiation causes genetic damage but chromic acid is worse because we know now that nuclear radiation does not cause inheritable, trans generational genetic damage, but chromic acid does. There is no doubt in my mind that before too long the scientific community is going to come to the consensus that the worst thing mankind ever did to itself was to invent and use chromic acid.

This page is regularly updated with toxicity information about hexavalent chrome (chromic acid). The state of knowledge about this uniquely dangerous chemical is constantly changing. I regularly search the Internet and review other information about this dangerous chemical. Recent developments are that Chromic Acid is likely the most dangerous threat to mankind posed by any chemical.

If you don't have the time to read all of this page right now you can go immediately to a Material Safety Data Sheet for Chromic Acid prepared by a German company in 2007 using this link:

MSDS - Chromic Acid - Genetic Toxin

You can plainly see in the Hazards Identification Section on Page 1 of this MSDS that Chromic Acid is identified to be a trans generational genetic toxin. It has been a trans generational genetic toxin since the day it was first put onto the market over a hundred years ago. It has been affecting the entire human race and degrading the genetic heritage of mankind continuously since then and is doing so right now.

If this isn't enough to convince you of the danger presented to mankind by Chromic Acid you can review this recent BBC Article (3/4/2011) describing the rapid rise is testicular cancer in men and the decrease in male sperm counts thought to be caused by the wide release of industrial chemicals:

Rapid Decrease in Male Sperm Count

This short BBC article contains a link that leads directly to the entire study published in the International Journal of Andrology. This is a very authoritative detailed research report whose conclusions are alarming. I can think of only one chemical that can do this kind of damage and it is Chromic Acid or hexavalent chromium.

What is a Poison, and What Makes Chromic Acid So Very Bad?

It is important to understand that while many people believe they understand the word "Poison" to mean anything that can damage the body or is not good for it this simple definition will get chopped into pieces by dishonest word magicians employed by their employer, the U.S. Navy or the Government if you engage in some kind of claim or adversarial process about an injury you experience as a result of being exposed to a poison of some kind, particularly Chromic Acid. I have had the experience of hearing a U.S. Navy Occupational Safety and Health expert witness state the lie under oath that nothing is a poison by itself and that the only thing that matters is the dose. However, this insane testimony evades one crucial point and this is there are some substances to which human beings should never be deliberately exposed at any level of exposure because their damaging effect is cumulative, permanent, and can be passed on through subsequent generations. First and foremost among these is Chromic Acid. I believe that currently available evidence and the evidence yet to come will conclusively demonstrate it to be the most toxic thing there is.

I have been studying Chromic Acid from my earliest days in College. Over this time I have seen how the general understanding of its extreme toxicity has slowly grown. The way it works in the scientific literature with a dangerous chemical is that at first it is stated the substance "May" cause a certain serious damage. Then, as evidence builds up things change it gets identified to be a "suspected" agent of some kind of serious damage to human health and finally it is confirmed. For a long time Chromic Acid was identified to be an irritant, but was also a "suspected' human carcinogen and there were a lot of arguments about this and so some literature said it "may" cause cancer and other said it was "suspected". Then, as time goes by, and as more and more studies build up that demonstrate the suspicion is a fact, an authority body such as the United Nations, the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Department of Health or the International Agency for Research on Cancer will officially conclude and declare the hazard. Then everyone falls into line and the word "suspected" disappears" from the literature and the danger is confirmed. As late as 1995 Chromic acid was a "suspected" human carcinogen. Now it is a confirmed human carcinogen.

The most recent literature states that Chromic Acid "may" cause not only human genetic damage but "trans generational" genetic damage and that this damage may be cumulative within mankind itself. This means that if you are a woman or a man, and you are exposed to Chromic Acid, it is possible for you to have genetically damaged children who can then pass on their genetic damage to their children and on down through subsequent generations. This means that if you are poisoned by hexavalent chromium or Chromic Acid it is permanent and you will never recover from this. It is a simple step to conclude that Chromic Acid causes genetic damage. Chromic Acid causes cancer. Cancer is an extreme form of genetic damage gone rogue causing tumors that don't stop growing. So it's not hard to conclude that because Chromic Acid causes cancer it also causes genetic damage. But the use of the words "Trans Generational" is very very serious and the phrase "cumulative damage" elevates it to a threat against the entire genetic heritage of mankind. This is a huge red flag that cannot be ignored. The dangers posed to mankind by a trans generational genetic poison with cumulative effects are so very great that the mere suspicion of this form of toxicity should provoke the most serious forms of prevention of the release of Chromic Acid to the environment. I know one thing about chemical literature and this is simply that over time the word "may" always turns into the word "does". The word "may" never goes away. It always gets changed into a stronger word.

The one thing that kept the extreme danger posed by Chromic Acid hidden is that it is ethically prohibited to deliberately expose human beings to a known poison to find out what it does to a human being. Also, accurate methods in the ability to discern genetic damage at the DNA level have only been very recently developed. Chromic Acid was invented around the year 1880. By the time modern science arrived on the scene Chromic Acid had been in use for so long that the fact it had killed or maimed a lot of people when it first was introduced into industry had been long forgotten, and by and large safe handling practices has been built up around it so that although it did kill people, it killed them slowly enough so that no one was alerted to the danger. The big event that has changed things dramatically concerning the more modern understanding about the extreme danger of Chromic Acid to humanity itself has come out of China.

China has recently undertaken a huge process of export driven industrialization that began in earnest about 10 years ago. Chrome plating is a huge part of all industries. China may have some environmental regulations but if anything they are completely ignored. Chrome plating workers in China have regularly discharged concentrated chromic acid to open waterways, allowed chromic acid to poison wells and other drinking water supplies. Workers in the plating industry there have died, their families have been poisoned, and entire villages have had their health ruined by airborne and land discharges of Chromic Acid. These episodes have become the subject of modern scientific study. This Wild West of Chromic Acid discharges in China has produced a perfect storm of Chromic Acid poisonings. In the past, in the western world, all of the data concerning Chromic Acid poisoning and the fact is was carcinogenic was considered by scientists to be anecdotal or merely good stories not useful to allow valid scientific analysis. The massive Chromic Acid poisonings in China are so widespread and so prevalent they cannot possibly be scientifically ignored and have provided a much clearer understanding of the unique, deep, genetic toxicity of this unimaginably toxic chemical.

When the U.S. Navy closed the Mare Island Shipyard metal plating shop the general consensus maximum allowable concentration of Chromic Acid in air that people could breathe was 0.05 mg/m3. This is five hundredths of one milligram of chromic acid per cubic meter of air. Today federal regulations stipulate this to be 0.000005 mg/m3. This is a level 10,000 times lower. Federal regulations go on to state that the "no harm" continuous exposure level is 0.000001 mg/m3. Now I know one thing and that is that these allowable exposure levels are purely a guess. They are not only a guess but they are a politically and practically adjusted guess. These are exposure levels that have been adjusted and massaged by the U.S. Navy and by other industrial users of Chromic Acid who are concerned about the cost of living within regulations and also by the difficulty of carrying on profitable and effective processes that use and release Chromic Acid into the environment. The simple fact of the matter is it is still ethically forbidden to deliberately exposure humans to controlled levels of Chromic Acid to find out what happens. The federal regulators responsible to formulate and publish regulations concerning Chromic Acid are working in the gray dark, subject to intense pressure by politically powerful and wealthy pressure groups and individuals, and actually have very little actual human data with which to work. The fact that industry users have commenced to publish warning documents (MSDS or material safety data sheets) that protect them from lawsuits and within which they state clearly that Chromic Acid "May" cause trans generational human genetic damage means simply there can be no possible level of exposure to Chromic Acid that does not cause harm. The fact that the most recent regulations are 10,000 more powerful than previous regulations means simply that Chromic Acid is frightening indeed to the people who know the most about it.

If you want to review the most recently published OSHA Book concerning Hexavalent Chromium regulations you can use this link

OSHA Hexavalent Chromium Regulations

I have connected the Chromic Acid toxicity dots from over the years. This creates a solid line that leads me to one conclusion: This is that Chromic Acid is a permanent genetic toxin that is so powerful its widespread effects constitute a constant destruction of the basic human genetic structural integrity, one that affects the entire human race. This damage has continued for over 100 years and continues today with continued release of Chromic Acid to the environment. I believe the recent development of an "epidemic" of autism is the outcome of a continued irreversible process of general genetic damage to mankind caused by Chromic Acid.

Chromic Acid suffers from one big problem when it comes to the human mind getting a good understanding of the danger it poses. This is its usefulness otherwise known as human greed. There is an analogy to this in asbestos. Medical experts and occupational safety and health experts knew asbestos caused severe lung damage and cancer for many decades before its use was finally banned. What can possibly excuse this delay and omission? The answer is asbestos was absolutely necessary to support our highly industrialized western way of life and our military. There was no substitute for it. Then, in the 1970's substitutes for asbestos became available on the market. As these were accepted and put into use and found to be a good and reliable asbestos substitute the dangers of asbestos became highly publicized and asbestos was banned. This cumulated in many lawsuits which were finally consolidated into a compensation fund which is currently active and disbursing funds to asbestos victims.

