YOU ARE OWED LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY - READ ON AND FIND OUT

Welcome, Civilians, Retirees, Mare Islanders, Navy and Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, Government Workers and Other Victims To This Sad But Necessary Website.

You do not know it but you have been or are now being POISONED and your bodies are paying BIG for your work. You are not being told about this. Years of life are being secretly robbed from you and your family.

There are five reasons you should want to spend some time at this web site.

Reason 1:

The average American retiree lives about 15 years after retirement. This is to about age 70. The average life span of a U.S. Navy or other Navy affiliated shipyard retiree is about 16 months after retirement. This is about to age 56 so you are paying about 14 years of life that is secretly being robbed from you as a "reward" for your great job. This web site explains and demonstrates the causes of rapid ageing leading to premature shipyard retiree death. There is one more thing for you to consider. If you are a shipyard employee and your paycheck is inflated with overtime that you did not actually work then you should understand that no one gives away money for nothing. This fake overtime is a lot of "free" money and it has a name. This is "death wages" and you are being paid extra money in return for your shortened life and other health risks that you do not know about. If you are a U.S. Navy shipyard professional or clerical employee the U.S. Navy will not pay you death wages. This is true even if the circumstances and adverse health effects of your work are identical to those of another worker being paid death wages; and they probably are. Maybe you should talk to your Union about this. If your co-workers deserve death wages don't you? Your life is being shortened also. You deserve the death pay, retroactively, and with interest.

If you are or ever were a U.S. Government employee and you were ever secretly exposed to any amount of certain poisons they you should have been paid a special pay called "Hazardous Duty Pay" or HDP. This special pay has two benefits. The first is your bi-weekly paycheck is larger but the second, and massively greater benefit, is that when you are older and become sick or weak you are immediately elegible for Federal Employee Injury Benefits. When you are exposed to a known poison you have an absolute right to HDP just as you have a right to overtime pay when you work overtime. The reason you are not paid HDP is the people at your Federal Employer who count the money have made a conscious decision to rob you of this pay in order to avoid having to pay for the illnesses they have caused and that they know all about. If the danger you are experiencing is massive then they will, in many cases, soothe their burnt consciences by paying you overtime pay you did not earn. This is called the payment of death wages.

The reason your federal employer is so anxious to rob you of the Federal Injury Benefits is lots of money. The federal injury benefits program is run by the Federal Department of Labor (DOL). They are the ones who have the responsiblity. Prior to 1974 the DOL paid all claims but in that year the policy was changed so that the employer paid all claims. Prior to 1974 the DOL decided all claims. In 1974 it was decided that the employer should "administrate" all claims. This is called "Putting the Fox in Charge of the Chicken Coop" or if you are injured at work you lose. Mare Island used a number of techniques to "discourge" approved injury claims. Some of these may be used at your employer. These included reaching out to local doctors and giving them free trips to seminars so that the doctor would ask the claims office about the applicant before making a diagnosis. Needless to say the claims office would tell the doctor the employee was a faker and malingerer. Another tactic was to staff the claims office with people who got big bonuses for fewer approved claims. The number of dishonest tehcniques used by federal employers is endless but you can be sure on top of the heal is to make absolutely certain you never get paid Hazardous Duty Pay.

The one and only way to get the HDP you deserve is for your Union to file a grievance against your employer. The only problem with this is the empoyer will immediately attempt to generously bribe your Union officials to drop the grievance or to not prosecute it effectively. The amount of money involved is huge and so you should expect the employer to fight to win no matter what it may cost them or you. You may want to consider forming a group to hire a lawer to keep an eye on how things are going.

Reason 2:

There are some industrial processes that are so intensely poisonous they cannot be made safe but which must be done by human beings and that are absolutely necessary to the making and eminence of military ships, submarines. planes and other weapons. The worst of these will be found at shipyards and other maintenance bases. First and foremost among these is the electroplating of metal. Second is the welding and grinding of stainless steel. The metal plating process uses hideously poisonous chemicals that are released into the air all shipyard and other workers breathe. Welding and grinding of stainless steel releases the supremely powerful cancer causing chemical hexavalent chrome. The overall effect of all this release of various poisons is a highly increased rate of cancers, birth defects, lung diseases, sinus diseases, and many other permanent and severe adverse heath effects. All the various poisons combine and multiply causing a vastly increased health wrecking effect. Those people exposed to these chemicals who do not die quickly get their lives shortened. This life shortening usually becomes evident only when one reaches retirement age. My advice to those receiving death wages is save this extra money and don't buy toys and, vacations and custom homes with it. You will be needing this money when your health collapses. This will come sooner than you think. Everyone working now or who ever worked at such bases should be paid at least 100% retroactive hazardous duty pay with interest. Talk to your Union about this.

Reason 3:

If the base you work at has a metal plating shop it is an invisible volcano of hugely harmful quantities of super toxic poisons you cannot fee, smell or taste. These poisons are robbing you of years of your life and making the end of your life more painful and difficult for you and your family. You cannot feel this process now, but you certainly will feel it. The reason for this is very simple. It is dust, normal dust. The pollution control devices installed on the outlet of air ventilation fans installed in the plating shops to protect the people who work in them have a huge defect. The pollution control devices are called "scrubbers". Their purpose is to remove the many billions of small particles of poisons that are released into the air by the metal plating processes. The scrubbers are continually self-washing and remove these poisons and keep themselves clean. These poison particles dissolve in water. Scrubbers are designed to remove particles that dissolve in water. Scrubbers are also super effective at removing normal particles of dust from the air. These do not dissolve in water, are not washed out of the scrubbers, build up and clog them in a short time. In any normal industrial environment where there are people, machines and activity a lot of dust is generated. The scrubbers make the plating shop ventilation system to be a huge vacuum cleaner whose "bag" is never emptied. Just like any normal vacuum cleaner, when the scrubbers quickly become full of dirt they clog and don't filter the air fill of poison particles from the metal plating processes and release it into the air for you to breathe. A metal plating shop absolutely must have two air filtration systems to be safe for everyone. It needs a complete air filtration system to clean the air coming into the shop to remove the normal dirt from it to keep the scrubbers working as they were designed to do. If this first air filtration system is not installed the result is the scrubbers quickly fill up with dirt and then they don't work. The U.S. Navy plating shops, none of them, have this absolutely necessary front air filtration system. The result is shortened lives and health misery at the end of life. All you need to do is to go and take a good look at the plating shop at your base. If your shop does not have a large building with an "input" air filtration system installed in it then you need to get your Union to file an emergency grievance to get you the long overdue hazardous duty pay and to get such a system installed fast.

Reason 4:

There is a very good reason you cannot smell, taste or feel the poisons that are robbing you of years of your life. Some of them are anesthetics. When you are exposed to them at first, and for a very short time you may smell a strange burnt sugar kind of smell. This is the deadly poison cyanide that was used in the Nazi Death Chambers at Auschwitz. The deadly poison Cyanide is a very common chemical that is necessary for many metal plating processes. It is used in extremely large quantities and large quantities of it are released to the air. You will only smell it for a short time because it is so incredibly deadly it kills the nerves in the nose. The amount of cyanide that will easily fit on the top of a large nail head will easily kill 100 people. When you are exposed to it, it stops your nose from being able to smell. The chemical "hexavalent chrome" (hex-chrome) is used inside plating shops for chrome plating, to clean metal and to corrosion-proof aluminum. It is a contact anesthetic. When you are exposed to it you cannot smell it. The effect of hex-chrome is insidious. When it gets into the body it is a super radical that has permanent effects upon the body and, even more importantly, it is a trans-generational genetic poison. It seeds your children with genetic damage that will cause birth defects in your grandchildren and following generations. It also causes lung cancer with a 20 year average delay period along with many other forms of cancer that are known to be super aggressive cancers. It turns the inside of your lungs into leather making it harder and harder for you to breathe. It causes heart disease. There is no known safe level of exposure to hex-chrome. If you are exposed to even tiny amounts of it, even infrequently, you should be paid huge amounts of hazardous duty pay that is retroactive and with interest.

Reason 5:

No one, including any medical doctor, can tell you what the symptoms are when you are poisoned with anything. The cruel fact is if you are poisoned you are going to find this out for yourself the hard way by living with it. The law forbids to expose human beings to known poisons to find out what these poisons do. The result of this is almost nothing is known about what poisons do to a human being. Every ting in the medical books is just guesses. The super poisonous chemicals used in metal plating shops were invented over 100 years ago. Since then crude safety measures to keep the workers inside the shops alive long enough have been invented. But no one every thought about what these poisons did to the people outside the shops. Another big problems is that when a human being is exposed to multiple poisons the poisons do not just add to each other, they multiply each other. If you are exposed to a group of five poisons released from a plating shop the effect in your body, if the total poison effect of each poison is 2 years of life cut from your life; the total effect of all five poisons is 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32 years. Most plating shops will pollute the outside air with at least five lethal poisons if not more.

Reason 6:

If you think your supervisors or managers are going to protect you, warn you or inform you about the poisons you are being exposed to then think again. They are not your friends and cannot be your friends. Many supervisors and managers know exactly what is happening but they keep their mouths shut. The reason for this is money. Every government department has a slush fund called a "bonus fund" used to reward managers and supervisors every year. It is a very common policy for the cost of all occupational injuries in any department to be subtracted out of the bonus fund. Any manager or supervisor who does anything to risk even a penny being taken out of this fund is going to be hated by all the other managers and supervisors and he will not be promoted. If you believe anyone is going to protect you then you should think again. You deserve to be paid full retroactive hazardous duty pay with interest for all the years you have been poisoned. Go to your Union and demand they take action for you.

The Most Important Reason:

Any metal plating shop will emit a lot of different poisons but one of them, the most important one, Hex Chrome, is by far the worst. The reason for this is it poisons your grandchildren and their children and grandchildren. Basically, it ruins your family line by seeding your descendants with genetic defects that take a generation to be expressed. This happens by your being exposed to it; even tiny amounts of it. The reason for this is simple. Hex Chrome is what is called a "Trans Generational Genetic Poison" or TGGP. Hex Chrome causes a lot of different kinds of cancer. Cancer is a disease of the DNA and so it is a genetic disease. This cancer causing ability of Hex Chrome makes it a genetic poison. Hex Chrome is a super powerful cancer causing chemical. The thing about it that makes it Trans Generational is its uniquely tremendous and selective DNA destructive power. Most poisons that get into your body are neutralized by the liver and excreted through the urine. Hex Chrome is unique because the liver has no method to detect it or to process it. This means it must circulate in the body until it has been worn out by doing damage. Hex Chrome is the ultimate "free radical". Most, if not all, other "free radical" type chemicals that get into the body have an electrical charge of +1. This makes them easy for the body to neutralize. Hex Chrome has a incredible charge of +6. This means it can only be neutralized by something in the body that can only be damaged by such a large electrical charge and this is mostly the DNA in the reproductive system. To put it a simpler way, when animal skins are tanned and turned into leather it takes the process using natural ingredients like tree bark extracts 12 months to complete; when Hex Chrome is used to tan leather it takes 30 minutes to do the same job. When you are exposed to Hex Chrome you are undergoing the process of being turned into leather and leather cannot have children. Hex Chrome is painless because it is an anesthetic. Hex Chrome has been called a "de-natureant" for at least 100 years. This term means it removes what it touches from nature. This ought to tell you that the people who have been exposing you to it know exactly what it does to you. 100 years ago doctors used to use Hex Chrome to remove warts, but they give this practice up when the warts were soon replaced with an aggressive tumor that killed the patient. A lot of innocent people have been secretly exposed to this stuff and there are a lot of descendants who suffer because of inherited birth defects of all kinds caused by it. Don't you think enough is enough?

Why have you not been paid?

You have not been paid because the amount of money involved is so vast no one can afford to pay it. So the matter of Hex Chrome poising has been kept secret just like the effects of asbestos were kept secret. Imagine if all of the victims and affected descendants of over 100 years of deliberate Hex Chrome poisoning were to be awarded a fair and just award by a court of law? Do you imagine that anyone could possibly pay it? Hex Chrome is a scandal far worse that asbestos ever was but it is still a secret. Why is it a secret? No one has enough money to pay the costs of what they have done. If you worked at a Navy or other Government shipyard you depended upon the other employees who were hired to protect your health in the Occupational Health Department to warn and protect you; but they did not. The Government was very careful when it came to selecting the head managers of these departments. These managers had no consciences and cared only for their personal careers, promotions and yearly bonus payments. Just the "right" kind of people were selected. I believe they were all psychopaths. These "managers" made sure the people under their supervision kept their mouths shut or they would be punished. Anyone who dared to even speak of hex chrome poising was made subject to a cruel severe regime of work place harassment, intimidation and punishment designed to hurt them to shut them up. I know all about this because as Union President I handled such cases as they were prosecuted against innocent employees who only wanted to protect the other workers. Now it's your turn. You need to find layers who will do the WORK to get you paid what is owned to you because if you don't you will get nothing.

The Poisoning at Mare Island is NOT an isolated occurrence; it is Normal at all shipyards and all other metal plating shops everywhere.

The Mare Island Shipyard Metal Plating Shop and all other U.S. Navy and other U.S. Government Metal Plating Shops

Were Are The Factories of

Severely Shortened Worker Life

Childhood Autism, Family illness

Premature Death,

Birth Defects, Cancer, Lung Disease and Other Incurable Diseases.

 

This is a picture of the Mare Island Shipyard metal plating shop as it is today. This building released vast quantities of highly toxic chemicals into the air. There are three reasons for this and they are strongly related to money (and lots of it), fear contempt, ignorance and Navy Prostitutes. Here they are:

1. Money: You can see the air vents all around the top edge of the building. These vents were used to allow air to enter the building so that the safety system that sucked air from above the tanks full of toxic chemicals inside the building was removed from the air the workers in the shop would breathe. This air was then carried through vent pipes to air scrubbers on the building roof and then vented to the open atmosphere. The scrubbers are basically boxes full of pieces of plastic upon which water is sprayed. The droplets of poison pulled from above the poison tanks hit the plastic pieces and the flowing water rinses the poison off of the plastic pieces and carries the poison away. It's all quite simple but it is extremely expensive if it is done right. The water that leaves the scrubber becomes so contaminated with the poison it becomes federal and state hazardous waste. This means it can only be disposed of by specially trained people, with lots of paperwork, in 50 gallon drums that must be shipped by a special shipper to a specially designated repository. The cost is about $500.00 per gallon with all things considered. A typical scrubber will turn about 11,500 gallons of clean fresh water into hazardous waste a day and this costs about $5,750.000 per day. This is far too much money. It's just easier to not provide water to the scrubbers and to let the poisons be released into the atmosphere so everyone on the shipyard gets to breathe them at the cost of years of their lives.

2. Fear: The scrubbers are given absolutely no preventative maintenance. As you can see from the above picture the air inlets to the plating shop have no filters installed on them. Shipyard air is very dirty air. A shipyard is a hard core industrial place with many welders, grinding machines and other industrial processes that create a lot of dust and dirt that gets released into the air. The plating shop itself had 12 huge grinders in it that fed their dust to the scrubbers. If you look at any shipyard you will easily see most of the buildings contain numerous air outlet pipes and just about all of them are dumping something into the air. The plating shop sucks a lot of this air into itself. It's like a huge vacuum cleaner and the scrubbers are the dirt bags. Over time, and not a lot of it, this muck in the general shipyard air gets pulled into the plating shop. Then it gets captured in the scrubbers. When all this metal dirt, grinding dust and other industrial airborne waste combines in the scrubber with the poison chemicals from inside the shop it forms a very hard rock like deposit on the plastic pieces. Over time this deposit grows and welds the plastic pieces together and finally it blocks the scrubbers. When this happens the liquid poison droplets carried in the air condense in the scrubber and begin to flow back through the air pipes and drips back into the plating tanks. The plating tanks are full of very expensive supremely toxic chemicals. The chemicals are very expensive because they must be very pure to produce the high quality results the navy needs. The tank contents are very quickly ruined by this back flow of dirty water. This is when the plating shop has an emergency problem big enough to compel some scrubber maintenance. The reason this maintenance has been delayed is fear and fear for good reasons.

The problem with scrubber maintenance is human beings have to do it. Every worker on the shipyard knows the plating shop is a bad place and they are terrified of it. This is because they know the workers in the plating shop. They tend to be sick a lot and have a greenish color to their skin. Plating shop workers go to the shipyard clinic to complain where the factory doctors tell them to quit whining and get back to work. No one in his right mind wants to be like them. Everyone knows the scrubbers are packed full of every kind of poison there is. No one wants to work on them and I mean no one. I was never able to figure out how the shipyard ever got anyone to clean out a clogged scrubber. All I can think is they must have been given lots and lots of extra money in the form of performance awards or perhaps their paychecks were padded with a lot of overtime they never worked. It was just easier to let the scrubbers fill with rock meaning everyone on the shipyard got to breathe very strong poisons that shortened their lives without knowing it.

3. Contempt: The third reason is contempt. The navy has complete, absolute and total contempt for its civilian employees. The navy does not care it is slowly murdering them. This is demonstrated by the presence of the five story building behind the plating shop. It's just too close to the plating shop. Everything that was discharged out of the roof of the plating shop was discharged into the adjacent building. In actual cruel fact the plating shop was actually the main source of breathing air for the adjacent building. This building was the Nuclear Engineering Building. It was full of all kinds of engineers, secretaries, managers and other workers who are supposedly valuable. All of these unfortunate people were at Ground Zero for being poisoned. The way we know the Navy knew all about this is the fifth floor. If you look at the side of this building that faces the plating shop you will see the windows have all been bricked up. This work has been expertly done and concealed to make everything look as normal as possible from the outside. But if you can get into this building and go to the fifth floor the windows are still visible and they are all filled with bricks. These bricks kept victims from being poisoned enough to be taken to the hospital but not enough to prevent many of them from having 15 or more years erased from their lives.

4. Ignorance: It is medically forbidden to expose human beings to known poisons to find out what those poisons do to them. This means that for a lot of poisons used in industry almost nothing is known about what they do to human beings who work with or who are exposed to them. This may seem strange but it is the way things are. Most, if not all, of the extremely deadly chemicals used in the plating shop were invented long before the words "industrial hygiene" were invented back in the 1920's. They got invented, got used carelessly, people using them died young, and practices and procedures that allowed the chemicals to be used with people dying more slowly became adapted. There was no science involved in this process.

It is now well known that when a human being is exposed to multiple deadly chemicals at the same time the result is not that the poisonous effects add up. They actually multiply. There is no book of any kind that anyone can go to and find out just how incredibly toxic the mixture of deadly poisons discharged from the plating shop are. There is no way to find out what all that deadly stuff actually did to people except for them to be exposed to it and for them to have to endure the effects. There is no such thing as a poison "antidote". The antidote is a thing of fiction and movies; not for real life. Once a person has had his health broken or broken by being exposed to the deadly poisons discharged out of the plating shop he has to live with it until he dies and there is nothing any doctor can do to make it any better. There is no doctor who can advise him about what is coming next. The effects of the poisoning are going to unfold over time and nothing can be done to stop this.

The long and the short of the situation, even today, is very simple. This is no one can tell you what the toxic mix of deadly poisons being emitted from shipyard plating shops today is doing to people except for one thing. It is all bad. The effects can range from immediate lung cancer to having your heath collapse at the age of 56. What will happen to you is probably somewhere in-between but this is not certain. All anyone can know for sure is exposure to the air released from a shipyard metal plating shop does health damage and the longer you breathe it the more damage is done. Some people only need a little of it to be finished. Some need a lot. There's no way to tell. My advice is no matter how much you are paid if you work anywhere that has a plating shop find another job as fast as you can.

5. Navy Prostitutes: The navy has no problem finding and paying people who will lie for them. This is necessary in time of war to protect secrets. As Winston Churchill famously said, "During war truth must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies". It's the same all the time at the Shipyards. The U.S. Navy must have new ships. Making new ships costs people their health. It is inherently unsafe. Human beings must make them. Shipyards are life-shortening places that people would not work at if they knew the cost to their health and life-span. Lies are necessary. It's as simple as that. The navy has no problem finding and training convincing liars to say comforting things to its workers. It has no problem constructing a fake phony "Industrial Health and Safety" department whose real job is to create false documents and to lie and manipulate to create the impression of safety in the complete absence of it.

The simple fact is the real situation is all explained by kitchens and bathrooms. The air that comes out of a kitchen smells good. It smells good because it's tiny bits of the food that are being cooked being carried through the air to your nose. Imagine what it would take to stop it. How much money would you need to spend to equip your kitchen with air fans and filters so that you would not smell what is cooking? The same goes for bathrooms. What goes on there gets to your nose and you know what it is. It's the same for a metal plating shop. The U.S. Navy will not spend the money it takes to make sure that tiny particles of the deadly chemicals used inside one do not escape into the outside air the workers breathe. It would cost too much. Instead it's easier to purchase technical prostitutes, hacks, dishonest managers and all the other psychopaths needed to fill the workforce with enough comforting lies to make sure the ships get built.

A typical Navy expert industrial hygienist prostitute will say: "It's a dose to response relationship. There is a dose of poison small enough so that there is no physical effect". They will say this under oath. And even though it is a lie they believe it because they are paid to believe it. They also know they will be severely punished if they do not say it. The fact is that it is now known that for some chemicals, and the most serious of these is the chemical used for chrome plating, there is absolutely no safe dose. There is no amount of this that you can be exposed to and still remain safe. This fact is published by the State of California itself. Yet the safety prostitutes hired by the navy repeat the same lie over and over again.

My advise is simple and it has two parts. First: Believe your nose. If your bathroom stinks then so does the plating shop. The only difference is that the smells coming out of your bathroom are not likely to ruin your health permanently. But the deadly chemicals coming out of the plating shop can turn off your nose so you have no warning even if that place is belching out a enough poison to cause you to lie dying of lung cancer in 3 years. Second: why not ask the shipyard commander for a guided tour of the plating shop? You might find his reply interesting. My guess is if you have the guts to do this he will make sure the next thing that happens to you is that you get fired on one trumped up pretext or another and what does this tell you about the deadliness of the metal plating shop?

Update 5/27/16: New Scientific research released early on March 26, 2016 and in July, 2015 have conclusively determined that Autism is a physical brain defect formed during pregnancy as a result of genetic damage. Autism is a genetic disease caused by genetic damage. I sincerely believe the root cause of Autism is genetic damage caused by exposure of one or both of the parents of an Autistic child, or the exposure of one or both of the grandparents or great-grandparents to the same Chromic Acid (hexavalent chromium) emitted in vast quantities from the U.S. Navy metal plating shops at Mare Island and all other U.S. Navy run metal plating shops across this nation for decades. Here is

Here is a direct link to the Scientific article about Autistic Brain Damage posted on the Internet:

Autism Study Results\

Here is a direct link to the Scientific article describing the discovery Autistic Brain Damage is caused by Genetic Damage:

Autism Genetic Damage

 

Introduction: If all you do is take the 15 minutes needed to read this Introduction to this large website this is enough. The Navy is always happy to publicize and obtain lots of press coverage whenever one of its new warships is launched. These ships protect us and it is necessary they be the best and the best of anything is always very expensive. We are all aware of the very large money cost to build an aircraft carrier, missile cruiser or destroyer. But what very few people are aware of is the equally huge health cost that is extracted from the workers who build them, the people who live in the vicinity of the shipyards where they are built and maintained, and in the misery that is passed on to unlimited generations of descendants of all of these innocent victims who have absolutely no idea of the incredible price they are paying that is being secretly extracted from their bodies to build and maintain ships.

The one thing that is responsible for all of this human misery now and to come is a single building located in every shipyard. Usually it's a small building and it's purpose is never visible from its exterior. It is the building where chrome metal is plated onto steel ship parts using uniquely toxic chemical baths and electricity. We are all used to chrome bumpers on cars and these cause no fear. But chrome is the hardest metal there is and when a thick coating of it is put onto a steel ship part that undergoes heavy loads and stress that part is provided with a super increased lifetime that is vastly increased over a part that is not heavily chrome plated. It's a process that produces parts for ships that win battles so no one argues with it. The need for chrome plating is obvious to everyone.

When a ship part is chrome plated large amounts of very fine chrome chemical bath droplets mist are discharged out of the plating shop and into the ambient air. This is done to protect the workers inside the shop building. One would suppose that the U.S. Navy being a U.S. Government entity and having access to almost unlimited personnel and money would be the most careful user of the super toxic chrome plating mists and would spend what it takes to capture, control and safely dispose of this poison before it can get to people. But, as this web site more than amply demonstrates this is not done. The U.S. Navy intentionally releases large amounts of this super toxic chemical into the ambient air where shipyard workers will unknowingly breathe it and where wind currents can carry it just about anywhere.

There are two stories about the life robbing and health destructive effects of the super toxic chemicals released from U.S. Navy plating shops that clearly show what I'm talking about. The first comes from 1983 when I began work at the Mare Island Shipyard. I was getting a hair cut at the Sportsman's Barber Shop in Vallejo. While I was waiting my turn the Vallejo City Coroner was getting his hair cut and was talking to the barber. I heard him say, "The one thing I can't figure out is why the average life expectancy of a Mare Island retiree is only 18 months". That got my attention. The second story is more recent. it comes from an episode of the modern TV series, "American Pickers". The two pickers had come to the home of an ex-shipyard worker who had a wonderful collection of things the pickers wanted to buy. They asked the owner why he was selling such choice valuable rare items and he replied, "When I retired from the shipyard I noticed my friends who worked there with me would retire and then they would quickly die so I need to sell this stuff before it's my turn". This also got my attention and it should get your attention. I can think of only one thing that is common to all shipyards that could have this universal and severe life-shortening effect and this is the metal plating shop where chrome is plated onto ship parts.

The worst thing about being poisoned is the victim is always the last to know. What reasonable person could possibly suspect that a U.S. Government organization as large, wealthy and important, and as protective of our National Security as the U.S. Navy would be deliberately and intentionally poisoning and shortening the lives of its workers? Add to this the fact that the U.S. Navy is always bombarding its workers with message to "work safely" and that "their health is the Navy's main concern" or "You have a right to a healthful work place" and other insincere trash its no wonder no one wakes up to the fact that the workers lives have been shortened and their health ruined by the secret poisoning that has been deliberately and secretly done to them. They never wake up to this fact even when their lives are ended shortly after they retire at the age of 55.

The super toxic chrome poison spewed from the U.S. Navy metal plating shops across this nation not only slices off decades of life from the shipyard workers and their families. It passes incredible misery down through the lives of their innocent descendants. In 1983 this chrome chemical called "Chromic Acid" otherwise known as hexavalent chromium or hex-chrome was thought to be merely a nuisance material that ruined the finish on car paint. Today it is known to be the second most powerful cancer causing chemical. Today it is known to cause sinus and lung cancer after a delay period of about 20 years. But there is much more. Any chemical that causes cancer is also a genetic poison. Today it is known that hex-chrome causes human genetic damage serious enough to cause birth defects that can be passed down through subsequent generations. One would suppose that all this bad news about hex chrome would stimulate the U.S. Navy to move to the forefront of those industries stringently controlling the emission of this ultra-super toxic chemical, but this is not so. They proceed as normal killing and maiming people who will be born 100 or more years from now to save money today.

The first reason for all this poisoning is the oldest one in the world: money. It is incredibly expensive to capture the hex chrome mist generated by chrome metal plating. It is incredibly expensive to dispose of the hazardous waste generated when it is properly controlled. It would cost fortunes every day to hire and train the special people needed to establish, maintain and control the minimum necessary equipment and systems necessary to keep us safe. But on top of this there is one over riding main reason the U.S. Navy refuses to do the necessary things.