Currently there is no acceptable substitute for Chromic Acid and other forms of hexavalent chromium. It is just too necessary industrially and also most particularly militarily. Military equipment of all kinds must be hard chrome plated in order for it to stand up in warfare service. Military victory can depend entirely on hard chrome plating. When the M-16 rifle was first introduced in Vietnam it had a huge jamming and accelerated wear problem. Soldiers were getting killed because their M-16 rifles jammed often. The Russian made AR-15 had no such problem. It could be subject to every kind of abuse and it would still fire. The difference between the two rifles was chrome plating. The M-16 had not had its crucial parts hard chrome plated as an economy measure. The AR-15 was full of hard chrome plated parts. When the decision was made to hard chrome plate the internal parts of the M-16 it became the reliable winner it is known to be today. Critical parts in the landing gear of fighter aircraft also fail prematurely if they are not hard chrome plated. The military effectiveness of hard chrome plating is as simple as this. This usefulness means there is never going to be a shortage of well paid highly educated mouthpiece apologists who will write and say anything to defend Chromic Acid just as there were the same for asbestos. The real danger posed by Chromic Acid is not going to be disclosed properly until a suitable replacement is found, has been tested in military service and found to be just as good.

There are a number of recent studies that conclusively demonstrate just how widespread the lack of regulatory compliance is with regard to the control of the release of hexavalent chromium and Chromic Acid to the environment. These studies measured the amount of hexavalent chrome present in municipal drinking water throughout the United States. These studies found that the level of hexavalent chromium present in average tap water is disturbingly high and of concern to local and federal authorities. Here is a link to one of these reports:

High Levels of Hexavalent Chromium in Tap Water

Regulators and other authorities are at a loss to understand as to exactly how all this hexavalent chromium has gotten into the water supplies all over the United States. I think this question can be answered by the Mare Island experience. Mare Island has a large building which once served as its power plant. This building has a huge smoke stack that was later converted to be an air suction for cooling air. The power plant had been converted into the air compressor station for the shipyard and it contains two house sized air compressors. The air sucked through the huge stack was used to cool water used to cool the compressed air from the gigantic air compressors. There was always a big problem with the cooling water discharged from the power plant building. This water had very high levels of hexavalent chromium. The Public Works and Occupational Safety and Health Departments could not understand how this could be happening and so it remained a mystery for many years. Finally when the Building 225 Plating Shop was closed the abnormal levels of chrome in the cooling water suddenly disappeared and everyone understood that the power plant stack had been sucking in large amounts of the Chromic Acid that was being belched into the air from the metal plating shop. I believe that the main reason there is so much tap water contaminated with high levels of hexavalent chromium is purely that state and federal regulations intended to control its discharge into the air and into the land and water are being ignored by users who have absolutely no fear of punishment for ignoring the regulations. I believe this fact of tap water poison is a clear demonstration that all of the federal and state regulations are effectively meaningless and are mostly un enforced.

When a tremendous amount of anything is produced, transported, used and dispersed in an economy a good fraction of it is going to be spilled and will be released into the environment that is populated by people who will be exposed to it. In 1985 the total US production of the basic hexavalent chromium chemical used as a basis stock for the manufacture of all other forms of hexavalent chromium was 300,000,000 pounds. There can be no doubt that much of this wound up in the air, on the land, and in the water.

Here are some links to Chromic Acid Material Safety Data Sheets and other Studies showing how recently the "suspected" Trans Generational Genetic Toxicity of Chromic Acid has been developing:

1. This MSDS published in 1998 has no mention of genetic damage: Chromic Acid MSDS 1998.

2. This National Institute of Health Report on Cancer identifies Chromic Acid Genetic Damage in 2004: Report on Cancer Chromic Acid 2004

3. This International Program on Chemical Safety states Chromic Acid MAY cause Heritable Genetic Damage to HUMAN GERM CELLS:

Human Germ Cell Damage Identified 2004

4. This MSDS published in 2006 states that Chromic Acid "MAY alter genetic material: MSDS Chromic Acid 2006.

5. This MSDS from Germany published in 2007 clearly states "MAY cause heritable genetic damage: MSDS Chromic Acid 2007

6. This MSDS published in 2008 states "May cause heritable genetic damage": MSDS From England 2008

7. This MSDS published in 2010 adds "Danger of Cumulative Effects" to "May cause heritable genetic damage"": MSDS Cumulative Effects Identified

As you can see the understanding of the extreme genetic toxicity of Chromic Acid is developing very quickly in comparison to the understanding of its toxicity as a carcinogen.

There is another analogue to Chromic Acid. This is tetraethyl lead "Lead" used as an anti-knock gasoline additive. In the late 1920's automobile manufacturer's knew they could not continue to develop the automobile engine to higher levels of performance based upon the gasoline available at the time. The reason for this was that silent high speed (high RPM) knocking was destroying engines and severely limiting their lifetime. A lot of money was poured into a development program to find a gasoline additive that would solve the problem of high RPM knocking. Tetraethyl lead was found to be cheap, easily produced, highly effective and effective in small quantities even though it was highly toxic. Without any study of its toxic effects as a tail pipe source of airborne lead it was put into use and was adopted throughout the world. Over time as science became modern the toxic effects of lead generally were discovered and finally studies concluded that tailpipe emissions of lead constituted a very severe health risk causing a decrease of IQ scores in children throughout the United States. This resulted in another crash development program to find a gasoline additive that did not use lead. Once this was developed and put into use lead was quickly discontinued and finally banned as a gasoline additive. The result has been, on the average, a 1 point increase in the average IQ of children in the USA for each year since lead was banned as a gasoline additive. Note that when tetraethyl lead was introduced there were many poisonings and fatalities that by now have been long forgotten. Practices were built up around the handling of "Ethyl" so that its toxicity was diffused until finally science caught up with it. Ethyl was adopted and put into widespread use without any study concerning its effect on the population. The problem with Chromic Acid is science is catching up with it, but there is still no substitute.

There is a startling recent development concerning the extreme genetic toxicity of Hexavalent Chromium that is very important. It has only very recently been discovered that vitamin C that is within a living cell promotes increased genetic damage caused by Hexavalent chromium ten fold. This is a big surprise because previous studies had shown the vitamin C contained in the stomach acted to neutralize hexavalent chrome and decrease its toxicity. Researchers had concluded from this that vitamin C in the cell would act in the same way, but they were wrong. Now that mercury and vaccinations have been thoroughly proven to not be a cause of autism scientists are looking for other wide spread environmental contaminants that can be the likely cause of the recent epidemic of autism. An ever increasing number of scientists are listing hexavalent chrome as a possible cause that needs to be studied. Because the epidemic of autism is a recent development the feeling is that something that has recently (within the past 20 years) been released into the environment will likely be found to be the cause. But this might not actually be the case. Autism could possibly be the first final stage result of the massive trans generational cumulative genetic poisoning of mankind with hexavalent chromium that has been in progress for the past 100 years.

Hexavalent chromium is of concern to everyone because when metallic chromium is generated in the form of small particles at high temperature, such as when stainless steel is welded at a U.S. Navy shipyard or when it is worn out of automobile engine components and emitted from the tail pipe, the tiny particles are mostly in the hexavalent form of chrome. The removal of lead from gasoline about 20 years ago has resulted in an increasing use of chrome inside automobile engines. This is because the lead additives provided considerable lubrication that the unleaded gasoline lacks. This lack of lead based fuel borne lubrication resulted in excessive wear to engine valves and piston rings. The automotive industry has compensated for this by hardening these parts by using an increasing the amount of chrome in alloys used to make engine valves and piston rings. Engine valves and piston rings also have increased chrome content due to demands for higher fuel efficiency requiring higher engine temperatures. The result of the ever increasing amount chromium used in engine valve and piston ring alloys results in ever increasing and large amounts of small particulate hexavalent chrome being emitted as automotive wear products out of the tailpipes of all the millions of cars on the road in this country. No one has yet estimated the total amount of hexavalent chromium emitted out of all the tailpipes in this country but it must be an extraordinarily large amount. Given that it is now obvious there is no safe level of exposure to hexavalent chromium, it is very likely that the large amounts being emitted from automobiles is having a profound, cumulative adverse trans generational genetic effect on human health.

A recent Scientific Study has concluded that mothers located close to freeways are twice as likely to have an autistic child as mothers located at a greater distance from a freeway:

Freeway Proximity Vs. Autism

There is one other analogy that explains why the extreme toxicity of hexavalent chromium is only now being discovered. This involved the explosive TNT. Around the time just before the start of the First World War there was an active disagreement between Occupational Safety experts in England and Germany concerning it. The English experts believed it was not poisonous and the German experts believed it was poisonous. The argument was decided by the war itself when many people were hired off of the streets in England to fill cannon shells and other munitions with TNT. These workers dropped like flies because TNT is poisonous. It was only when proper handling procedures were developed that workers lives were spared in England. After the war the matter was examined. It was found out that the Germans had been using TNT a lot longer than the English. They had already experienced their fatalities and had implemented safe handling practices and procedures long before the English decided to use TNT as a military explosive. The Germans knew it was poisonous because they had used it and the English did not know it was poisonous because they had not used it. What this bit of history teaches us first and foremost is that when it comes to a useful chemical the way the mind of a person who will profit from its use is biased by greed and the chemical is "innocent until proven guilty". This always means proven guilty by someone else being poisoned and being killed or maimed.

One day when I was an engineer working at the Mare Island Shipyard Post Closure Detachment I was assigned to oversee the removal of PCB's at the long closed Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. PCB"s are a class of substances that were very useful for a long time. They were a completely effective fire prevention additive used in electrical transformer oil and were used and leaked into the ground just about everywhere that electrical transformers were located. There are a lot of transformers at a Navy shipyard. It took a long time for scientists to figure out just how bad PCB's are. A PCB starts out fairly harmless and is essentially non toxic, but over time when it is released into the environment, bacterial action changes it and increases and magnifies it's power as a carcinogen by as much as a million times or even much more. These "activated" PCB's are so extremely carcinogenic that the EPA has named them to be an entirely new class of human poisons called "Dioxin Like Toxins" and they are subject to very strict regulations. Dioxin is the most powerful carcinogen there is.

I had been trying, without much success, to convince my supervisor, this kind man, to implement more stringent safety procedures, which were more than the none he had implemented, for the workers who were actually doing the cleanup work and for him to more closely follow the applicable federal regulations, which he had not been doing. His shouted response to me was the "He had not seen one speck of evidence by himself that PCB's were harmful and that I was an idiot for thinking so". To this day I still have not figured out how to make an effective response to a total ignoramus of this magnitude. His attitude is much the same elsewhere in the U.S. Navy. If you are in a community located close to a U.S. Navy Shipyard or other Navy industrial facility or if you actually work at such a place please keep in mind that the U.S. Navy high officials have a knack for selecting out monsters just like this man to "monitor" their regulatory compliance. There's no doubt in my mind that the new lower emission limits are in the capable hands of people just like him.

Here is a document that demonstrates the U.S. Navy attitude when it comes to regulatory compliance. It deals with the sampling conducted at sites suspected to be contaminated in some way at the closed Mare Island Shipyard. The thing to understand is that if a sample is not properly handled and documented it can be thrown out and an entire case can fail because of this. This sort of thing was amply demonstrated at the infamous murder trial of a football star. The Los Angeles Crime lab had not observed proper chain of custody procedures with its sampling of the murder scene with the result very important evidence was not considered by the jury.

If you think the Navy has changed anything between the issuance of new hexavalent chromium regulations and now, is operating honestly and is a good steward of the environment please read this Consent Agreement between the Navy and the State of California Department of Toxic Substances Control in 2004 regarding the way the Navy conducted chemical sampling at Mare Island in violation of just about every regulation there is:

You Can't Trust the NAVY - Consent Agreement

The most important thing to understand about this Consent Agreement is that it is completely worthless. The U.S. Navy has a long standing policy of doing everything in its power, honestly or dishonestly, to avoid having to live with a court judgment. When the Navy is sued the first thing is does is to collect the evidence and then hide it. Then it engages in a campaign of accusing the other party of overloading the Navy with "excessive and burdensome" data requests for data it no longer has. Finally, when the other party has run out of money or patience or both the Navy offers a generous consent agreement that appears, on its face, to give the other party much of what he wanted to begin with. The reality is that once the Consent Agreement is signed it is turned over to a low ranking employee who is well known to be a management pleaser to administrate. He, of course, does nothing to change anything and everything goes on much as it did before except now the navy has a disposable fall guy in place if things go wrong again.

When I visited the California EPA offices in San Francisco and examined the Mare Island file I saw a letter addressed to the Shipyard Commander. It's topic was the Mare Island Naval Shipyard sewage system. The letter demanded that the Shipyard Commander specify to the State of California the date by which it was either going to fully treat all Mare Island sewage for cyanide and hexavalent chromium contamination using a permitted treatment facility or, if it didn't want to do that, when it planned to upgrade the Mare Island sewage system to meet the design requirements of a certified hazardous waste pipeline. There's no doubt the State of California knew that Mare Island sewage was actually also hazardous waste. What the Navy did was to ship all of the shipyard sewage, about 200,000 gallons per day, out of the State of California to a disposal facility in the State of Utah. The way this was done was to deliberately and falsely call the sewage "bilge water" or water from the bilges of a ship. They did this because under California law there is a specific exemption for bilge water. This is that it must be manifested and shipped as hazardous waste inside California, but once it leaves the State it's no longer considered hazardous waste. Many railroad tank cars were used to ship all of the Mare Island sewage, falsely called bilge water, to a disposal facility in Utah that did not know it was sewage. At this facility all of the railroad cars were dumped into a huge lagoon that was allowed to stagnate in the desert sun. This sewage did what all sewage does when it's allowed to just sit, went rotten and began to give of huge amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas. This "rotten egg" gas is more toxic to human beings than the cyanide gas used in the prison gas chambers. The facility operators thought it was just bilge water which is basically clean fresh water with a little oil in it and were very surprised to find out it was actually raw sewage. The result was the disposal facility had to be abandoned, was severely damaged and the owners suffered huge financial losses and sued the Navy. The court ordered the Navy to turn over all of its hazardous waste manifest documents for all these thousands of railroad car loads. The Navy refused and replied with its usual "excessive and burdensome" routine. The many boxes full of these documents were cleverly hidden about 20 feet from where I worked and were never turned over. The story the Navy finally concocted would be funny if it wasn't such a huge lie. The facility operators were finally put off by being told the big lie that all of the water that had been shipped to them was actually bilge water, but it has been taken from a super secret spy submarine, and the sailors on that submarine routinely urinated into the bilges. So many rail cars were used to transport this sewage that the post closure activity at Mare Island took three years to clean all of the cars, certify them clean, and then disperse them throughout the United States.

The subject of this Memorandum of Understanding was a professional topic of mine while I was employed at Mare Island after it closed. I was asked to write sampling recommendations for the people who did the sampling and did so according to the specified Federal and State requirements. The first thing that happened after I turned this in was that I was made subject to a campaign of harassment, intimidation and entrapment schemes designed to put my employment in jeopardy. I was told by the sampling personnel that there was no way they were going to conduct sampling according to my "stupid s..t". My understanding of the matter at that time was that the U.S. Navy wanted Mare Island to be sampled dishonestly and in complete violation of applicable rules and regulations and were happy with the results that came from this policy.

Anyone who believes the U.S. Navy has changed its ways must also believe in the tooth fairy.

Abraham Lincoln once observed that the way the mind of a property owner works is that he does not question and only appreciates anything that will make his property more valuable no matter how adverse it may be to the property of others. We have to watch out for this perfectly human way of thinking when we use toxic chemicals because some of them are toxic enough to ruin the entire genetic heritage of the entire human race. I firmly believe hexavalent chromium is first and foremost among these.

I had an experience that demonstrated to me the kind of regulatory enforcement one can expect from the U.S. Department of Labor and doubtless OSHA and any other federal or state regulatory authority. This was during the time just prior to closure of the Shipyard. The Navy was actively destroying a building that was full of liquid mercury. A long time ago this building had served as the location where measuring instruments that used mercury had been serviced. The building was saturated with liquid mercury. As the building was being destroyed and torn apart from the inside pockets and pools of liquid mercury were being found inside the walls and underneath the floors. The Navy was naturally anxious to destroy this building because it would have been a huge problem for all the people who had worked in that building over the decades to find out they had been breathing harmful amounts of mercury vapor all of their working lives. This was a problem that had to be wiped out prior to the shipyard being closed and the Navy loosing a lot of control over the situation. The problem that developed was the working people who were doing the tearing down were beginning to freak out because it occurred to them that they were being exposed not only to mercury but to criminal liability for being ordered to simply throw highly mercury contaminated material into the dumpster's in violation of state and federal law. So someone called the Department of Labor anonymously to complain. The result was that a DOL Investigating Officer came to the Shipyard and convened a meeting at which I was present. He demanded to know just how anyone could demonstrate that the level of mercury that people were being exposed to inside that building and during its demolition exceeded federal standards. No one could demonstrate this because the Shipyard had conveniently conducted no sampling and kept no records. The DOL investigator left the meeting, went back to his comfy office in San Francisco and the end result was the supervisor of the closure of that building commenced to drive a fork lift through the walls of the building so that it eventually collapsed and was trucked off in pieces to the municipal dump in dumpsters. I strongly suspect that this is how industrial users of chromic acid are being treated by the regulators. They are probably not sampling the output of their poorly maintained scrubbers and hence have no problems with the regulators.

This mercury adventure is, to my mind, a perfect example of Navy Environmental Stewardship, Navy Core Values in action, and the U.S. Navy scrupulously observing the regulatory compliance to regulations applicable to a severe human poison. I am sure they are doing much the same with hexavalent chromium these days. When the Navy has a serious poison problem it simply refuses to do its duty and collect samples and have them properly analyzed. If there are no samples there cannot possibly be any regulatory problems.