In the U.S. Navy production is king-emperor-God at the shipyards. The use of U.S. Navy ships is tightly scheduled based upon military necessity. When a ship enters a shipyard for maintenance absolutely nothing must interfere with or delay the scheduled departure date of that ship. And the more modern or the larger (like an aircraft carrier) the ship is the more this golden rule applies. The establishment of a safe and secure control regime for the discharge of hex-chrome into ambient air from a U.S. Navy plating shop would automatically take "stop-work" shipyard wide control out of the hands of admirals in Washington D.C. and hand it over to mere low-level hirelings running the metal plating shop pollution control equipment. This would put ship movement schedule destroying power in the hands of low level environmental hirelings with nothing to loose. This possibility is an absolute absurd worst possible nightmare to the Washington D.C. Admirals and Politicians who control the movement of U.S. Navy ships and it will never happen except for one thing. There is no escaping the thing that is coming.

I am absolutely certain that exposure of individuals to hex-chrome is responsible for the current epidemic of the incredibly horrible human brain birth defect called Autism. I am certain the epidemic scale outbreak of Autism we are suffering under today is the result of the exposure to hex chrome of the grandparents and/or parents of these afflicted children that took place back in the 1960's. Given that the U.S. Navy has continued it's incredibly bad habits with hex-chrome up to today there's no doubt in my mind that this Autism epidemic will continue to grow until at least two generations after the U.S. Navy and other dangerous users of hex-chrome get a grip on the situation and stop emitting this chemical into the environment to the point where the U.S. Population no longer sustains severe genetic damage from being exposed to incredibly small amounts of it.

Every day vast amounts of money are being poured into the search for the cause of Autism. Two years ago it was not known that Autism is caused by genetic damage. Now it is known this is the cause. One month ago it was not known that physical brain damage is Autism. Now it is known. The question being answered now is "what causes this genetic damage". It is certainly now proven to not be the result of childhood vaccinations; but it has to be something historically recent and genetically damaging. Chrome plating did not become popular until the late 1950's. My answer is simple. Any chemical, like Hex-chrome, that causes severe genetic damage to the sinuses which are as close to the Frontal Cortex of the brain as anything can be, can certainly cause genetically caused physical damage to the Frontal Cortex itself and this is what Autism is. In time, I am certain, this will be discovered by science that is working now to find it. When this day comes, and I hope it comes as soon as later today, there will be no escaping the consequences of this fact.

The reason the U.S. Navy has stopped at nothing to keep its decades long poisoning a secret is money. It is the vast, almost infinite and uncountable amounts of money that must be paid to compensate all of its victims from the past, the present and those yet to be born. Just think of it. The U.S. Navy owes more compensation money than all the money printing presses of the world could possibly print in a thousand years. And the sad fact is they just might owe some of it to you or to your grandchildren.

In 1988 the U.S. Navy, through ignorance, accident and circumstance, poisoned me and others with enough hex-chrome to kill us yet we lived. We were poisoned but left uninformed about this and let to go home and vomit into the toilet for weeks while fate determined whether we would live or die. I have lived since then, but not well and not in good health and not with much strength. Fortunately for you I had been properly educated to figure out what had happened once fortune put enough clues in front of me. I am amazed to still be alive. Many of my old shipyard friends are dead. This web site has taken over 20 years of constant searching to find the documents necessary to prove the U.S. Navy to be the poisoner it is. It seems like yesterday I walked into my house, went to the bathroom and started to vomit for two weeks. I think of all my "friends" at the shipyard who knew all about the poising and yet said and did nothing and you should consider this also.

I have lived through many many complex schemes of entrapment at work designed to put me into a position where I would give up my incriminating papers or to destroy my personal reputation so that all that has been written here would be more unbelievable than it actually is. I could write an entire book about all of this but it's not important to the point. The point is the Autism epidemic will not begin to decline until at least two generations have passed from the day the emission of hex-chrome into the environment is reduced to safe levels everywhere. Currently the State of California considers there is no safe level of exposure to Hex-chrome. The adequate control of Hex-chrome will require huge amounts of very intrusive and comprehensive enforcement and the application of technology only slightly less expensive than the cost of injury compensation for the injury already done. But it is necessary because if the current Autism epidemic is allowed to continue it will grow to be more than anything else. It doesn't take too much of a leap of the imagination to come to the conclusion that any unstoppable epidemic of anything has the potential to wreck society. Ask yourself: how many people does it take to care for one autistic child over his or her lifetime? How much does it cost? How many autistic children are necessary to absorb enough of any state or federal budget to wreck it? What about all the misery to come?

I knew a man at work who had an Autistic son and asked him what it was like. He said his life was a nightmare. There is no magic bullet drug for Autism as their is for AIDS.

Forward:

Data available on the Internet and reproduced in this site conclusively demonstrates that the U.S. Navy is the lowest, most despicable and loathsome criminal there is: A deliberate and intentional poisoner and murderer of its employees and innocent civilians who are alive now and those who will be born in the future. If you want to see this data for Mare Island just use this link:

The U.S. Navy is a Poisoner Murderer

This poisoning is has taken place for many decades and is ongoing at an unknown number of sites throughout the USA today in 2016. If you are located next to any U.S. Navy controlled facility of any kind it is in your very best interests to find out if this site has a Metal Electroplating Shop and, if it does, to do everything you can to get your local or state worker safety officials to pay a visit to this Shop and issue a written report to you about the toxic nightmare they find.

This is not a fun site and there is a lot of information in it and so I'm going to answer the question, "why should you care enough to stay here long enough to learn something?". The answer is simple. Wherever there is now or once was a chrome plating shop there is also an elevated cancer rate. Just Google cancer maps and then do a search for chrome plating shops. You will quickly see that they go together. The next question is "why isn't anyone doing anything about this?" The answer is simply chrome plating is absolutely necessary for many important things that we take for granted like airplanes, printing presses, high power engines, food and many other things so there's no getting away from it. The next question is, "why isn't the release of toxic chrome plating chemicals into the environment properly controlled?". The answer is greed. It costs a lot of money to eliminate toxic chrome being emitted into the environment from industrial activities that use and release it. There are not enough regulators and people can be very sneaky where money is concerned. The final question is why is chrome from industrial use so toxic when we actually need some chrome in our bodies to promote good heath? The answer is the hexavalent chrome used in industry is a man made thing that is completely and absolutely un natural. It does not exist in nature like the forms of chrome our bodies need. This hexavalent chrome is foreign and highly toxic to the workings of our bodies and the bodies of everything else that lives like dogs, horses, pigs, fishes, birds, trees, and flowers. There is nothing in our bodies that knows how to handle it, treat it or eliminate it once it gets in. The industrial chrome has an electronic power of six (6) and it acts like a free radical once it gets into the body. This free radical nature allows it to move around and damage the DNA anywhere in the body. It's electronic power of 6 is titanic. This electronic power is far stronger than any other free radical you can possibly inhale or ingest. This titanic electrical damage power makes it like a lightning bolt when it gets to the DNA and it will do permanent damage to the DNA. This is why it is so strong of a cancer causer. But this DNA damage goes even further than personal cancer. It damages the DNA so badly that the DNA damage is inheritable down through your children and grandchildren. This means these genetic defects will go downstream and have the potential to come together and cause severe and untreatable genetic defects years from now. Now you know the answer to the basic questions about why you should care about hexavalent chrome. The purpose of this web site is to show how an extremely large industrial scale user and discharger (U.S. Navy) of this deadly form of chrome is today discharging vast quantities of it into the air and water that you breathe and drink. The U.S. Navy is very clever in its campaign of deception and cover up and so this is why this site is a little complex. But you better believe it.

If you live in an area where there is a shipyard within a half hour driving distance you should look at local cancer maps to see if your home is in a high cancer area. Chances are good it is. You also may want to go to a local library and look in old phone books to find out if there ever were any commercial metal plating shops in your vicinity in the past. Here is why you are being poisoned and made liable to cancer in a nutshell. Chrome is the hardest metal there is. A diamond has a hardness rating of 10 and chrome is 9. There is no metal that even comes close to being as hard as chrome. This hardness means if a metal piece is coated with a thick enough coating of chrome it will have a greatly increased service life and will not fail due to wear unless the service the metal piece is exposed to is extremely severe. This is why the Navy needs hard chrome plating the same way a heroin addict needs a fix. The landing gear of fighter jets that land on aircraft carriers are exposed to the most severe service of anything made by the hand of man. The forces a fighter jet landing gear are exposed to when a jet lands on an aircraft carrier are so great the parts will not last beyond even one landing unless they are thickly coated with chrome. Since the time the aircraft carrier was invented the airplanes that land on them have become heavier, faster and more powerful. These factors have resulted in increasing forces on the aircraft landing gear and other control surfaces. These increasing forces have been compensated for by improvements in the design of this landing gear and also, most importantly, by improvements in the chrome plating applied to these parts. To put it in a nutshell, the Navy has worked with chrome plating, improved it and worked out the procedures to do it so the landing gear have a reasonable service life. The Navy must do its own chrome plating because only the Navy knows how to do it the way it needs to be done. But, even with all this the landing gear don't last very long and even today the Navy is spending a lot of money looking for better alternatives to its traditional chrome plating, but without much success. If you would like to learn all there is to know about the Navy need for chrome plating and its search for alternatives you can view this report:

DOD Report on Chrome Plating and Alternatives

This report is a long download but if you take a good look at it you will know everything you need to know about chrome plating and the Department of Defense (U.S. Navy) and why, from their viewpoint, it's much better to poison your air than to spend the money it takes to control this dangerous chrome six poison.

When a part is hard (thick) chrome plated the chrome layer that is produced is not smooth and shiny like a car bumper. It's rough and bumpy and has to be ground down to make it uniformly smooth and of the proper engineering dimensions so the part will fit into its assembly and will function as designed. While the Navy is very clever about hiding and disguising the amount of chrome plating it does it has not been so clever about the amount of chrome released from all of this grinding. The Navy has reported in official documents submitted to the EPA that in the year 2010 over 122 pounds of chrome metal were discharged into the ambient air. This is a lot of chrome and it all certainly resulted from chrome ground from the surfaces of parts that had been hard chrome plated at the Puget Metal Plating Shop. All of this 122 pounds of chrome resulted in the discharge of toxic chrome plating solution being discharged into the breathing air while it was being plated. If you want to see this section of the report you can use this link:

PSNSY Chrome Released

Typically about 1/3 of the amount of chrome plated is ground off. This means that with 122 pounds of chrome ground off, 366 pounds were plated. This accounts to the chrome plating shop operating full out for at least two shifts per day 50 weeks per year. This is a lot of toxic chrome discharged from air pollution scrubbers left dry and not maintained or monitored.

The problem for you and me is that while the Navy has learned how to chrome plate it has retained the attitude of people from 100 years ago with regard to the highly toxic chrome plating bath mist that is released from the plating shop into the air we breathe. These days modern chrome plating shops that do not have the ability to hide behind a shipyard fence and rooms full of dishonest mouthpieces and who can be sued use engineered controls and devices (scrubbers) to remove the chrome plating solution from the air exhausted from the metal plating shops when chrome is plated. But the Navy has short circuited all this. They have installed scrubbers on their plating shops but do not operate them. The scrubbers are there, and if you are on the shipyards you can see them, but they are for appearance only. A scrubber needs to have water circulated through it but the Navy provides no water flow to its scrubbers. The reason for this is simple and it is money, trouble and guilt. To run water through its scrubbers would cost lots and lots of money. It would also require an organization of workers, engineers and technicians that are currently not there and that would cost money; but even more importantly this organization would produce written records that would demonstrate just how completely and thoroughly the Navy has deliberately poisoned so many people over all these decades and continues to do so even today.

Chrome plating is an inherently inefficient and very dirty process. It is inefficient because the chrome plating bath does not easily or quickly plate chrome. The very thick layer that hard chrome plating produces is not smooth and shiny. It is always rough and must always be made to be too thick so it can be ground down to size using precision grinding wheels. The chrome plating bath uses a lot of electricity to produce a small amount of chrome. This excess electricity produces a lot of bubbling in the chrome plating bath and this bubbling produces a toxic mist of chrome plating bath solution that is released into the air. To protect the plating shop workers air is sucked from the top of the chrome plating tanks and exhausted into the outside air. To protect people outside the shop there are safety devices called "scrubbers". The purpose of these scrubbers is to remove the chrome plating bath droplets from the air exhausted outside the shop. The scrubbers use water to accomplish this removal and as a result the scrubber water quickly becomes contaminated with chrome plating fluid. The big problem with a scrubber is that it produces lots and lots of water contaminated with chrome plating fluid. This fluid is a federally regulated hazardous waste. This means it is very expensive to handle, process, package and dispose of because it is a federal crime to dump it down the drain. It costs at least $50.00 per gallon to dispose of it properly. A plating shop scrubber will produce about nine gallons of this hazardous waste per minute. The Navy reported to the EPA that currently, at Puget Sound, it releases about 122 pounds of chrome per year as a result of grinding of chrome. This means that more than this 122 pounds of chrome had to plated onto things, in one year, in the Puget Sound plating shop. A good guess is that this much plating would produce at least one million gallons of hazardous waste costing about $50.00 per gallon to dispose. On top of this cost is the cost of personnel to handle all of this waste. Then, most importantly there is guilt. If the Navy did all these good things there would be many documents that would show conclusively what should have been done for all these decades and how badly you have been poisoned. This is why you are being poisoned today. The cost to just leave the scrubber to rot without any water being supplied to it and to only maintain it when it becomes an obstacle to plating shop internal operations because it has been left to rot is far less than operating the scrubber properly and handling all the hazardous waste it will generate and dealing with all the accusations and court cases that would result. The amazing cost reduction resulting from the Navy's Chrome Plating Scrubber neglect strategy is disclosed in a report issued in 2006.