Regulatory enforcement is based upon sample analysis results. It is the legal duty of the abatement equipment (scrubber) operator to conduct sampling operations, pay for sample analysis (expensive) and maintain records. The craziness of the law is that it is the duty of the maker of the complaint to prove the regulatory non-compliance using sample data which cannot possibly be gotten from any other source than the abatement equipment operator. If the abatement equipment operator refuses to collect samples and have them analyzed or if he does this and destroys or hides the records it seems there is no recourse of any kind. Shortly before the Shipyard closed I filed a Grievance against the U.S. Navy for unsafe operation of the Building 225 metal plating shop. The local Occupational Safety and Health people responsible for sampling and record keeping promptly hid all of their records and refused to give them up to me as federal law required them to do. They all lied under oath and submitted false data during the arbitration hearing for this Grievance. I was unable to obtain any help from any federal agency to force the Navy to give up its sample results. The entire issue was just a huge black hole into which work disappeared and nothing came out.

You must watch out for Navy mouthpieces because they are very highly trained and extremely dangerous to listen to. The Navy spends a lot of money and time on them to make sure they are effective public speakers who can make convincing arguments out of pure wind very quickly. At Mare Island this person for environmental matters was the Assistant to the Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Office. Records that I was able to see before the Shipyard closed demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on grooming this person to be the perfect public spokesman. He was sent out for every kind of training in public speaking. He even became a Deacon of the Catholic Church and this certainly increased his intrinsic believability. And I have to say that he was so good at the BIG LIE it astounded me, which is a thing that doesn't happen often. His office was directly above my office. On the day when my analysis of all the available data convinced me that the scrubbers on the top of the Building 225 Metal Plating Shop were a big problem I went up to his office and confronted him about this to see how he would react. Here's how the conversation went

Me: "Bernie, I believe there has been a serious problem with the scrubbers on the roof of the plating shop".

Bernie: "That is a most fantastic speculation".

Then I walked out.

I was completely blown away by the ability of this man to instantaneously formulate such an elegantly expressed sophisticated big lie with absolutely no warning. Because he chose to lie to me at that instant you are reading this now. My plan, when I went up to his office, was to see how big of a fight it was going to be to get justice for the innocent people (victims) who had been secretly poisoned. I figured that if he sat down with me, showed me data, and convinced me my conclusions were incorrect it would be safe to drop the matter and go on with my life. But, if he engaged in any kind of evasion this would mean that I was right and should take things as far as they could go because the subject was mass murder on an unimaginable scale. The reason for this is very simple. Too many people at Mare Island have been poisoned. Many have been killed. Many more have had their health robbed from them by stealth. Children have been orphaned. Many have had their careers cut short prematurely. All of these victims have a statutory right under federal law to be paid and compensated for their work related injuries caused by exposure to Chromic Acid. By deliberately covering up all of this murder and maiming the U.S. Navy has effectively perpetrated an unimaginably huge mass robbery on top of its vicious assault on the bodies of the victims and mass murder. Having been put into a state of knowledge concerning all this it seemed simply logical to conclude that anyone who knew what I knew and who did nothing would be siding with the Murderer Robber U.S. Navy and would actually become a perpetrator having full liability in this world and the next for all the malice, injury, robbery and other crimes associated with this Crime Against Humanity.

Why You Are Being Poisoned

The reasons the Navy is releasing massive amounts of Chromic Acid into the environment out of its plating shops is very simple. It's just that you can't figure it out unless you actually worked at a Shipyard. The Navy needs chrome plating because many important parts of important machines like fighter aircraft that land on aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines depend upon it and could not exist without it. Aircraft have become ever more powerful. With this increasing power come more stress on mechanical components like landing gear. Finally the demands on these components became so great it was impossible to make parts that would last for more than even one landing unless these parts were covered with a thick layer of chrome. Chrome is the hardest metal and it is almost as hard as diamond. Parts in the landing gear and in the gears that operate the control surfaces of high performance military aircraft must be thickly plated in chrome otherwise the aircraft could not exist. Because of this technical chrome plating is absolutely necessary to the Navy. The problem then becomes, who does this chrome plating that must be so perfectly done our national defense depends upon it? The kind of chrome plating needed for supersonic aircraft cannot be obtained from just any plating shop that makes a living plating car parts. It must be done by a shop that does it perfectly time-after-time because only one mistake can put a very costly supersonic jet and its pilot into the sea. The simple answer is Navy chrome plating shops exist because only Navy owned and operated chrome plating shops can be relied upon to do the job that needs to be done. The Navy is enslaved to its plating shops and cannot do without them. The problem is these shops are manned by normal working people who have been trained on the job by experienced workers who themselves were trained on the job. Navy technical chrome plating is a skill that has been developed in the Navy and has been passed down through the generations of plating shop workers. You won't find it in any book or taught in any classroom. A chrome plating shop is not a nice place to work. It's hot and stuffy and full of bubbling pots of the most poisonous deadly poisons and acids known to man. People who work in a plating shop are under tremendous pressure to produce perfect work and to make it fast and as cheaply as possible. Plating shops are not well maintained. They are not plush palaces. Because they are full of pots of acid they are rotting constantly from within and everything is always breaking down. It's about the worst possible working conditions anyone can imagine. When you work around poisons, no matter how careful you are, you are going to get bit. People who work in plating shops don't feel good most of the time but, for the most part, they have gotten used to it. So, the question has to be asked, what business is it of a chrome plating shop worker, who is being stressed, poisoned and worked to the limit, to be an agent of external environmental protection? The answer is this is not the job of a plating shop worker. His job is to plate vital parts with chrome perfectly. But the problem is the equipment installed and designed to prevent the release of Chromic Acid from the plating shop is installed in the plating shop and someone must operate it unless it is just there for show. The metal plating shop is a scary place. No one who does not work there wants to go into it even for a minute. At Mare Island the responsibility for the maintenance of the plating shop scrubbers was officially assigned to the Public Works Department. This Department was supposed to maintain the scrubbers, to direct their operation and this is a completely cruel cynical deliberate hoax. The question is, "How?". The Public Works Department had absolutely no authority or the ability to affect any shipyard operations. Its job was to keep the buildings standing up, the roads drivable, and the cranes working. It is unimaginable that anyone from Pubic Works, from outside the plating shop would be allowed to do anything or direct anything to happen that would reduce the production of chrome plated parts coming out of the plating shop. And then what were these people from the Public Works Department supposed to do? Were they supposed to enter the plating shop and operate the pumps, valves and scrubbers and climb up on the roof and keep the scrubbers operating and maintain them? That's just plain crazy and it could never ever have happened. Then there is the cost of actually operating the scrubbers and supplying them with water. It costs about $25.00 per gallon to process plating shop liquid hazardous waste. Water that passes through a plating shop scrubber becomes Federally regulated hazardous waste almost immediately. Imagine the cost of disposing of thousands of gallons of water discharged from a plating shop chrome plating scrubber day after day for years. This is just too big of an expense. Operating the scrubbers would require more people, more equipment, and an authority that could impact plating shop operations. It would also produce witnesses and files full of documents useful in litigation and injury claims. Can you imagine if the Navy did the right thing and put together an independent group that had the power to shut down the plating shop if a scrubber needed maintenance? This would effectively put the operation of entire aircraft carrier battle groups and the operations of nuclear submarines at the mercy of people running the shipyard plating shop scrubbers. This is just not going to happen. Then, also, there is the very convenient fact that Chromic Acid has no smell. It has no warning properties. It's also a local anesthetic so the instant you think you smell something your nose goes dead. It has no color. It is the perfect invisible poison. It's just far too convenient to install useless scrubbers on top of a plating shop and then dump the Chromic Acid into the air. Besides, if no one knows then no one can complain. If someone develops health problems, then so what? They can't possibly justify an occupational injury claim because there are no witnesses and no records to prove their allegations of injury. And, better yet, if a person does not know he is being poisoned, and he does not know the symptoms of the poison how can he ever possibly come to the conclusion his heath problem is due to the poison? The simple answer is he can't.