The purpose of this report is to report on the effectiveness of a chrome plating process that uses a flame spray instead of a wet plating bath to apply a thick layer of chrome on parts used in aircraft designed to land on aircraft carriers. But this report contains some very important disclosures about scrubber operation that demonstrate the Navy is even today not providing water flow to its scrubbers. You can view the entire report using this link:

Thermal Spray Chrome Plating Report - 2006

It's about 11 MB and may take some time to load. Here is the section of importance to Chrome Plating Scrubber operation:

It's important to realize that if the U.S. Navy ever bothered to maintain the hex-chrome scrubbers that would have protected the shipyard workers then the costs would certainly have been available. If there is one thing the U.S. Navy keeps a tight track of it's money. If U.S. Navy is spent on anything the data is available. This document is a sure admission by the U.S. Navy that hex-chrome emission control equipment is never and I mean NEVER maintained.

These costs of providing water to the scrubbers were not available. This means the water necessary to operate them was never provided. But one scrubber cost was included that tells the entire tale about how the Navy actually runs its Chrome Plating Scrubbers: What this

 

What this tells us is the U.S. Navy installs hex-chrome scrubbers, provides them with no water so they do not work, does not maintain them, but instead installs "pads" on them that act as filters. This is to say the entire scrubber is replaced with a single and easily replaceable pad installed on its outlet and that this pad is replaced only once every five years. An entire industrial chrome metal plating shop runs for five solid years on the same thin useless filters? This is a very pure form of insanity that is the result that comes from thinking that relatively small amounts of money are very important and at the same time considering that worker health is of no value at all.

Note that para. G above refers to "Ion Exchange" being associated with scrubber water supply costs. Ion exchange is a method of removing chrome from waste water. Commercial chrome plating facilities that are liable to be sued and who cannot hide behind phony security claims and a shipyard fence must do the right thing. What they do is use ion exchangers (like a water softener) to remove chrome from scrubber water. It's expensive to do this but not as expensive as being fined by the State and Federal EPA or being hauled into court by victims of chrome plating in adjacent neighborhoods. The Navy doesn't have to worry about any of these things and so while it has studied ion exchange it still does not use it. I believe the authors of this report were duped by the Navy so that they would not pry too deeply into the matter of water to the scrubbers. The Navy is invited to prove me wrong about this.

The Navy has rooms of accounts and it knows where every penny goes. When a cost is "not available" this means it does not exist. In this report the Navy says the cost of supplying water to the scrubbers at the Chrome Plating Shop "is not available" but the cost of replacing the final filters on these same scrubbers is available. This means simply the Navy runs its scrubbers everywhere without water and replaces the final filters when they become clogged. The equation is about $100,000,000.00 per year per shipyard vs. $3560.00 every three years per shipyard. Of course, you are absorbing the health cost of the avoided $100 million dollars in savings.

You are poisoned by all the hexavalent chrome being released into the air by the Navy; and the result of this is an elevated ambient cancer rate. The Navy hides behind the fact that the cancers caused by this massive release of chrome into the air will be diffused by statistics so that no particular individual who gets cancer from the shop can file a claim. It's a cruel calculation that has been made and you are its immediate victims. But this released chrome is also a genetic poison that causes inheritable genetic defects. This means that not only you but downstream generations are being poisoned. It would be far better for the Navy to do the right thing. But, right now there are no penalties for their continued refusal to monitor the air coming out of the scrubbers during normal plating shop operations. What the Navy does is it overhauls the scrubbers and operates them properly if state of federal regulators insist on a scrubber test. But once the regulators are gone its back to normal. This site demonstrates how this was done at Mare Island and also how it is being done now at Puget Sound. You can be sure these are not isolated.

How do you know for sure you are being poisoned by the toxic cancer causing Hex-chrome discharged from the Navy shipyard chrome plating shop? The first part of this answer is the Navy is disobeying Navy regulations to keep the discharge of this genetic poison and powerful cancer causing poison a secret. Here's how they are doing it. U.S. Navy Regulations mandate that whenever a safety system is in operation it must be monitored hourly and inspected to make sure it is operating properly by the system operator. Navy Regulations mandate that the safety system must be monitored on a log sheet that the system operator uses to record system pressures, temperatures and flow rates among other things. Navy Regulations mandate these log sheets must be kept indefinitely. The log sheets are an official U.S. Government document and this means it is a federal crime to falsify the data or to refuse to record it. The Navy has simply decided to not monitor the chrome plating scrubber system and to violate Navy Regulations applicable to a vital safety system. The reason for this is to avoid collection of documents that would either force them to spend vast sums of money to operate the scrubber systems properly or to accumulate a pile of documents that will convict the Navy of a federal crime. It's easy to see it's easier an better to just not record the data, not accumulate the log sheets and this is what they are doing. The U.S. Navy has NEVER monitored its chrome plating scrubber systems. It has NEVER collected a single operating log for them. It DOES NOT routinely monitor the performance of the scrubbers. The scrubbers need clean water and lots of it to operate properly. This water absorbs toxic chrome 6 and becomes federally regulated hazardous waste that cannot be poured down the drain. It is extremely expensive to properly handle, package and dispose of the very large quantities of chrome 6 contaminated hazardous waste water a properly operated chrome scrubber will produce. The U.S. Navy has decided to not spend this money by simply letting the scrubbers sit to rot on the plating shop roof without the necessary water flow while you are poisoned. How do you know you are being poisoned? There are two ways. The first is simple and this is to ask if the cancer rate in the area surrounding the shipyard is elevated. The answer to this question is yes at all shipyards. The second is to ask the Navy to show you the scrubber system operating logs that U.S. Navy regulations mandate they must have. EPA safety regulations mandate that YOU have a RIGHT to inspect all records concerning safety equipment that protects YOU so the Navy MUST have these documents and it MUST allow you to inspect them. The answer to this is they will not and cannot produce such documents because they have deliberately not collected them, EVER. The answer to this seems simple to me and this is they know what they are doing and the deadly results. Don't believe me. Just write to the Navy and ask them to send you copies of the chrome plating scrubber system operating logs and monitoring reports and see what you get.

The main message of this site is simple. Imagine if suddenly and magically all the fresh water in the world was to contain a microscopic amount of fertilizer. What would the result of this be? Over time and slowly everything that grows would grow a little faster, bigger and greener and this would continue until someone noticed it. This would probably take a long time. But look at the other side. Suppose all the water was to contain a microscopic amount of a chemical that is a genetic toxin that causes permanent genetic damage resulting in inheritable genetic defects that will slowly accumulate in the plants, fishes, birds, animals and human beings. In the end, this would cause nature itself to crash. This is what hexavalent chrome has been doing to the world since it was invented about 100 years ago. Today hundreds of thousands of tons of this chemical are being used in the USA. Eventually, a great amount of this finds its way into the air and water. Many large cities in the USA have measurable amounts of hexavalent chrome (chromic acid) in their water supplies. You can certainly imagine the long term result of spreading a powerful genetic toxin into the air everything breathes and lives in and into the water everything drinks.

This site is the story, and an excellent example to you, of how much of this genetic poison got released and how it is being released today. People who put profit and productivity first think nothing of poisoning others and, a little bit more each day, everything else that lives. It's also the story about how the damage done already to the health of everyone who was ever within the vicinity of a place where hexavalent chrome is used. It is about how you and them have been robbed of health and life. This Mare Island story is just a typical example. It is a bad example, but it is not, by any means, the worst example. Hexavalent chrome has many many useful and profitable uses. Do some Googling on it and see if it might be in use near you. Then go to that place and have a look. See for yourself that no one is immune.

I had wrongly thought that the Mare Island Chrome VI disaster was unique. But documents recently discovered have demonstrated to me that the U.S. Navy is still covering up the deliberate discharge of tremendously harmful quantities of Chrome VI at other shipyards today in 2012. I am certain that it will not be long before medical science will be able to demonstrate my belief that the tremendously elevated rate of blood cancer or Leukemia and other fatal cancers, in the Puget Sound area is directly related to the U.S. Navy spewing vast quantities of Chrome VI into the air of Puget Sound from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Chrome plating shop for decades. If you'd like to read more about this please use this link:

 

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Area is being Chrome VI Poisoned Today in 2012

 

One of the main things this site is meant to demonstrate to you is that the one and only thing you can believe is documents. You cannot believe anything anyone may tell you because, for the most part, they are going to tell you there's nothing to worry about and everything is just fine so you've no need to worry. But, if you ask for documents this is where the fighting will start and the more you insist the bigger the fight will become. If there's nothing to hide, why hide it? Every business that generates hazardous waste must file a document every year with the Federal EPA and this is a public document available to you on the Internet. Go to the EPA web page first to see who in your vicinity, and this means in a 20 mile radius, is discharging hexavalent chrome to the environment. Then, contact them to ask if they are using it and chances are they will say "no". So this can be your starting point. If you are next to a military base believe nothing their well trained and selected spokespersons may say to you. The first place to start with a military or other government installation is the EPA and also your local State EPA. Your state EPA will always have a huge file on any location and you have a right to view it. Just give them a call and make an appointment to visit their office. The point is that any question you may have you must answer as best you can before asking anyone a question. The lies you will be told will tell you the truth if you know the correct answer.

Here is a very recent demonstration of the lengths the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), operator of U.S. Navy Shipyards, is willing to go to in order to hide the vast extent its activities are still today in 2012 releasing toxic amounts of hexavalent chrome (chromic acid) into the faces of its workers and communities close to its industrial sites. In 2007 a report was issued whose stated purpose was to evaluate the extent of worker exposure to hexavalent chrome resulting from the conduct of various industrial operations conducted at shipyards, including U.S. Navy shipyards in the USA. This thoroughly dishonest report was constructed to satisfy a need of NAVSEA which I believe is to continue to deny Navy victims of hexavalent chrome poisoning access to their rights and entitlements under Federal Occupational Injury Law. My reading of this report is that it is a bucket of lies whose only possible purpose can to be publish false evidence contrary to the truth about U.S. Navy Chrome VI exposure taking place today. There is specific evidence to demonstrate the data used in this report was "sanitized" at the specific request of the main author of this piece of trash. If you would like to see the real face of the "Force For Good" U.S. Navy please use this link:

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard is being Chrome VI Poisoned Today in 2012

 

There are three reasons for this web site. The first is that I was poisoned to within an inch of my life by chromic acid during the Plating Shop Chromic Acid Airborne Spill of February 17, 1988. What happened is that I was working on the third floor of the building to the left of the plating shop on the Swing shift. My desk was right next to the window. The whole evening I felt and smelled nothing. The one supervisor on the first floor acted as if everything was normal and told me nothing. It was just a normal work day. Everything was fine until I got home. Then I went right to the bathroom and started vomiting. The vomiting lasted for two weeks during which time I did not go back to work. Then after returning to work, I became overcome by a progressive weakness, lack of energy and ability to do my work. I was afraid of loosing my job because my work was so bad and had no idea of what had happened to me. I got a lucky break and was invited into the Engineers union I.F.P.T.E. Local 25. I asked what the union job was and the answer was to sit in the union office and answer the phone all day. The job would last four years and so I figured by getting the union job I could wait this sickness out figuring that my health problems were some kind of temporary thing. So I got the union job, set a cot up in the union office and tried to recover as best I could. As luck and circumstances would have it I wound up becoming President of the union about the time the Shipyard was to close. One day in 1995 I accidentally found the Chromic Acid Airborne Spill Report from 1988 and immediately knew what had happened to ruin my health. I went to the doctors and they finally told me "It takes a long long time to get over a good poisoning" and that there was nothing that could be done at this late stage to help me. To this day I still live with the effects of this secret poisoning. I did more document searching and found enough to be compelled, by the duty of my office, to prosecute a grievance against the shipyard for unsafe operation of the plating shop because it was clear the plating shop had secretly killed (murdered) many innocent people. I believe that due to the deliberate withholding of evidence and U.S. Navy Perjury, among many other despicable schemes, devices, tricks and frauds, that we lost that grievance. If you are interested in the grievance and want to read it as it was served on the U.S. Navy you can use this link: Grievance.

The second reason for this Site is Immediately prior to the Shipyard closing I held a meeting of the Union membership. I explained to them all the facts that were at hand about how we had all been poisoned for a very long time and the probable long term bad news about chromic acid and its late life effects upon them. It was put to a vote should I continue this matter without limit until true justice is obtained or not. The vote was unanimous that I should continue, regardless of the circumstances, until this matter is resolved in a just and true way. This Site is in obedience to their orders; the orders of my truest friends. It is always a work in progress.

Let me tell everyone who reads this one thing about chromic acid. It is the worst poison there is. It will not kill you, but it will certainly make you wish you were dead and it will do this until the day you die. Chromic acid is not hard to understand. It is easily understood to be a chemical form of nuclear radiation. Nuclear radiation harms people by damaging the DNA permanently leading to cancer and other health problems. Chromic acid does exactly the same thing. Very large amounts of nuclear radiation causes physical injury and permanent disability and very small amounts of chromic acid do exactly the same thing. Nuclear radiation however, does not generally cause genetic mutations that are inheritable. Chromic acid is now known to cause trans generational inheritable genetic damage. Plus, there's one extra thing that chromic acid does: it induces miscarriages in pregnant women. The truth is that the Mare Island Plating Shop was at least as bad as if it was a melting down nuclear reactor of the same size and was probably much worse.

Here's the bottom line about how much Chromic Acid was blasted into the breathing air by the metal plating shop:

1. When the U.S. Navy Perjury is corrected so that U.S. Navy calculations, that do not account for or use all available data, are corrected to merely eliminate the perjury, the results of the normal chrome scrubber operating conditions are that the chrome plating air scrubbers on the roof of the metal plating shop blasted out extremely large volumes of air contaminated with Hexavalent Chromium at the following levels:

1. Hard Chrome Plating Scrubber: 2.2 Times the 1988 OSHA Permissible Exposure Level

2. Decorative Chrome Plating Scrubber: 9.8 Times the 1988 OSHA PEL

These are massive exposures that will cause injury and death.

2. When complete calculations using all available data is used to Calculate the Amount of Chromic Acid emitted from the scrubbers the normal conditions result is:

1. Hard Chrome Plating Scrubber: 5.2 Times the 1988 OSHA PEL

2. Decorative Chrome Plating Scrubber: 19.7 Times the 1988 OSHA PEL

These are extraordinarily massive exposures that will cause injury, death and immediate adverse permanent health effects.

The amount of air blasted from the plating shop containing chromic acid at these levels of exposure was extraordinarily large. The Hard Chrome plating scrubber discharged 17,000 Cubic feet per minute and the Decorative Chrome plating scrubber discharged 10,800 Cubic feet per minute of contaminated poisonous air simultaneously each minute of every day of the year for decades. This is such a large volume of air it could not simply "dissipate" and become diluted by ambient air. It filled up the area surrounding the plating shop, displacing the ambient air, and it was not for a considerable distance from the plating shop before the concentration of chromic acid would begin to decline due to dilution by ambient air. You would have had to be miles from the plating shop before the chromic acid exposure level would have been reduced by dilution to the current "no harm" exposure level of 0.0001 micrograms per cubic meter of air. But even with a considerable distance wind currents would have brought high concentration plumes to your vicinity from time to time.

3. If you want to see the U.S. Navy Perjury document and the corrected U.S. Navy calculations use this link: PERJURY

4. If you want to see the page that uses complete data and U.S. Navy methods to calculate chromic acid releases use this link: CALCULATIONS

This Web Site is about the nuts and bolts of how the U.S. Navy allowed, covered up and still refuses to admit the massive poisoning of uncounted thousands of innocent victims with this horrible chemical for decades. Chromic acid is used mostly for chromium plating and tanning leather but it is also used in preservative paints used on military aircraft, for precision cleaning purposes and for the making of pigments. When breathed it kills lung tissue permanently and causes a kind of fibrosis similar to emphysema. It also causes asthma and many other diseases. It is the second most powerful lung and sinus cancer causing agent known to man. It is odorless, colorless and tasteless and it is a local anesthetic. All these factors explain why it was possible for the U.S. Navy to keep the fact that many thousands of innocent victims were constantly exposed to extremely harmful levels of this chemical for many decades and these cowards continue to refuse to admit it up to the present time.

Chromic Acid is used in metal plating shops everywhere throughout the world. It is used to plate a thin layer of chrome for decorative purposes (decorative plating), a very thick layer of chrome for wear proofing heavy duty equipment (hard plating), and it is used to anodize aluminum. During these processes large quantities of electricity are passed through large volume baths of chromic acid dissolved in water. Also, large quantities of compressed air are introduced into these baths to keep them well mixed. The passage of electricity (Amperage) and the passage of compressed air bubbles through these baths causes the generation of a highly toxic chromic acid mist. To protect the workers in the shop this mist is sucked up from the surface of the tanks by air vents and powerful large fans. This air is passed through an air cleaning device called a Scrubber before it is exhausted to the outside air.

The purpose of the air cleaning scrubber is to protect people who are outside the shop and who don't know the great danger posed to their health by the chromic acid mists being generated inside the shop that are then discharged from the shop. For all the time the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Metal Plating Shop was in operation for over 67 years, there were either no scrubbers installed or when they were installed they were completely ineffective at capturing toxic mists of chromic acid because they were not monitored to ensure they were operating properly, the were not maintained, the were not provided with cleaning water and the people who were tasked to operate them knew absolutely nothing about how to operate them. But this is by no means all of the crime. In 1987 and 1988, when the Bay Area Air Quality Management District put the Mare Island Plating shop permits to operate chrome plating tanks in jeopardy and mandated the chromic acid removing scrubbers be tested, Mare Island engaged in very clever schemes of massive cheating in dishonest attempts, which were finally successful, to keep their permits to operate the chrome plating tanks and discharge polluted air to the air outside the shop. This is a link to the CHEATING page that discusses this cheating. It is currently a work in progress. You are welcome to review it while it is being prepared:

U.S. NAVY CHROME SCRUBBER TEST CHEATING

Because the extremely unique toxic nature of chromic acid this willful, deliberate, reckless negligence by the U.S. Navy has doubtlessly been responsible for many thousands of deaths from cancer and disease, crippling due to ill health, birth defects, lung disease, heart disease and many other disabling conditions and diseases.

The fact that exposure to even small amounts of chromic acid (hexavalent chrome) is a severe health risk is plainly stated in the following recent article in the New York Times:

New York Times Article Hexavalent Chromium 2/12/2009

And in a release by the National Resources Defense Council:

NRDC Chromium Lawsuit Win 2/4/2009

Recently (12/31/10) The State of California acted to drastically reduce hexavalent chromium in drinking water:

California Drinking Water Chrome Level

Recent Developments regarding Chromic Acid toxicity are that it is now being understood to be a Uniquely Toxic Trans Generational Genetic Toxin with Cumulative Effects that are inheritable. This makes is a prime suspect for the development of the great increase in AUTISM.

Please use this link to view the page containing evidence of this rapidly developing recent understanding:

The Unique and Extreme Toxicity of Chromic Acid to Mankind

Please refer Mareislandmurder.com to the New York Times, other media outlets and your Congressional Representatives.

The Purpose Of This Site

The information in this Site is not just for the unfortunate Victims who worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard or who lived in nearby Vallejo. It is for everyone who worked at or was within miles of a Navy or other Government run metal plating shop where Chrome plating was performed. This includes the Department of Energy, Marines, Army, Air Force and many other entities. The main point is that the Official Navy Documents provided on this site demonstrate total negligent reckless carelessness and a complete abandonment of caution when it came to the handling of a severely toxic and cancer causing substance by a U.S. Navy facility having almost limitless resources and so it must be assumed that what was done there was not unique.

We all know there is no statute of limitations on the crime of murder. We also know that if one person uses a gun, a knife or secretly administers a poison to injure another person, and that injured person should later die of a cause related to the injury, even after years, the perpetrator will be liable for prosecution for murder. In the same way there is no statute of limitations when a group of innocent persons is deliberately exposed to levels of a toxic chemical known to cause fatal cancers to a large fraction of the group after a delay of 20 years. This is what this site is all about. It is about murder and if you worked at Mare Island prior to closure of the metal plating shop in 1990 it may be about your murder. It just may be it hasn't happened yet. It is also very likely that the effects of the plating shop were so large it is responsible for many cancers in the nearby City of Vallejo. The wind blows towards Vallejo and the amount of poison discharged every year was immense.

If you are working or have worked at Mare Island or another Navy Shipyard it is very important for you to get past the extreme care taken with exposure to nuclear radiation. The Navy is extraordinarily scrupulous in keeping track of and controlling the radiation exposure employees receive.  If the same scrupulousness and care had been applied to Chromic Acid exposure this site would not be necessary.  The strict control and monitoring of radiation exposure goes a long way to explain why it was so easy to keep the plating shop fatal releases a secret.  The ever present and prevalent radiation control and monitoring procedures are so complete, so obvious and evident everywhere that it was only natural that these would inculcate in shipyard workers a feeling of safety, a lack of concern for other dangers, and a false confidence in the Occupational Safety and Health Office.  The deep, intense, prevalent, pervasive and obvious rigor applied to radiation exposure engendered a very unsafe deep and unsupported strong false feeling of confidence that all risks were being monitored and controlled to within safe limits. It is truly a great crime that this was not true.

This web site describes, with Official U.S. Navy documents, how many thousands of Mare Island Naval Shipyard workers and visitors were secretly poisoned and exposed to a powerful toxin and carcinogen over a period of many years starting some when between 1916 - 1918 and ending in 1990. It also provides sufficient official Navy, Shipyard and Contractor documents to allow a lawsuit or the filing of an injury claim under the Federal Employee Compensation Act (FECA). The fact that Chromium Acid is the second most powerful human carcinogen, causing cancer of the sinus, lungs and gastrointestinal tract, was not publicly known until years after the shipyard metal plating shop was closed. This determination puts Chromium Acid into the same league with Dioxin. Most of those who have been exposed to Chromium Acid at Mare Island do not know this. It is a secret that releases of Chromium Acid at Mare Island were completely out of control until 1990. Chromium Acid also causes a great many other serious and debilitating illnesses, conditions and diseases and this also was not well understood until recently. It is important that all people who worked on Mare Island find out what was done to them and what their legal remedies are.

Please note that when you review the downloadable Official U.S. Navy Documents that in most of them there is a distribution list on the left hand side of the front page. These are indicated by "Code" or "Shop". On a navy shipyard the various organizations are identified by a numerical Code. The Code "100" identifies the Shipyard Commander himself. The fact that the Occupational Safety and Health Office was identified to be Code 106 indicates it was very close to the Shipyard Commander's Office. A code of 100, 200, 300 and so on indicates a major Department Head and the larger the number the lower down in in authority within that code is the office. When you review these routing codes it will become clear that there is absolutely no way the Shipyard Commander and every other major shipyard Department Head and major subordinate did not know everything that was going on with the mal operation of the plating shop and its incredible toxic effects on the shipyard and nearby Vallejo. Note that the plating shop was actually operated by Shop 51. Shops were workers and codes were white collar. Shop 51 was the Shipyard Electrical Shop.

If you are interested in knowing more about the Author of this site use this link: The Author. There you will fine a little note explaining this web site.

Before going any further please review this official letter to the shipyard from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). It is the letter that started the chain of events that lead to the final closure of the metal plating shop. You can use this link:

BAAQMD Letter of 1/20/88.

This letter contains a number of statements which are fundamentally important:

The first and foremost is that it identifies that California considered Chromium Acid to be a highly potent human carcinogen in early 1988 and the shipyard kept this a secret.

The second is that it describes in paragraph 2 that the Mare Island Metal Plating Shop had a calculated cancer risk to ALL shipyard personnel of "3 per thousand" persons in 1987.

This is a shipyard wide calculation and it is based upon data which was probably just a phony guess and which is also completely obsolete today. Given that the federally mandated Department of Labor (DOL) Permissible Exposure Level (PEL) of Chromium Acid has recently been decreased by a factor of 1000 its easy to see that the real cancer risk, as it is known today, must be that everyone who worked on the shipyard will likely experience one or more cancers as a result merely of the Chromium Acid discharged out of the exhausts on the roof of the plating shop in building 225. Please note also that this letter refers to "source tests" of the Mare Island Chrome Plating Scrubbers. The U.S. Navy has not yet released these source tests and it's about time they did.

The massive cancer rate conclusion is also supported by a secret shipyard internal memorandum that states the Chromium Acid emitted from the metal plating shop in 1988 represented 687 of of 700 total Shipyard Toxic Substance (TS) emission points that were calculated to total every emission source of every kind on the entire shipyard and these included things such as gas heaters and water boilers. Here's a link to it:

THE SMOKING GUN MEMORANDUM - CHROMIUM DISCHARGES ARE MASSIVE AND OUT OF CONTROL

Notice that this memorandum has distribution to the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Office (106) and the Head of Production (385) and was prepared by an OSH Office person. It seems to me to be a Crime Against Humanity for the OSH Office to be making the decision to close the plating shop so that the extreme damage being done to workers health could be hidden from them.

The consequences of the first BAAQMD letter will be explored to a much greater depth later on. It has been put at the start to show you that the matters of this web site are of the most extreme seriousness. There has been and there will be cancer and there will be lots of it. People have died, people are dying and people will die due to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Chrome Plating operations which took place between 1918 and 1990. The Murderer Navy owes a lot to a great many workers, ex-workers, widows and orphans. Up to this point the U.S. Navy has not acted responsibly. It has not officially informed anyone of their exposure to deadly chromic acid nor has it publicly released any studies to show the actual disease and cancer rates for Mare Island Shipyard personnel. There can be no doubt that such studies have been conducted. We know this because we know the Navy conducted secret shipyard wide health studies in 1988-1989. This study was referenced in an official letter from the U.S. Navy to the Shipyard Commander. Here is a link to this letter:

U.S. Navy Comments on Chromic Acid Exposure Health Study

This Health Risk Assessment has not been released to the public. It should be released immediately, prominently and with publicity in the media. The fact it has been kept secret for so long is a definitive statement by the U.S. Navy that the Plating Shop was a Factory of Death and Disease.

Persons located outside of the plating shop were also routinely exposed to MASSIVE releases of Hexavalent Chromium as a result of solid chemicals released during routine chemical mixing operations. This excerpt from a Occupational Health and Safety site monitoring visit report illustrates and describes of how chemicals were mixed in the plating shop. It states that the tank of water to which the chemicals were added was kept agitated with air while chemicals were swept over the surface of the tank with a large shovel. This constant air flow blew solid chemicals into the air above the tank where they were sucked up by the scrubber air suctions. Mixing of chemicals with an air lance also caused massive chemical discharges. With the scrubbers being inefficient due to no water flow much of the chemicals thrown over the surface of the tank were discharged out of the shop and into adjacent buildings.

 

 

IF YOU ARE NOW OR EVER WERE A FEDERAL EMPLOYEE AND BELIEVE YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO EVEN THE MOST TINY AMOUNT OF CHROMIC ACID AT WORK REVIEW THE FECA CLAIMS SECTION WITH THE MOST TREMENDOUS CARE AND DILLIGENCE BEFORE TAKING ANY ACTION:

Federal Injury Compensation Procedures

The Three Key Elements - The First Key - The Scrubber

There can be only one reason to put a scrubber in place to clean the air exhausted from a process that generates dangerous dusts and mists. This is to protect the people who are outside the shop that creates these dangers. By its nature a scrubber has the purpose of protecting people who do not know they would otherwise be in great danger without the scrubber. This places the strongest possible moral obligation on the people who operate it. This obligation is to ensure through testing that the scrubber is operating properly all of the time and protecting the innocent. The U.S. Navy acted in deliberate, absolute and total neglect and recklessness with regard to its operation of the Building 225 Plating Shop Scrubbers for all the time they were present. They never took one sample of the air discharged from the scrubbers to make sure they were working properly, which they were not.