Another big reason why you are being poisoned is Shipyard Empires. On a Navy Shipyard there are Empires run by various Feudal Lords called "Shop Superintendents", "Department Managers", "General Foremen" and the like. The Navy Shipyards are full of Empires, large and small. The plating shop is a small but hugely powerful Empire run by the Plating Shop General Foreman. At Mare Island the Plating Shop General Foreman had an office located at the rear top of the plating shop. Outside his office door was a large landing and on this landing was a home sized air conditioning unit. Federal rules prohibited air conditioners on the shipyard and exceptions could only be made by a direct order of the Shipyard Commander himself. Only two people on the Shipyard had an air conditioner and these were the Shipyard Commander and the Plating Shop General Foreman. The plating shop was his personal fiefdom and no one could be allowed to intrude on this authority. An example of this is the following document written by the Plating Shop General Foreman in response to a direction by the Occupational Safety and Health Department requiring the plating shop to come into compliance with applicable safety regulations. This was a declaration of war by the Empire of OSH on the Empire of the plating shop. The Plating shop empire responded with an Ultimatum:

The OSH Department ordered the plating shop to come into compliance with all health and safety regulations and that they must "Just Go Do It". The Plating Shop Forman replied to say to them, "You come and do it" which is basically the spider inviting the fly to come into his parlor. Can you imagine a bunch of safety department personnel who actually know nothing about a metal plating shop and its many many hazards coming into a crumbling shop full of hostile workers beholden to their all powerful General Foreman Lord? The idea of OSH punks armed with notebooks marching into the plating shop to restore Health and Safety Law and Order is just an insane idea that could not happen. They would be treated to every kind of bad experience at the hands of hostile workers who know how to do all kinds of scary things to them and they would have been run out never to return. And, on top of this is the simple fact that if the rotting, crumbling, falling down poison vapor filled plating shop were to be actually be made safe this would have required it to be demolished and replaced. This was also just not going to happen. The result of this RED HOT "Health Hazard Memorandum" that certainly went straight to the desk of the Director of the Health and Safety Department, is that nothing happened. Everything stayed the same and went on as they had gone on for the past 67 years and this is exactly what this document was intended to accomplish. It did its work. The Plating Shop General Foreman had a far more powerful empire and had far more "juice" with the Shipyard Commander than the Director of the Health and Safety Department. One would think the Health and Safety Department would have total and absolute authority over anyone and anything that would be any kind of health or safety threat to anyone. After all, health and safety come first, don't they? That's the empty Navy slogan. If the Health and Safety Department can be sent packing with a single document like this can anyone possibly imagine that mere lowly Public Works people would be allowed to come to the plating shop and tell anyone to do anything much less to order them to stop plating supersonic jet and nuclear submarine parts and to start running the scrubbers? This is just plain crazy and it could not happen. The fact is Public Works knew that it's position on the Shipyard Totem Pole was dead absolute bottom. The fact is no one operated the plating shop chrome plating scrubbers at Mare Island and no one is operating them now at any Navy Shipyard. One has to ask if they were not operated then why were the scrubbers installed at all and why were they assigned to a department that could do nothing about them? The only conclusion I can come to is to deceive.

The simple fact of life is no one robs anyone of anything that has no value. The things that are stolen from us that have the most value are stolen by stealth and not at the end of a gun or at the point of a knife. Is there anything more valuable to anyone than physical health? Then, on top of this, can there ever possibly be anything that could be more valuable than the genetic health of your grandchildren and great grandchildren? These are the things that are being (or have been) stolen from you by stealth. If you work at a shipyard, and you see a plating shop, and you see the scrubbers sitting on top of it, you must know the one and only reason they are there is to fool you and they have been doing this work for a very long time. I look at these scrubbers in the same way we look at the shower signs the Nazis posted at the entrances to the gas chambers at their death camps. They were reassuring for a while.

For Mare Islanders who spent time in the Nuclear Engineering Building no. 273 that is adjacent to the plating shop in Building 225 there are three interesting facts to consider. These are best illustrated with some pictures. The first picture is of the side of Building 273. If you look at the left side and count the floors you will see five rows of windows, one for each floor. But if you look at the side that faces the plating shop, on the right, you can see that the fifth floor has no windows. They have been plastered over and painted so it's not clear if there were once windows there. From inside the building on the fifth floor it is easy to see that at some time the fifth floor had a row of windows facing the plating shop on the fifth floor because from the inside the brick work that fills in the window holes is visible. At some time the Navy paid to have these windows bricked up. The only reason I can imagine this was done is to prevent "obvious" fumes discharged from the plating shop from entering the fifth floor:

The next picture is a top view of the Nuclear Engineering Building. You can see that on the roof there is ventilation ducting and there is a fan room. If you go to visit this fan room you will see that there are no fans in it and that it is full of rust. Clearly it has been empty for a very very very long time. Inside the Nuclear Engineering Building, you will see ventilation outlets in the ceiling of all five floors. These are obviously connected to this fan room. At sometime time in the past building 273 had working fans in the fan room and forced ventilation. But, because the fans had been removed all ventilation into Building 223 was natural circulation.

Here is a picture of the top of building 223 showing the ventilation connections and the empty rusted out fan room. An arrow points to the fan room.

 

The question is why did the Navy go to all this expense and trouble? This is answered by yet another picture:

 

This is an illustration from the EPA Manual specifying how to determine the proper height of air outlet vent stacks around buildings like the stacks out of the plating shop scrubbers. If you imagine that the building on the left is the Nuclear Engineering Building you can see that this building and the plating shop were so close to each other they were both in the same stagnant cavity region. We know from Navy documents that the air outlet stacks on the roof of the plating shop were inside this cavity zone because they were not higher than building 273. The were below it at about the fifth floor level. This means that whatever was discharged out of the plating shop was effectively discharged into the Nuclear Engineering Building. You can see the Cavity Region extends and forms a bubble over the building and this explains why the fan room is empty on the top of building 273. However, there were hot spots because some discharges, like the chrome plating scrubber discharges, on the plating shop roof were closer to the Nuclear Engineering building than were others. This Cavity Region made it necessary to remove the fans from the fan room and to brick up the fifth floor windows. It is then obvious to see that the windows were bricked up and the fans were removed for one reason only and this was to deprive the victims in the Nuclear Engineering Building of any chance of smelling anything that might tip them off to the fact they were being exposed to highly toxic vapors from the metal plating shop. When confronted with the fact persons in Building 273 were being poisoned the only actions taken by the Navy were to deprive them of the knowledge of that fact.

Scrubbers must have water to do the job they were designed to do and this is to remove toxic mists generated in and released from metal plating tanks. The Mare Island plating shop scrubbers were not provided with this water flow except during a short period of time during which they were tested during short periods in 1988. In February 1988, due to the complete ignorance surrounding these scrubbers, there was a secret massive release of chromic acid in very high concentration into the air that lasted for over a day during which time many people in the Nuclear Engineering Building were secretly poisoned. These victims were never officially informed that they had been poisoned and this is in direct violation of applicable federal law. These victims have been robbed of their rights by the Navy who, to this day, is a murder living on the proceeds of its robbery and murder by stealth.

Here is a link to the critique report for this spill:

February 17, 1988 Chromic Acid Airborne Spill Report.

If you were on the shipyard during this spill you got a good stiff load of Chromic Acid. If you take the time to read this Spill Report you will notice there is not a single mention of the slightest concern about what this massive release of Chromic Acid poison would be doing to the innocent and unknowing people being exposed to it. Notice that the Occupational Safety and Health office was represented at the formal meeting called to discuss this spill yet they did absolutely nothing to help the injured. They were completely silent.

The BIG QUESTION is: During the massive day long discharge of Chromic Acid into the Shipyard air out of the chrome plating scrubber that took place on February 17, 1988 were any air samples taken at the shipyard to determine the concentration of Chromic Acid in the air? This sampling, of course, would be absolutely necessary and it would certainly be a great crime to not collect them because samples must be taken to evaluate the danger posed to shipyard personnel by the spill. It would be the purest form of deliberate malpractice to not take samples. It is certainly the crime of premeditated murder to just let people stay in the danger zone and absorb and breathe in the second most powerful carcinogen there is. Samples would conclusively demonstrate if it was necessary or not to evacuate personnel in the danger zone out to a safe distance. Also, If these samples were taken they would be an irrefutable demonstration of the honesty and integrity of the Shipyard Occupational Safety and Health Department. These samples would demonstrate conclusively that the U.S. Navy motto of "Safety First" and "Our Employees are Our Most Important Resource" were not just empty cynical word constructions. The answer to this question is NO. Not one sample for Chromic Acid was taken anywhere on the Shipyard during the time of the discharge of Chromic Acid into the air. I have a copy of the 1988 Occupational Safety and Health Sampling Log for the shipyard. The page from February 17, 1988 is shown here:

As you can plainly see there is an unexplained complete absence of any kind of sampling for the Chromic Acid. The Occupational Safety and Health Department knew was being spewed into the air in vast quantities on February 17, 1988. They were busy taking noise level samples in building 112. I have heard from other persons that at the time of the spill some complaints were filed with the OSH Department and in response to these complaints personnel came with their instruments and took samples and then later reported that nothing hazardous could be found. This sample record from the day of the spill tells me that no samples were ever taken and that if any person was told nothing could be found then this had to a big lie. People coming with their sampling instruments had to be a cruel hoax. It should be noted that other logs for other days show samples were taken for things like asbestos, methyl-ethyl-ketone, volatiles and other "stressors". But, in all of 1988 not one sample was taken for Chromic Acid. This omission is explained next. There can be no doubt that during this horrendous spill the people charged by federal law to protect and defend the health of the shipyard workers and to take samples to assess the extent of the health threat posed by a massive continuing release of highly concentrated toxic Chromic Acid into the shipyard air were busy doing other more important things like taking noise samples. I think we all would have been better off if the Occupational Safety and Health Department had been a house of prostitution run like the Mustang Ranch. At least then we would had some good reason to know the shipyard was a death trap, it was necessary for every man to look out for himself and to not trust them. The problem is we did trust them and they were not trustworthy to the slightest degree. The OSH Department was a box of phonies and it would all be a big joke if it wasn't so tragic and if their criminal neglect had not resulted in so much death and misery.