A scrubber is an air cleaning device that is installed onto the air outlet of any process that generates toxic or irritating particles that are released to the ambient air. It is basically a box that the air is passed through. As the air passes through this box it hits packing inside the box and when the air hits the packing the toxic particles in the air stick to the packing. As the air moves through the box water is constantly sprayed onto the packing to remove the contamination and keep the scrubber clean and operating at maximum efficiency. Here is a diagram of the inside workings of the design of chrome acid removal scrubbers installed on the plating shop:

And here is a hand drawn diagram of an actual chrome acid removing scrubber installed on the top of the plating shop from a Mare Island Shipyard Work Permit:

Here is a process diagram that shows how a scrubber fits into the chrome plating process and a little bit about how it works: If you want to see it full size or to print it just click on it.

 

There is a myth that the air discharged from the chrome plating scrubbers somehow "dispersed" into the ambient air and was simply diluted into harmlessness. This is not true for two reasons. The first is the volume of air discharged is too high to simply disperse. It has to go somewhere. The two chrome plating scrubbers discharged about 27,000 Cubic Feet of Air Per Minute continually throughout the year. This much air cannot simply disperse. Secondly, the fact the air will not simply disperse is codified in federal air pollution regulations. The EPA publishes these regulations in two technical documents specific to emissions from polluting point sources, such as chrome plating scrubbers. These are EPA 454/R-92-019, "Screening Procedures for Estimating the Air Quality Impact of Stationary Sources" and EPA 450/4 -80-023R "Guideline for Good Engineering Stack Height". The purpose of these documents is to specify the minimum necessary "Stack Height" for the discharge stack of a pollution emission point so that the pollutants emitted from it will not come right back down to ground level or fill adjacent buildings. This is because if a stack is too short the polluted air discharged from it can come back down to ground level right below where it discharges (down wash) or it can be caught in a "cavity region" that surrounds buildings and then fill or "fumigate" adjacent buildings. This is a diagram from this EPA manual giving a good idea of the kind of situation that existed around the plating shop. The building in this diagram is typical of the building to the left of the plating shop, building 273 because it is higher than the plating shop building 225. It shows that the plating shop chrome scrubbers discharged directly into the building 273 cavity zone and therefore fumigated the plating shop and adjacent buildings.

The air discharged from the plating shop scrubbers was not heated like air from a furnace that tends to naturally rise. It was ambient cold air and the only thing making it tend to rise was the force of the fans. In most situations like this the discharged polluted air will rise a little, then just like a ball thrown into the air, will come down. The reason a proper stack height is so important with this kind of air discharge is that the polluted air must be discharged high enough to be caught by prevailing winds so that it is transported away from the discharge point by these winds. The problem at the plating shop is these winds were much higher than the discharge point and so the plating shop discharge down washed and fumigated the entire shipyard.

 

This manual also specifies that where there are adjacent buildings they must be considered to be one building if they are not separated by at least the width of the smallest building. This means that the plating shop building 225, building 273 and 101 were, for the purposes of assessing the pollution impact of emissions of chrome from the plating shop, all one big building. This means that actual discharges of chrome from the plating shop can be shown by this picture that shows a chrome scrubber discharging into the cavity region surrounding the building 225, 273 and 101 group:

There should be no mistaking the fact that U.S. Navy management knew all about this because their knowledge is demonstrated in the Alimam Memorandum by the drawing that is page 3 of this memorandum:

As you can see there is a circle drawn around the area centered by the plating shop. This circle is the "Area of Immediate Vicinity" for the square Building 1 as shown in Figure 8 from EPA 450/4 -80-023R:

The Navy knew all about what it was doing to wreck the lives of people on the Shipyard when it was discharging tremendous volumes of Hexavalent chrome and other poisons into the air from the plating shop and it knew all about all of the technical specifications that applied to that building, yet they did nothing. Another thing to consider is that the radius of the circle in the Alimam diagram is not 5 times the height of building 225, it is five times the height of building 273 and this says the Navy knew all along that buildings 225, 273 and 101 were all just one big building where the only difference between the people in the plating shop and everyone else is they knew the risks and had safety equipment and everyone else did not.

Here is a link to the Harrington Scrubber Technical Manual for this scrubber: Harrington Scrubber Manual

Here is a link to a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with the Harrington Scrubber Technical Representative about this scrubber in 1996: Harington Technical Engineer

The fact that the Chromium Scrubbers installed on the top of the Mare Island Building 225 metal plating shop were completely ineffective massive dischargers of Chromic Acid to the shipyard environment is clearly stated by two independent sources:

1. The first source is the August 30, 1988 RSA Source Test of the chromium plating scrubbers. On Page 18 of this report it is stated that the two chrome plating scrubbers had the following normal operating condition miserable efficiencies in 1987:

2. The second source is the Allimam Memorandum to the Head of the Occupational Health and Safety Department in 1990:

The Big Picture of this twisted memorandum is that it is better to cancel the very expensively and hard won plating shop BAAQMD operating permits than to spend a couple of hundred thousand dollars. This just doesn't make any sense. What's going on here is that even though the U.S. Navy used every possible form of Cheating to get those permits and intended to use them, they were effectively blocked from doing this by a new BAAQMD Program. This program had the goal of forcing platers to stop plating permanently or to inform their victims of what had been done to them. It's all couched in careful and proper bureaucratic language but that's what this memorandum is really all about.

This memorandum shows that when all toxic emission sources on the shipyard were totaled and ranked the shipyard had a ranking of 700 with chrome plating and 13 without it. This is why the plating shop was finally closed. THE U.S. NAVY DID NOT WANT TO INFORM ITS VICTIMS OF WHAT HAD BEEN DONE TO THEM BY DECADES OF BEING EXPOSED TO EXTREMELY HARMFUL LEVELS OF CHROMIC ACID.

This memorandum discusses a health impact rating program that had been implemented by the State of California. This program required all industrial facilities to list and count all of the toxic discharges to the air from every activity, even ones as small as water heaters. Then, all of these discharges were to be totaled. If the total Hazardous Substance points (HS Points in the memo) added up to more than 10, then the facility could be required to perform a health risk analysis of the entire Shipyard including all people working at the Shipyard, and this analysis would have to be made public. In this memorandum an engineer working in the Occupational Safety and Health office clearly states that the Shipyard had 700 HS points, much more than enough to mandate a Shipyard wide health study; but that discharges of chromic acid from the metal plating shop were the major contributor to the point total to the extent that if the plating shop was closed there would be no need for a health study because the total HS score would then be about 13. This means that all toxic risks present due to the work of the shipyard totaled to 13 and chromic acid amounted to 687 hazard points.

The Scrubbers were also installed in 1951. The real reason they were installed was to prevent the nuisance of chromic acid particles discharged out of the plating shop from staining adjacent buildings. This staining is a permanent stain and when new it is a pink color, but after a very long time it becomes dark green. This reason for the installation of chrome plating scrubbers to control nuisance staining is identified in a report presented to the American Electro platers and Surface Finishers Society in 1992:

Chromium Plating Scrubber study presented to the Metal Plating Industry in 1992:

"In the earliest stages of chrome abatement (pre 1987) while chrome
was under consideration for regulation under NESHAP, plating shops
were generally interested in controlling chrome to the point where
deposition on the stack and nearby buildings and automobiles was
eliminated."

This study is important but it misses a key point. This is if the air that is sucked out of the plating shop by the fans that discharge process air into the scrubbers is not clean of ambient dirt, debris and general dust, this material will tend to clog the scrubber generally and will also greatly decrease its performance efficiency at removing chromic acid droplets from the process air being passed through the scrubbers. The scrubbers are high precision air filters and as such the air that is fed to them must be as clean as possible and not contain the kinds of insoluble materials that are typically generated in a filthy general industrial environment such as a U.S. Navy shipyard.

This presentation also passes on some anecdotal statements concerning the permissibility of operating a wet scrubber without water flow. These are clearly shown to be incorrect by evidence available at Mare island and through statements provided by Mare Island and its contractors. It is also now illegal in all states to operate a chrome plating scrubber without adequate water flow.

The fact the Mare Island chrome plating scrubbers were very inefficient and discharged very large amounts of chromic acid is demonstrated by the following pictures that were taken of cement pavement located immediately outside the back of the Building 225 Plating Shop in the vicinity of the chrome plating scrubbers. The first picture shows deep red chromium surface staining of a large area of the cement pavement between the plating shop and adjacent building 101:

The second picture shows damage to the cement surface showing the deep penetration of the spilled chromic acid and its conversion to green chromic oxide inside the cement. You can also see how the red stain increases towards the gutter demonstrating that the airborne discharges were sufficient to form a liquid runoff. This large amount and depth of chromic acid staining in combination with its oxidation inside the cement doubtless took decades to accumulate.

These pictures demonstrate that the Mare Island chrome scrubbers discharged massive amounts of chromic acid for a great many years.

These scrubbers were regularly run for extended periods of time without the water flow mandated by the manufacturer and required by good engineering practice. Mare Island demonstrated that the scrubbers required a very high volume of clean water in order to be efficient in the following memorandum

Requirements to Continue (Plating Operations)

Paragraphs 4. and 5 of this memorandum state:

"4. No plating should occur unless at least 100 GPM (gallons per minute) is maintained through each scrubber."

"5. Scrubber water should not contain more than 2 PPM (parts per million) of dissolved chromium. A minimum of 8640 gals/day (gallons per day) of blow down water should be removed from the (scrubber) system (6 gals/min) while plating operations in progress."

These requirements are also stated in the recommendations section of a study report commissioned by Mare Island, the RSA Associates, "Performance Evaluation of the Existing Chrome Plating and Emission Control System", on page 20 paragraphs 4 and 5 as shown in the following link. This is a phony report for several reasons. It is not explicitly stated in this report but it seems to me to be obvious that the true purpose of the scrubber study described by this report was to test and confirm that the Requirements to Continue Plating Operations would have the intended effect on scrubber performance so that a plausible argument could be made to the BAAQMD to get them to issue operating permits. There's only one problem. Maintaining a 100 gallon per scrubber per minute flow rate WITH a 2 parts per million concentration of hexavalent chromium is impossible unless the water that passes through the scrubbers is not re circulated but passes through the scrubbers only once. These TWO conditions were impossible to simultaneously maintain in the existing recirculating system because the recirculation tank was very much too small to begin with. The hexavalent chromium concentration would have quickly built up above 2 PPM and then increased beyond the 5 PPM limit that mandates the contaminated water be handled as Federal hazardous waste which is extremely expensive and difficult to do. The practical effect of actually implementing these recommendations would have been that approximately 100 gallons of scrubber water contaminated with hexavalent chrome at above 5 PPM, per operating scrubber, would have had to be transferred to the Industrial Waste Treatment Facility every five minutes. This is an impossibility. This RSA Test is just another fantastically complicated U.S. Navy swindle lie designed to trick everyone into giving the Navy what it wanted regardless of the consequences to personnel health and the good reputations of others.

The first thing to consider in this report is that the contractor personnel who performed the test were fed phony data by the plating shop personnel. Note that the size of the metal pieces that were chrome plated during this test and those which were anodized are extremely small when compared to the large size military objects the plating shop regularly handled. Also, the amount of electrical current supplied to the piece that was anodized during the test was below the amount actually used during real anodizing and as specified to be used in the Plating Shop Procedures Manual.

The second thing to keep in mind is to note that the recommended clean water flow rate is specified to be 100 gallons per minute. The problem is this exceeds the manufacturer's specification for the scrubbers as shown in the BAAQMD Letter of 1/20/88. which is shown to be 75 gallons per minute. It might have been possible to force an additional 25 gallons per minute into the scrubbers, but it certainly would not have been possible to drain this amount out. The net effect of increasing clean water flow as recommended by Mare Island and tested in the RSA report would have been scrubber flooding with water coming down the air vents and ruining the plating chemical baths.

I also have to say it's highly doubtful that 100 GPM of clean water was forced into the scrubbers during the RSA tests. This is just more phony data provided by Mare Island to RSA. Note that the test states that no flow meters were installed and that the pressure differential across the pump was used to calculate the flow rate. It's possible to "adjust" a pump pressure differential gage beforehand to provide the needed results. Given the overall phoniness and dishonest trickery that fill the tests that are the subject of this report the pump differential pressure method of measuring scrubber water flow has to be viewed with a huge dose of skepticism.

RSA Chrome Plating Scrubber Report

There is only one possible conclusion and this is there was no concern for the safety and well being of personnel outside the plating shop. The only safety concern was for personnel inside the shop and this was minimal at best.

.The main thing is that scrubbers need four things to operate to remove toxic air contaminants. These are:

1. The scrubber must be supplied with a constant flow of water at the rate of flow specified by the manufacturer.

2. The water supplied to the scrubber must be very clean to avoid clogging scrubber sprayers and to allow the maximum absorption of water soluble toxic air contaminants like chromic acid.

3. The process air supplied to the scrubber must be very clean of ambient dirt. The scrubber is actually a high precision air filter designed to trap and dispose of very small particles such as dried airborne droplets of chromic acid. If a scrubber is fed air that contains a lot of ambient dirt such as is generated during the normal operations of a large industrial facility like a a major shipyard, it will quickly become clogged and will breakdown often as is demonstrated by many official maintenance problem reports submitted to the Public Works Department by the metal plating shop foreman.

4. The scrubbers must be supported by a highly efficient and documented monitoring and maintenance program. This is clearly stated in the following article published by KCH Services Inc (KCH Services Inc.) on a plating industry web site. Here is the link to this article:

Chrome Plating Scrubber Maintenance

Official U.S. Navy, Mare Island Shipyard and paid contractor documents provided on this web site demonstrate the following:

1. The scrubbers that had been installed on the metal plating shop in building 225 to remove the toxic air contaminant chromic acid were run without the required water flow for extended periods of time sometime lasting years.