The Shipyard Routinely Discharged Chromic Acid from the Plating Ship in Concentrations above the Legal Permissible Exposure Limit

This page, discovered on 1/25/2013, published by the State of California, showing Mare Island plating shop Chromic Acid discharge data from 1985, explains perfectly why the Shipyard OSH Department decided to not take samples for Chromic Acid during the emergency spill. The Navy refused, in violation of federal law, to furnish this data to the Union in 1996. It shows plainly that there ware prolonged instances where the discharges of Chromic Acid from the plating shop exceeded the (completely inadequate) OSHA and Shipyard Permissible Exposure Level (PEL) for Chromic Acid in effect at that time. This was 0.1 milligrams of Chromic Acid per cubic meter of air. It has since been reduced to 0.005 milligrams per cubic meter of air.

The data declares the plating shop discharged 29.975 pounds of Chromic Acid per year. This is an insanely large amount. It's a killer amount by far. More importantly to showing this routinely exceeded the PEL the maximum hourly discharge rate is shown to be 0.005513 grams of Chromic Acid per second. Doing the math (shown below) this is converted to be 0.39 milligrams per cubic meter of air or 4 times the allowable PEL. The discharge measured between 0700 and 0900 hours is 0.003888 grams per second. This is converted into 0.29 milligrams per cubic meter of air or 2.9 times the PEL. This page shows that for four hours the discharge rate of Chromic Acid from the plating shop into the ambient air was an average of 0.3410 milligrams per cubic meter of air or 3.4 times the allowable legal PEL. This page demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Navy, and I believe every level of Shipyard Management, running from the Plating Shop General Foreman through the OSH Department, the Public Works Department, the Injury Compensation office and up to the Shipyard Commander and certainly beyond him knew all about this. I believe they certainly did know and their successors and all the Navy mouthpieces continuing up until now have done everything in their power to make sure that you would never find out just how great your exposure to Chromic Acid at Mare Island actually was. These monsters all live happily today content and satisfied knowing that many whom they knew and worked with are going to suffer fatal lung cancers and other cancers along with debilitating and painful chronic physical injuries, conditions and limitations produced as a result of their exposure to harmful levels of Chromic Acid. The U.S. Navy is indeed a true murderer happy to live off of the proceeds of its many murders, maiming's and crippling's and this document proves it.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind about this reported 29.975 pounds of Chromic Acid. We know now that in a dirty plating shop like the Mare Island shop, the release of dusts of Chromic Acid as the result of the drying out of spills is roughly the same amount that is discharged out the air stacks. This is a published conclusion of the State of California ARB and so the amount actually discharged is very close to 58.0 pounds if not more. Also, you can be sure the good people at Mare Island thought long and hard before they put their pen to the ARB Survey Form to report 29.975 pounds. This is a highly massaged and adjusted figure and I have no doubt it is the lowest amount they thought they could get away with. But the fact is actual personnel exposures were easily twice what have been calculated here.

In 1985 there was the mistaken belief that soluble chemicals containing Hexavalent Chrome, such as Chromic Acid were weak cancer causing chemical when compared to the insoluble forms. But the Navy added large amounts of Barium to the chrome plating baths along with Sulfuric Acid and other trade secret additives that were meant to improve the plating ability of the bath. Barium Chromate is an insoluble form of Hexavalent Chrome and it is an extremely powerful cancer causing chemical. It was well known that you were being exposed to it along with Sulfuric Acid and the other trade secret additives. Then also there was the room full of grinders (10 of them) on the second floor of the plating shop. The purpose of these grinders was to grind down the excess chromium metal deposited on parts during the hard (thick) chrome plating process so that the newly chrome plated part could be inspected for cracks and flaws before being sent to the machine shop for final finishing. And used parts being sent to the plating shop to be restored by being given a new hard (thick) chrome plating layer had their old chrome layer ground off in this room full of grinders. Needless to say, all of the chrome metal released during the grinding process was just spewed out in the air that went right into buildings 101, 273 and 225 along with being released into the general shipyard area. The data of Appendix 4 Page 115 should be viewed to be the wildest underestimation of actual personnel exposures to carcinogenic chrome blasted out of the plating shop. The most recent report for the Puget Sound Shipyard is that in one year 110 pounds of chrome resulting from the grinding of parts was released. The amount released by grinding from the Mare Island plating shop would probably have been about the same.

We know the data on page 115 was provided to the ARB by Mare Island because it was provided in response to a mandatory Survey Form that was served on Mare Island. We can also be sure that the data provided on this survey form to California was "highly adjusted" so that it would present the best possible appearance that could possibly be manufactured at that time. There's no doubt in my mind that the table of data on Appendix Page 115 is actually an insanely low massive underestimation of the exposures we routinely received. If you'd like to see a copy of this Survey Form as it was provided to Mare Island you can use this link:

Chrome Plating Survey

If you would like to read more about this extraordinarily important page from Appendix 4, and the calculations that use this data please use this link:

State of California Discharge Page Explained

If the Navy had taken air samples for Chromic Acid during the spill of February 17, 1988 I am certain they would have found nothing because the one thing the Navy knows how to do well is to collect bad samples designed to produce results that are good for them. Any samples collected probably would have been collected as far away from the plating shop as possible. The reason I think this is the Navy has already been caught doing exactly this kind of thing. A Consent Agreement was entered into between the Navy and the State of California wherein the Navy agrees to correct rotten sampling practices at polluted environmental sites scheduled for clean up. The message of this Consent Agreement to you is that a lot of money can be saved by cleaning up a polluted site less rather than more and bad sampling practices is just the way to get this job done. Phony samples give phony results resulting in the general public being exposed to toxins in the environment that they wrongly believe are cleaned up. Needless to say, if you buy a home built on toxic Shipyard land that is certified by phony samples to be cleaned up, and your children come down with "unexplained illnesses" how could anyone ever figure it out? Here's the link:

You Can't Trust the NAVY - Consent Agreement - Deliberately Bad Sampling Practices

There is a great monstrous ingenuity in the workings of the mouths of dishonest Navy mouthpieces that would almost be admirable if it's purpose was not to justify mass murder. When the Navy needs a mouthpiece that can talk great but has the conscience of a tick they know how to find him. One of these twisted word constructions I ran up against during my time at Mare Island in conversations with management was the idea that somehow if a population is being exposed to a powerful toxin there should be a group of persons showing "unexplained illnesses". Okay, tell me who at Mare Island was ever assigned to keep track of unexplained illnesses? Can you imagine anyone going up to another person at work to say, "Oh my God! I've got an unexplained illness! Something must be terribly wrong here! Run for your life!" No, the concept of an "unexplained illness" or group of them is a fantasy concept woven out of nothing but the purest form of dishonest plausibility designed by a truly corrupt mind and intended to put the matter at rest by creating a phony insurmountable baseless point of verbal argument that leads nowhere. The concept is that if people were being poisoned there should have been an obvious discernable outbreak of "unexplained illnesses is baseless. There will be the symptoms of illness when a person is poisoned and that's for sure but the only person who leaves it unexplained is the poisoner. The fact is there is no scientific basis for this profoundly corrupt idea because the body has no poison sensors. The simple fact is you cannot possibly know you've been poisoned unless you have been warned or told about it somehow. If the poison has no warning properties like a good unpleasant stink or if the employer knows you're being poisoned but refuses to tell you and hides the evidence, there is absolutely no way you can know you have been poisoned. A person who is ill, and who presents himself to a doctor reports symptoms and not suspicions. A doctor can only diagnose according to the patients symptoms and not to the patients suspicions. If you ingest a poison that is administered to you secretly you will show symptoms which may or not be delayed in their appearance. And if you come staggering into the emergency room after ingesting a good dose of poison how is the doctor supposed to figure this out if you don't know it? Poisoning is always the most difficult diagnosis and it is always the last diagnosis. At the Shipyard people are typically young, healthy and active. They earn sick leave and I never heard of anyone calling in on sick leave and justifying it on an "unexplained illness". The way it works when you are young and believe you are healthy is if you feel sick and can't get up to work you call in sick and that's it. If you feel like you've got a flu, and many initial onset chemical poisoning symptoms appear "flu like", you call it that and tell your supervisor you've got the flu. If you go to the doctor you tell him you think you've got the flu. When I was out on sick leave for two weeks as a result of being poisoned by the February 1988 spill I thought it was the flu and it did bother me a little that I didn't have an elevated temperature. But, not knowing I'd been poisoned I didn't suspect I had been poisoned. I had no idea I'd been poisoned until I stumbled across the spill critique just before Shipyard Closure in 1996. With my knowledge of being poisoned delayed by eight years there was no way any doctor could possibly diagnose my poisoning and this is exactly what the OSH people at Mare Island intended to accomplish by not collecting samples and by hiding the entire affair. Once I found the Spill Critique I knew for sure why I'd felt so bad all these years. In all that time I never once had the thought that I was suffering from some "unexplained illness" that needed to be reported to the non-existent "Shipyard Unexplained Illness Department" and neither did anyone else. Can you imagine what a doctor would think if you presented yourself to him and said, "Help me I've got an unexplained illness"? It is just the purest nonsense concept carefully crafted, designed, intended and used by the poisoners to frustrate the poisoned and block them from their rights. Poisoning is the most despicable, inhumane, loathsome, dastardly and cowardly crime anyone can commit against another. Those who justify it with phony distraction concepts like "unexplained illness" are just as involved in it as everyone else who is involved in it. They are all completely guilty the same.

I have a message to everyone who had knowledge (not just suspicions) of the discharges of Chromic Acid from the plating shop and who did nothing to warn others or who have acted up to this day to do nothing or to deny the victims their rights through their actions or a lack of them. What you are a part of cannot be washed clean by the passage of time, by distance, by the forgetfulness of human memory, by the deaths and silence of the victims or by rewards from your employer. Think hard about the things that are going to go through your mind in your last hours when you lie on your death bed. Consider very carefully the words of Benjamin Franklin, "I have found in my life that whenever I believed I was most right I was actually most wrong". If you believe there is not a God who will be as merciful to you as you have been to others then you are most wrong when you believe you are most right. My personal feelings for you are the deepest sincerest abject pity because I know for a fact that there is nothing in this world lasting enough, good enough, or valuable enough to compensate any one to the least degree for what will be given to those who have had no mercy like you. We are all tested in this life and we can't see the tests coming. For you and for me this Chromic Acid poisoning has been a big test. You can see how I have acted and I can see how you have acted and can conclude with assurance that I would not be you even if all the rich things in all of existence were to be given to me because it would not be worth it to share your fate; the one that will last forever.

The State of California Chromic Acid Discharge Page Explained

This page was found today on 1/25/13 during one of many hundreds of Internet searches conducted over the past 20 years for the purpose of finding exactly this kind of data. I have learned over the years spent searching for this data that you just never know what a search engine is going to bring up. As the search engines become more and more powerful they can search ever more deeply into documents. Also, as time passes documents that were once considered sensitive become downgraded and get posted. Fortunately, today, for the first time, it brought up this page that is posted on the California Air Resources Board web site. This is a link to that site:

California Air Resources Board Web Site

The page is accessible from this page on the ARB site:

Chrome Plating Operations - Publications/Supporting Information

It is contained Appendix 4 to this document: Technical Support Document to Propose ATCM for Emissions of Hexavalent Chromium from Chrome Plating and Acid Anodizing Operations: January 1988. It is directly accessible using this link:

Appendix 4

If, for some strange reason this link should become inactive you can use this link to download Appendix 4 from this web site:

Appendix 4 - Local Download

And it is page 115 of this Appendix.

I have performed some quick and simple mathematical conversions to use the data on this page 115 to demonstrate that the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Electroplating shop routinely discharged Chromic Acid into the air at concentrations that greatly exceeded federal OSHA and local Shipyard Control level, the Maximum Ceiling Permissible Exposure Level or PEL existing at the time of the data provided on Appendix 4 page 115. Here are the calculations, data and conversion factors used so that you can do the math yourself to check my work:

1. The output of the Hard Chrome plating scrubber is 17,000 cubic feet of air per minute. This was measured in a test performed on the plating shop on April 5, 1988 and this is a link to that test:

Mare Island Hard Chrome Scrubber Test

2. The output of the Decorative chrome plating scrubber is 10,557 cubic feet of air per minute. This was measured in a test performed on the plating shop on April 6, 1988 and this is a link to that test:

Mare Island Decorative Chrome Scrubber Test

3. To convert cubic feet per minute to cubic meters per minute: CuFt / 35.31 = CuMtr

4. To convert pounds to grams multiply by 454.5 grams per pound.

5. There are 1000 milligrams in one gram.

5. The plating shop scrubber fans ran continually and were never shut down unless the plating tanks were covered. The February 17, 1988 report explains there were no chrome plating tank covers. This is a link to this report:

Chrome Acid Spill of February 17, 1988

 

Calculations

A. Calculate the Maximum Chromic Acid Hourly Discharge Rate in PEL units of milligrams of Chromic Acid per cubic meter of air:

The page shows a maximum hourly discharge rate of 0.005513 grams of Chromic Acid per second. This is converted into milligrams per minute:

0.00513 grams/sec X 1000 milligrams/gram = 5.13 milligrams/second x 60 sec/min = 307.8 milligrams/minute

The combined air discharge rate from the two plating shop scrubbers is 17,000 cubic feet per minute + 10,557 cubic feet per minute = 27557 cubic feet per minute. This is converted into cubic meters per minute:

27557 cuFt/min / 35.31 cuMtr/cuFt = 780.3 cuMtr/min

To determine the Chromic Acid concentration the discharged milligrams per minute, 307.8 milligrams, is divided by the air discharge of 780.0 cuMtr/min:

307.8 mg/min / 780 cuMtr/min = 0.3946 Milligrams of Chromic Acid per Cubic Meter of Air.

This is 3.9 times the PEL

B. 0700 to 0900 Chromic Acid Discharge Rate in PEL units of milligrams of Chromic Acid per cubic meter of air:

The page shows a maximum hourly discharge rate of 0.003888 grams of Chromic Acid per second. This is converted into milligrams per minute::

0.003888 grams/sec X 1000 milligrams/gram = 3.88 milligrams/second x 60 sec/min = 233.2 milligrams/minute

To determine the concentration of Chromic Acid this is divided by the previously calculated air discharge rate of 780.3 cuMtr/min:

233.2 mg/min / 780.3 cuMtr/min = 0.29 Milligrams of Chromic Acid per Cubic Meter of Air

This is 2.9 times the PEL

C. 0900 to 1100 Chromic Acid Discharge Rate in PEL units of milligrams of Chromic Acid per cubic meter of air:

The page shows a maximum hourly discharge rate of 0.001260 grams of Chromic Acid per second. This is converted into milligrams per minute::

0.001260 grams/sec X 1000 milligrams/gram = 1.26 milligrams/second x 60 sec/min = 75.6 milligrams/minute

To determine the concentration of Chromic Acid this is divided by the previously calculated air discharge rate of 780.3 cuMtr/min:

75.6 mg/min / 780.3 cuMtr/min = 0.0969 Milligrams of Chromic Acid per Cubic Meter of Air

This level is so close to the PEL only a monster would act as if it was below it. It certainly is above the Action Level and requires Employee Notification and the implementation of actions to reduce exposure. Were you ever informed about this? Did you see any actions taken to protect you?

The Shipyard was a death trap. This is a pure and simple fact. Shipyard management knew all about it. They did everything in their power to keep it a secret. The reason for this is money and unimaginable amounts of it. The U.S. Navy does not want to pay the incredible injury compensation costs resulting from all the decades it poisoned, maimed and crippled its workers with Chromic Acid; particularly those closest to the plating shop in adjacent buildings 273 and 101. Rather than pay these costs it simply implemented a deep and complex scheme of denial and has continued to ruthlessly execute it for decades even up to now. It refused to take Chromic Acid air samples or to collect any other data that could be used by employees to justify an occupational injury claim. It was too bad for them Environmental Law caught up with them and forced them to provide this data to regulatory agencies. But these agencies were not immune to U.S. Navy influence. You should know that I made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) information request to the Air Resources Board in 1996 and went to their offices in San Francisco. There I was provided with a box of documents pertaining to Mare Island and access to a copy machine. I examined each and every document in that box and read each from top to bottom. Appendix 4 page 115 or any data that could be used to calculate the concentration of Chromic Acid in the air discharged from the plating shop was not in that box. If the Navy was forced to pay for all of the injury it has done the printing presses at the Treasury could run for a hundred years at full speed and not print enough money to cover the cost of all the valid claims. This is why no cost or effort required to avoid paying them was too much, too low, too dishonest or too dirty. The cost of the U.S. Navy performing chrome plating has been truly astronomical and it has been extracted secretly out of your health, the health of someone you know or someone you love. This cost has been extracted from the genetic health of generations to come.

In all my dealings with U.S. Navy people during the time from the time the Plating Shop Grievance was filed in 1996 up until today never has one every acted or spoken honestly. All they ever had to do to stop the grievance, and also to prevent this web site, was to present me with the chrome scrubber discharge data that showed discharges of Chromic Acid were well below the PEL and Action Limit. Now we know this was a pure impossibility. Not only did they not do this, they threw every possible obstacle down in my way. They used every delaying tactic. The committed perjury in writing to "win" the grievance hearing. The surrounded me at work with spies. They used their influence with every other "impartial" federal agency whose purpose it was to ensure the "playing field" between the Union and the Navy was fair and equitable to make sure it was not. The denied us every possible document. The emptied files and destroyed every plating shop document they could lay their hands on. They continually implemented schemes of entrapment against me that did not stop until I retired. They solicited my friends at work to entrap me in speech. They planted pornography in my desk. There was nothing left undone they could possibly do to make sure that no one ever found out that the Mare Island Electroplating Shop was a box full of uncovered bubbling pots of poisons whose vapors were secretly exhausted into the faces of everyone. Now, after years of searching, the one document they could not destroy or hide has finally been found and it conclusively demonstrates the Mare Island Electroplating shop routinely discharged Chromic Acid polluted air whose concentration of Chromic Acid was known by them, at that time, to cause delayed cancer, immediate injury, death, loss of health, and every other kind of physical malady, weakness and disability. I firmly believe there is nothing that can be done to ruin the workings of the human body that Chromic Acid cannot do.