2. When water was supplied to the scrubbers it was not clean and was not monitored or tested to ensure it was clean. In point of fact the concentration of chromic acid into the scrubber water was allowed to become so high that the water inside the scrubbers became so thick it was actually blown out of the scrubber in a massive airborne spill that took place on February 17, 1988 and which was allowed to secretly continue for over a day before it was stopped.

3. The process air generated inside the metal plating shop which was fed to the scrubbers was filled with every kind of normal dirt generated on the shipyard and was not clean as required by manufacturer specifications.

4. The scrubbers were not maintained and their performance was not monitored and they were operated by personnel who were not trained in their proper operation. There were not local maintenance documents available for operating personnel to use to monitor scrubber performance or to maintain the scrubbers as was mandated by both U.S. Navy and local Shipyard written Occupational Safety and Health Instructions. There was no way the scrubbers could possibly be tested because of the lack of access to the scrubber outlets.

The simple fact of the matter is that the scrubbers were installed for one reason only and this was to keep the victims outside the shop from asking any questions. They were to protect the exterior of the plating shop from showing that the emissions out of the shop were massive. Staining of the building exterior and the outsides of adjacent buildings would have stimulated too much curiosity. The purpose of the scrubbers was to keep the continuous poisoning a continuous secret. The scrubbers were installed in 1951 and were worn out by 1975. They were never operated properly and never worked. Occupational Safety and Health personnel never ever did a single thing to change this situation and when it was made clear to them by a local union in 1995 that what had happened had been discovered they did everything in their power to cover it up and keep it secret even resorting to physical assault on the Union President.

The Three Key Elements - The Second Key - The Smoking Gun Scrubber Performance Test

Personnel inside the two buildings directly adjacent to the metal plating shop, buildings 101 and 273, had been made severely ill by the effects of the massive airborne spill on February 17, 1988. But because chromic acid particles in the air, even when their concentration is very high and very harmful, are odorless, colorless and tasteless and a local anesthetic, the persons who had been made ill, weak and asthmatic had no idea of what had been done to them. The spill of February 17, 1988 had been kept secret from them and so for the most part these people attributed their health problems to allergies and age creeping up on them. In 1995 a local Union official became suspicious of the plating shop and brought his suspicions to the attention of Shipyard Labor Relations Office and Occupational Safety and Health Personnel. He figured that if these experts provided him with data demonstrating the suspicions were groundless all would be well. But not only was he not provided with any data, what happened was that he immediately became the subject of a gigantic campaign of harassment and entrapment. These actions only served to confirm his suspicions and he began to accumulate documents concerning the plating shop, many of which are presented for free and easy download on this web site. But among all the documents he obtained there was not one that actually demonstrated what the outlet concentration of chromic acid was in the chrome plating air exhaust scrubbers. Shipyard management was required by Federal Law to provide them upon his request, but they refused to do so and continued this refusal until after the Shipyard was officially closed in 1996. Knowing that such studies and measurements documents had to exist he continued his search throughout the Shipyard and on the Internet figuring that sooner or later someone would make the mistake of posting them somewhere. Finally, in November of 2007 after many hundreds of hours of Internet searching the smoking gun documents were found on the Internet.

These documents are a highly controlled scientific study of the performance of both building 225 plating shop chromium scrubbers. The Tests were performed under the direct supervision of the State of California Bay Area Air Quality Management District Engineers and so their results are indisputable. Official U.S. Navy Documents provided on this Site demonstrate that directly prior to these tests the Shipyard engaged in a money is no object campaign to both completely rebuild and optimize the performance of both scrubbers. With all these factors these two tests provide concrete reliable objective data which is used in this Site to demonstrate conclusively that during the entire time of plating shop operations between the years of 1918 to 1990 the Mare Island Naval Plating Shop was MASSIVELY UNSAFE AND A FACTORY OF DEATH to all who were so unfortunate as to be within miles of it.

If, before you read on to get the entire picture, you want to see these Chromium Acid scrubber performance test results that management kept secret and that demonstrate the right of people outside the plating shop to be paid a 25% hazard differential pay, you can use this link. Keep in mind that you will need to multiply the emitted Chromium Acid concentration, which is provided in gr/sdcf (grains per standard cubic foot of air), by the EPA provided conversation factor of 2,290, to obtain the concentration in mg/cubic meter (mg/m3) of air that is used in the 1988 local shipyard Chromium Acid control limit of 0.05 mg/m3. When this is done you will find the emitted Chromium Acid concentration exceeded the local shipyard control limit for workers. Exposure above this limit automatically invokes the payment of hazardous duty pay.

The Smoking Gun

It can be proved with documents prepared by management that the Navy had these documents in their possession in 1995 and so their refusal to provide them was no mistake but was just another despicable act in a decades long almost limitless train of despicable acts to keep the murder factory secret.

In 1986 The Shipyard Commander personally directed that every person on the Shipyard be provided with a "Safe and Healthful" working environment. But, obviously, with regard to the metal plating shop, this Instruction was observed only in the breach of it:

Shipyard Commander Instruction 10-10-86

Consider also that the April 6, 1988 test results were obtained from scrubbers that had recently been completely rebuilt and were being operated precisely as they should be after having been specially prepared for BAAQMD mandated performance testing following the February 17, 1988 massive spill of Chromium Acid into the air. In normal conditions the scrubbers were completely ineffective due to being operated without water flow and without maintenance and they were also used up and worn out. Real Chromium Acid exposures outside of the plating shop to innocent personnel were actually much much greater than demonstrated in the BAAQMD reports.

How Massive was the Factory of Death?

It would just be too easy to use words that have become cliches due to overuse such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz. But somehow the words Secret Gas Chamber continue to creep into my mind over and over aging even though its been so many years. The Shipyard was a form of Poisonous Gas Chamber and having entered this category normal human measures of scale don't seem to apply when held up against the destruction of health and life that continued for most of the 20th Century. The question is how could all this have been allowed to continue? The answer is that only those who knew about it, were responsible to do something to stop it, and who were responsible to inform the victims know; and they're doing everything possible to avoid having to answer these questions. I have to tell you in absolute complete honesty the main reason I've published this web site is to make certain that when I stand before God for judgment it's crystal clear I'm not one of them and am well out of their vicinity.

The main problem in dealing with the massive poisonous effect of the chromic acid discharges from the metal plating shop is that the extreme toxicity of chromic acid means the numbers that describe this toxicity are very small. The human mind naturally tends to assume that small quantities of anything will have a small effect. But there are some extraordinarily toxic substances like chromic acid, dioxin and PCB's where this rule does not apply. Chromic acid causes cancer and many other serious debilitating diseases in extraordinarily small quantities.

The average of the reported discharge of Chromium Acid in the exhaust air out of the Decorative Chrome/Anodizing scrubber from the April 6, 1988 test report is 0.0000230 gr/sdcf. This

converts

to 0.0527 mg/m3 which exceeds the 1988 local shipyard worker exposure limit of 0.05 mg/m3. But, this result was obtained from scrubbers that had been recently

overhauled

and were being operated with the correct water flow and with clean water and were 93% efficient. We know that they were routinely left

without maintenance and without water

and we also know from the April 17, 1988 RSA report that normally this scrubber was 7% efficient. The calculations that adjust for this are shown on this page:

Scrubber Discharge Calculations

 

The Shipyard played a dirty nasty criminal game with Federal Law concerning employee exposure to toxic chemicals in the work place. The Federal Law that stipulates a Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) or Action Level (AL, 1/2 the PEL), applies only to employees who are actually assigned to work with the chemicals or who otherwise might be exposed to them by accident. If a person is a worker, as defined by this law, he must be provided with a number of things such as training about the chemical and its hazards, safety equipment, notices, safety documents, safety showers, first aid equipment and other things which the persons outside the plating shop were not provided. By not providing these things to these plating shop outsiders in adjacent buildings 101 and 273 and others nearby, Mare Island Occupational Safety and Health Department management demonstrated they did not consider such persons be under the law pertaining to PEL or AL. In all cases, persons not covered are required to be as safe from chemical exposure as "bank workers". Hence, if anyone was exposed to chromic acid at a level exceeding that which a bank worker would normally experience then he was eligible for hazardous duty pay because the hazard was not accounted for in his official Job Description. If you want to know more about this in more detail you can use this link:

Reckless Endangerment

You may be asking just how reasonable the calculations that produce the 1.310 mg/m3 exposure level are? It is always best, with such a terrible result, to apply a test of reasonableness to see if the calculations are consistent with reality. The calculations are well confirmed. This is a graph from a test conducted in 2000 at the Navy Air Depot plating shop at Cherry Point. The purpose of the test was to measure the effects of the use of a fume suppressant additive on chrome plating baths. The tests measured the emissions of Chromium Acid from a hard chrome plating bath in the chromium bath air exhaust stack before the scrubber both with the additive and without:

 

As you can see, the NADEP Cherry Point Chromium Acid emissions without the additive average to be 2.46 mg/m3 and so the calculations performed on the Calculations Page for Mare Island are demonstrated to be very conservative and likely underestimate the actual Mare Island emissions of Chromium Acid from the plating shop..

What Is the Probable Lung Cancer Risk From The Toxic Exposure From The Plating Shop?

There is no doubt about it. Many cancers to the lung and sinus of the unfortunate Victims at Mare Island and in the City of Vallejo have happened, are happening now and will happen in the future. This is the main point of this web site and the human and financial costs of this are so large as to be totally incalculable. This is why the U.S. Navy has done everything in its power to make sure you would never find out about this. But, incalculably more than the money is the total abject contempt for the human lives that have been wiped out and the families that have been destroyed. Here we see the real black heart of the U.S. Navy in action.

There are two authorities studies concerning the severe cancer causing effect of chromic acid. Both of these are used here and then averaged to obtain a final rough cancer risk from the chromic acid spewed out of the plating shop::

A. A State of California letter from 1-30-2002 states that over 70 years and twenty four hours per day an exposure level of 0.00000144 mg/m3 will result in 216 excess cancers per million persons exposed. Converting the normal 1.310 mg/m3 exposure to 5 years and 1000 persons is accomplished as follows:

(1.310 mg/m3 / 0.00000144 mg/m3) X 216 = 196,500,000 cancers per million persons exposed 24 hours per day for 70 years.

70 years/5 years = 14 and 196,500,000 / 14 = 14,035,714 cancers per million persons exposed 24 hours per day for 5 years.

Converting from 24 hours to 8 hours per day for a normal work shift: : 24/8= 3 and 14,035,714 / 3 = 4,678,571

There's no point in converting this to 1000 persons. 4.6 million lung cancers per 1 million persons exposed means that it is likely that only the most lucky very few who were exposed to the plating shop will escape lung cancer in his or her lifetime. Another way of looking at this figure is that the cancer causing effect of the plating shop likely extended deep into the City of Vallejo.

B. Second, California also determined in its 2006 Regulations Basis Document that an emission of as little as 2 grams per year of Chromium Acid will initiate cancer in 10 persons out of 1,000,000 persons exposed:

"12. Why is staff concerned about 4.0 pounds per year of emissions?
While the 4.0 pounds (1,800 grams) per year of emissions seems low, even a very small
amount of hexavalent chromium can result in a substantial cancer risk. For example, staff
found that as little as two grams of annual emissions would yield an estimated cancer risk
of ten per million people exposed. "

Dividing the 79,758 grams of Chromium Acid emitted from the Mare Island Plating shop in 1988 by 2 and then multiplying by 10 produces the total cancers caused by this discharge amount:

79,758 grams/ 2 grams = 39,879 X 10 cancers per million = 398,790 Cancers per million or 39.88 percent.

C. Taking the average of 1,000,000 cancers per 1,000,000 and 398,790 cancers per million results in 699,395 cancers per million or about 70 percent.

About 70% of the people who worked in the vicinity of the plating shop will or already have likely contacted cancer of the lung or sinus due to the plating shop emissions of Chromium Acid.

Another important question is just how "Big" was the Mare Island Plating shop? A plating shop is not rated by physical size, but by the amount of work put through it. It makes sense that the size of the shop should be matched by the amount of work put through it. The bigger the amount of work put through a smaller sized shop the larger the emissions. The California 2006 Regulation Basis Document contains a graph that allows the work "size" of the plating shop to be determined:

The Shipyard Toxic Preview of 1989 shows that the Mare Island Plating Shop used 5,930,000 Ampere-hours of electricity in Chromium Plating during about a half year of operation in 1988. This puts it in the upper 80% in size of all plating facilities in California. It was a very big shop packed into a tiny building. The result was personnel overwork, poorly maintained equipment, frequent breakdowns, and a total lack of concern for toxic emissions.

If you would like to see a very detailed modern review of all of the medical information available about the tremendous toxicity of Chromium Acid you can use this link to access the EPA study issued in 1998:

EPA IRIS Hexavalent Chromium 1998

I know that Mare Island worked very hard to keep all these things a secret. While I was poisoned on February 17, 1988 and my health permanently collapsed from this, it wasn't until late 1995 that I discovered the February 1988 spill report. After reading it I understood what had been done to me and shortly thereafter I reported to my doctor to obtain treatment. She asked me to return the next day. During that second appointment she said to me "Mare Island says you're full of s**t". Mare Island management did everything evil in their power to keep this Chromium Acid exposure a total secret. And once you've taken the time to give this web site a good and thorough examination you will know why they were so determined to keep the Chromium Acid poisoning a secret even to the point of the denial of medical treatment of a severely poisoned victim.