In this world there are monsters who look like people and there is nothing they will not do to get what they want. They are rare and special and the Navy knows how to identify and use them. Normally, people who work at a Shipyard and who come in, work hard, do their jobs and go home don't get to meet them. But if you get involved in Union work they are everywhere and fill the ranks of the Human Resources Department, Injury Compensation Office, and Occupational Safety and Health Department. The same kind of monsters that worked at Mare Island to hide the fact the plating shop was a death machine do their cruel dastardly work at other Navy shipyards today. They are doing the same work for the same reason because the Navy is caught in a trap of its own making. It does not dare to provide water to its chrome plating scrubbers because to do this would result in the production of documentary evidence its employees have a right to view under current federal law. They would then know they are being poisoned. Look at the Puget Sound telephone book under Doctors and see how many cancer clinics and cancer specialists there are for such a small population. This is not an outbreak of "unexplained illness". It is the natural result of decades of Chromic Acid raining down of them that was discharged out of the Navy and other chrome plating shops that have been there for a very long time.

I had a conversation with a Nuclear Engineering Department supervisor whose name will go unmentioned some years ago. He was one of a number of unknowing innocent victim "sponges" assigned to sit at a cubicle located immediately adjacent to the chrome plating scrubber outlet. Arrows point to the scrubber and to the location of the cubicle.

One day, through some oversight, this cubicle was left vacant (probably because the last supervisor occupant just couldn't take it anymore) and a group of regular employees who were friends quickly moved into it because they liked the sun coming in through the window. They were promptly kicked out and nothing they could say could get them back into it. They were highly offended and called me in to address it as a Union matter. The explanation provided by the Division Head himself was that the cubicle was reserved for supervisors only and it was made clear to me there was no way this was fight that could be won. The poor supervisor sponges who were assigned to sit in that little torture chamber suffered and were certainly badly underpaid. Some even had the kind of spontaneous nose bleeds a big overexposure to chromic acid mist will cause. I am certain they had no idea of what had been done to them. I am certain the Chromic Acid secret was kept above their level.

There are cases today where people are poisoned by another in an attempt to kill them. We are all familiar with the huge Tylenol cyanide poisoning that took place about 20 years ago. One of the most rotten things about poisoning is that it's always done by someone the victim trusts. I think this lingering trust makes it very difficult for anyone, even someone who is severely poisoned by a relative to wrap their mind around the fact that they've actually been poisoned deliberately. I know that even when I found the Plating Shop Chrome Scrubber Spill Report of February 17, 1988 it took me a long long time to actually understand and internalize the fact my health had been ruined by a poising and it had been kept secret from me by people who I worked with, knew, liked and trusted. The data shown on Page 115 of Appendix 4 is for you just like what the Plating Shop Spill Report was for me. Now, you have data that you can take to a Doctor and if you are suffering you can have your case evaluated and diagnosed. This is something you did not have up until now and it is a very big and important thing.

You have 30 days from the moment the Doctor diagnoses your injury to be either caused by entirely, to be a pre-existing condition that has been aggravated by, or a delayed injury that was precipitated by an occupational factor like exposure to Chromic Acid to file a claim with the Department of Labor for injury compensation. If you do not file the claim within 30 days you have lost all rights and cannot possibly recover them ever. The law requires you to file a claim within 30 days of the moment you know your injury is work related. You are not a a Doctor and are not medically qualified and so you cannot KNOW any injury, disease or condition is work related until a qualified medical Doctor tells you it is. If you fill out a claim form make sure that you answer the question on it that says, "When did you first become aware your injury was work related" with "The moment my Doctor diagnosed it to be work related" and make sure you hand in that claim form in less than 30 days from that moment. Don't worry about filling in all the blanks. The Department of Labor claim examiner will get the Navy to fill them in. You just make sure you put your name on it, answer the questions you can answer, and sign it date it and turn it in within 30 days. The next thing to do is to contact the office of your Congressional Representative. Ask them to "track the progress" of your claim form. Do not ask them to "assist you" with it. They will be happy to track it which means it will move promptly through the system. Above all things, never ever make any kind of deliberate inaccurate statement on a Claim Form. If you don't know the answer leave the blank empty. Also, if you are asked about income be completely and absolutely honest. The Navy has rooms full of people whose job it is to find weaknesses in Occupational Injury Claim forms. If you have a loved one who has died from lung or sinus cancer, asthma or any other condition, and he worked at a Navy Shipyard, talk to a Doctor because the cancer or other cause of death may be related to Chromic Acid exposure. If he says it is and is willing to sign a letter saying so you've got a good basis for a claim. It doesn't hurt to ask and you have the right to see as many doctors as you want to. You don't have to see a Navy doctor or go to a Navy clinic. Under law you have the right to choose your Doctor.

My answer to that supervisor was that someone had to represent the victims and no one else was doing it.

The Navy has constructed a very craftily constructed system designed to deny occupational injury victims their rights and it's based on money; but not money for the victims. When a person becomes a supervisor he gets entered into the supervisor bonus system. The supervisor bonus system is a fairly well kept secret but it's basically a pot of money that's given to each Shipyard Shop or Department to be apportioned out to managers and supervisors. Needless to say, the higher a person is up on the management feeding chain the bigger the slice of this pie is served to him. But if you've ever wondered why a person would want to become a supervisor when the GS-12 to GS-13 pay difference is so small, now you know. The problem is this fund is directly linked to any cases of occupational injuries. The total cost of any occupational injury is directly subtracted from the management bonus fund for the year. This means that even one occupational injury claim in a Department can result in a huge slice of this pie being cut out of it. And, you can bet that any supervisor who has a subordinate who causes this to happen is going to be in very very bad odor with his supervisor and management friends. This explains why, even if a Shipyard supervisor strongly suspected he was being poisoned, he kept his mouth shut. But, even if a supervisor found out the plating shop was poisoning everyone, and he went around telling people, it would have been useless to do this because the Shipyard refused to take samples. The one and only thing that would have happened if a supervisor had warned his subordinates is that he would have been quickly reassigned to a nice quiet place where he could have been harassed until he quit. Without samples a victim cannot go to a doctor to get a diagnosis because the doctor cannot know the name of the chemical and how much the patient was exposed to.. Without a doctor's diagnosis there can be no approved occupational injury claim. Without an approved injury claim the supervisors bonus fund remained intact. There's no doubt in my mind this deliberately cruel system is in place at operating Navy Shipyards today. It's wonderfully simple and effective.

There's no doubt in my mind that anyone selected to become a supervisor was not briefed about these darker aspects of the supervisor system before he (or she) was promoted into it. These are things they would have found out afterward, when it was too late to do anything, except to go along with it. Besides, by saying anything about the plating shop a supervisor could have done nothing except to guarantee the complete destruction of his career, and any chance for a good job after he was forced to quit the Shipyard. The plating shop secret was so important I have no doubt that anyone in the ranks of supervisors who breathed even a word of his suspicions to anyone would have been crushed like a bug. The simple cruel fact of life is that any supervisor exposed to plating shop poisons was poisoned just as much as anyone else and I can't see how any of them could have done anything differently. The Navy has a nasty habit of making a good example by wrecking anyone who dares to try to help anyone who is injured at work. You can use this link to read about a prime example of this. I have no doubt every supervisor at Mare Island knew very well the dreadful fate that awaited him if he didn't keep his mouth shut good and tight and go along with the corrupt injury compensation program: Anyone who was a Mare Island Supervisor knows today if he opens his mouth and says the wrong thing about the plating shop he can just forget any kind of good job reference from the Navy if he looks for employment. This fact is amply demonstrated by this very important link:

Navy Supervisor Henrik Langhjelm Crushed Like A Bug by U.S. Navy As An Object Lesson

Cancers caused by occupational exposure to workplace toxins are known to be rapid onset, rapid progression, and resistant to treatment. Everyone exposed to Chromic Acid from the plating shop has been made liable to a fast death from cancer that will happen about three months from the time the victim presents himself to the doctor. Anyone poisoned by the plating shop pronouncing "Look at me! I'm healthy!" today should take some time to review the Vallejo Times Newspaper Obituaries to see how often one has been published saying, "Worked at Mare Island" and "Died after a short illness" before continuing to tempt fate because you may not have as long left to live as you think you do.

The Navy had absolutely no right to expose us to even the smallest amount of toxins from the Electroplating shop without our permission. They had no right under any law. They had no right to do it as a mistake. They had no right to do it as a condition of employment. There was absolutely no possible justification. It was a crime against humanity to hire persons and then put them in a location where they would be exposed to carcinogens and other poisons without their knowledge. Every person applying for a job with the Navy or any other employer has an inherent right to know every significant risk entailed with the job before they accept an offer of employment and exposure to powerful toxins and carcinogens is certainly one of these. The U.S. Navy violated every precept of every right every person has to be secure in their own bodies at Mare Island and they knew it then. The object lesson of Henrik Langhjelm demonstrates they know it today.

 

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