The State of California found the highest concentration from Chromium Acid scrubbers occurs 20 feet away from the outlet. Because the plating shop Chromium Acid scrubbers were at the edge of building 225 this puts the highest Chromium Acid concentration in the center of the two adjacent buildings 273 and 101. The two adjacent buildings did not have any ventilation systems of their own and depended entirely upon air entry through the windows for ventilation, so there was no dilution. This is demonstrated by the Chromium Acid Vs. Distance Graph provided in the 2006 California 2006 Regulations Basis Document:

Chromium Acid Concentration Vs. Distance Graph

There was another problem. The air exhaust ducts or "stacks" on the top of the plating shop were not high enough and were not in accordance with the recommendations of the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH). The result of this was that the air suctions inside the plating shop pulled air down from the exhausts on the top of the shop as it was exhausted. This caused a constant flow of Chromium Acid contaminated air in the alleys between building 225 and adjacent buildings and also contaminating the entire atmosphere outside the shop in its vicinity. This was recognized by the U.S. Navy in an official letter:

U.S. Navy Plating Shop Exhaust Re circulation

It is also very important to consider that the Shipyard OSH office set a local control level of 0.05 mg/m3 (milligrams per cubic meter of air) Chromium Acid in air as a convenience only because it made things easy for them. The fact this control level was purely for the sake of convenience is proven by a Shipyard Training Program issued in 1985. Notice that in this document, on Table 1, says for Chromic Acid, "Repeated exposures above the PEL may cause cancer". This statement is a very sophisticated lie buried in a truth. The truth is that the Shipyard knew Chromium Acid was a carcinogen in 1985. The lie is that repeated exposures above the PEL are required to initiate cancer. This is a pure lie because no study or authority at that time had made such a determination. We also know it has to be a lie because we know now there is no safe level of exposure. This shipyard assurance is a completely made up statement whose only purpose would seem to be to lend support to the phony shipyard control level of 0.05 mg/m3. Here it is:

This 0.05 mg/m3 control level is not the lowest level recommended by competent expert U.S. Government authority. As early as 1973 the U.S. Government determined that Chromium Acid is a human carcinogen and recommended a much lower permissible exposure level. The fact this was ignored by the shipyard demonstrates a deliberate reckless abandonment of mandatory due diligence concerning the handling of an extraordinarily toxic substance. Please use this link to see a complete explanation of this fact:

No Due Diligence - Deliberate Negligence and Reckless Endangerment

It is also important to realize that the human senses are not equipped to detect or measure air quality and cannot detect Chromium Acid in the air even when it is present at extremely toxic levels. Here's what a world recognized expert in air quality, Vent-Axa, has to say about this:

"Monitoring of Air Quality

Normally, building occupants have to rely on their five senses and such signs as odor, dry throat and burning eyes to detect indoor air pollution. Unfortunately, our senses are better at judging comfort than at judging the threshold of toxicity. They are reliable for only a few molecules, such as ozone, nitric oxide or formaldehyde, whereas the more dangerous carbon monoxide, particulates, asbestos, and sulphate's are undetectable far beyond safe limits. "

The conclusion is simply the victims are blameless. It was the responsibility of the Shipyard to maintain a safe work environment and they refused to do this in spite of official and authoritative notification that the work place was not safe due to releases of the highly toxic and carcinogenic local anesthetic Chromium Acid.

To visit their site, use this link: Vent-Axla Web Site Handbook.

Please be sure to read the detailed analysis of the BAAQMD smoking gun test results which is provided in this Site. You can go there now using this link:

Smoking Gun History and Analysis

As late as 1973 the Industrial Hygiene situation with regard to Chromium Acid was that Chromium Acid was NOT considered to be a human carcinogen. The Shipyard admitted it was a carcinogen to a select group of people in 1985 and then was notified by the BAAQMD that it was one in 1988. Finally, In 2006 the State of California finally clearly declared to the public that Chromium Acid was the second most powerful human carcinogen and that in addition to this it is so highly toxic there is no level of exposure low enough that adverse health effects in the exposed population were not observed.

If you worked at another Navy Shipyard or other Navy Industrial Facility that had a plating shop you should know that the conditions at the Mare Island metal plating shop were not unusual. In 1993 the Navy sent Mare Island a full report about plating shop ventilation system problems. This report was the result of visiting 13 active Navy metal plating facilities:

Plating Shop Ventilation Lessons Learned 8-24-1993

It needs to be made clear from the onset of this that the Plating Shop personnel were not the problem. It was shipyard Command and Management structure that had the Occupational Health and Safety and the Injury Claims situation under such complete corrupt control to stifle and frustrate just complaints and claims that they felt it was safe to allow the poisoning to occur. The poisoning happened for the simple reason they thought they could simply get away with it. The following Work Request from the Plating Shop, which was cancelled three years after it was written, plainly demonstrates that the sympathy and the concerns of the plating shop workers was for their fellow Shipyard brothers and sisters. The plating shop workers had it far worse than anyone else.

Potable Water Contamination Prevention Request

There is no doubt that many people will be very disturbed about what has been done to them. I ask you to remain patient and to contact no one, most especially Federal Injury Compensation or local Occupational Health and Safety Office personnel until after you carefully read and understand the section of the filing of a FECA claim. There are very strong Statutes of limitations on claims for payment due to injuries caused by federal workplace working conditions and for the payment of back pay for the 25% hazardous environment pay differential. These can be triggered by simply saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, even someone who you think is a friend, at the wrong time and so I strongly advise you to keep the fact you have visited this site to yourself until after you have filed your claim papers.

This is a picture of the signs on the front gate to the Mare Island Metal Plating Shop Today.

\.

 

This is a picture of the sign on the side fence surrounding the plating shop today.

 

The Third Key - Chromic Acid Sampling, Sample Collection and Sample Analysis

The basis fact of chemical hazard monitoring is that in order to know the amount of a toxic chemical in the air a person is being exposed to one must sample the air the person is breathing. This sounds easy enough, but in actual practice it is very difficult and filled with complexity which provides many ways for the U.S. Navy to disguise cheating that produces results indicating exposures are less than harmful. I ran into a number of these during my examination of the offices of the Occupational Safety and Health Department offices, the Mare Island Industrial Chemistry Laboratory, the Mare Island Medical Laboratory and the Alameda Air Station Chemistry Laboratory immediately after closure of Mare Island Shipyard and the Alameda Air Station and will describe them here.

The way an airborne sample for chromic acid is collected is to use a small portable battery powered air pump. It sucks a measured quantity of air through a filter. Particles are collected on the filter. The filter is then sent to a laboratory so that the amount of the chromic acid collected on the filter can be measured through analysis.

The first and best way Mare Island cheated in its analysis of the negligible number of airborne chromic acid samples they collected was with the water that was used in the Industrial Chemistry Laboratory. All sample filters were analyzed there using a variety of techniques and machines that shared one thing and this is they needed very pure water in order to produce valid results. Chemical analysis procedures always specify the purity level of the liquid component of the analysis and the analytical procedure for chromic acid samples. When one is dealing with the analysis of very small quantities of things it is very important that the water used to extract the material captured on the filter not contain any of this material or any other material that will in some other way interfere with the analysis in some way. The water must be ultra pure. There are two ways to get water of such high quality. The first is to purchase it in one gallon containers as a chemical reagent. This is the most expensive way but it is the best water. Each batch is individually analyzed and it comes with a certificate stating the very low levels of any contaminant. The second way it to manufacture it yourself. This method requires specialized equipment provided by a chemical supply company. It usually consists of a water distillation unit, filters, pumps, valves, electronic quality monitoring systems, and a storage and dispensing system. Such systems can cost about $10,000.00 but all they provide a virtually unlimited quantity of extremely high quality water suitable for general analytical use on demand.

The thing so understand is that the smaller the amount of material that needs to be measured through analysis in a sample, the purer the water used in the analytical procedure must be.

Mare Island had a secret medical laboratory located in the old Mare Island Medical Clinic which has since been converted into a Veterans Affairs Clinic. The equipment in this laboratory was of a very high quality and was obviously used to secretly analyze blood samples of all shipyard employees for drug usage along with other substances such as poisons used in industrial processes. Because some of the analysis performed on blood samples went down to extraordinarily low levels of detection it was necessary for the analytical water used to be extraordinarily pure. In this laboratory chemical reagent quality bottled water was used. It was only used in this one laboratory at Mare Island.

The Alameda Naval Air Station had a chemical laboratory used to analyze the quality of fuels and lubricants used in fighter jets. Bad fuel or lubricants can severely shorten the life of aircraft jet engines or other life supporting equipment and so this laboratory showed all the indications of being a no nonsense well funded clean and efficient laboratory. One one wall was mounted a top of the line analytical water purification system. manufactured by the Millipore Company. It contained an electrical still, water filters, de-ionization cartridges, a storage and distribution container and was piped together with teflon and glass tubing and fittings. It was the best that was available at that time and produced the highest quality analytical water that could be locally produced. There was nothing like it, or even closely approaching it anywhere at Mare Island.

The Mare Island Naval Shipyard Industrial Chemistry Laboratory water supply system was a complete and total wreck that was useful for nothing but the production of completely unreliable results. It consisted of two reverse osmosis water cleaners that had been purchased at the local Home Depot Store. These were located up inside the elevator machinery room that is accessible from a roof access opening in the men's lavatory. Located next to these home water cleaners were two old 1930's era electrically powered water stills. These stills had been allowed to "rock up" a very long time ago and had been abandoned. Operation of a water still requires the discharge of high temperature brine water continually. This brine would have quickly turned the elevator equipment room into a sauna and would have certainly shorted out the electrical controls for the elevator. It wasn't hard to see why they had been poorly maintained, and then abandoned and not replaced when they failed which was probably not long after they were installed. The water produced by the Home Depot osmosis units were fed into the chemistry laboratory by plastic pipe that was then split off so that it was provided to each of the many sinks in the lab. Each sink was provided with a de ionization cartridge that had been modified with its top being cut off so that old resin could be replaced with new when the need would arise. Each outlet of each modified cartridge was provided with a water electrical conductivity meter. This was, for a chemical laboratory having the responsibility of analyzing all samples of all kinds collected at Mare Island, a total shame and a perfect crime of willful violation of every precept of chemical analysis result reliability and quality.

The fact that the corrupt water system at the Mare Island Chemistry Laboratory was a complete sham was amply demonstrated to it by the installation of a very expensive analytical machine that was completely ineffective. Environmental samples are routinely analyzed by a machine called an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer or ICP. This machine is designed to measure very small quantities of metals in a sample; down to the parts per million level. Samples collected in the field are put into strong acid and pure water then cooked down to nothing so that only the metals in the sample remain. Then this liquid is filtered and diluted with pure water and fed into the ICP machine. The ICP machine then provides a reading as to the amount of all the metals contained in the sample. When I reviewed the operating log for this machine all it showed was that the machine was stuck with a super high reading for the metal lead. This machine cost over $1,000,000 and so the chemistry lab people were anxious for it to work right because it was intended to save Mare Island a lot of money by allowing Mare Island to analyze all of its environmental samples locally rather than send them off to expensive contractor laboratory. The ICP machine's manufacturers representatives were constantly called in to diagnose the problem with the machine but they could find nothing wrong with it.

The problem was very simple. Mare Island was over 150 years old and a lot of its water pipes were made of lead and were leaching large amounts of lead into the tap water. The Home Depot RO units and the hacked up modified de ionization cartridges were not removing much of it from the tap water and too much lead was in this water used for all analyses in the laboratory. The excess lead in the analytical water overloaded the ICP machine to the point where it could do nothing. Finally everyone just gave up on the ICP machine without ever figuring out it was their Rube Goldberg water supply system that was at the heart of the matter.

Nothing by way of analytical results that came out of the Mare Island Chemistry Laboratory can be believed or relied upon for any useful purpose. It was a total useless wreck because of the complete corruption of its water supply. One has to ask how could this happen? The answer lies in in the differences between the the water used in the secret medical lab, the Alameda Naval Air Station Laboratory and the Mare Island Industrial Laboratory. The Navy had plenty of highly educated, trained and qualified people on the scene at Mare Island and elsewhere in the Bay Area who knew all about analytical water and its requirements. They specified $10.00 per gallon perfect water for their secret medical laboratory. The Alameda laboratory did the water job right. The only thing I can come up with by way of explanation is that the Industrial Laboratory water system was a useless wreck because the U.S. Navy really wanted bad results from it. This is because good results would have created a damming record of intentional and deliberate mass poisoning. The expense of this record would have far exceeded the costs of bad results. Besides, if U.S. Navy higher ups really needed to have a good result the sample could be directed to be sent to a certified contractor laboratory. It was just cheaper to keep the Industrial Lab useless and pay for all its upkeep and the salaries of personnel and buy a useless ICP than it would be to be forced to pay the total cost of compensation for all the uncounted thousands of its victims which would easily exceed many billions of dollars if not much more.

The U.S. Navy is not just a murderer. It is a ruthless, cunning, vicious, calculating, cold blooded first degree mass murderer.

Here's Where the Story Begins

The Metal Plating Shop in Building 225 used highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. These were present there in massive quantities and were used extensively. The work operations inside the plating shop building generated highly toxic mists and dusts of these chemicals. With very few exceptions the chemicals used in the plating shop were vastly under rated by being defined to be Class "A" health stressors by the local Shipyard Occupational Health and Safety Manual (OSH). It was a local shipyard OSH requirement that where Class "A" stressors were to be used there had to be a physical boundary between the work operations to prevent the exposure of personnel outside the boundary to levels of the stressor in excess of the locally determined safe levels of the time. This is the shipyard OSH manual page that specifies this requirement in paragraph 3.2.3:

OSH Manual Boundary Requirement

What were the boundaries for the plating shop to contain the emissions of the highly toxic and carcinogenic odorless, colorless and tasteless mists and dusts generated there? To stop the dust there were the walls with holes in them through which contaminated liquid was allowed to escape, there were the windows so deteriorated the panes were falling out of the frames, and there was the main door. This is a picture of the main plating shop door from inside the plating shop:

 

California states in the 2006 Regulations Basis Document that emissions of Chromium Acid in contaminated dust and dirt emitted from inside the shop to the outside are very serious:

"20. What is staff proposing to limit fugitive emissions?
Fugitive dust emissions also likely impact people residing near chromium plating and
chromic acid anodizing facilities. Therefore, staff is proposing that all facilities implement
housekeeping measures to reduce dust emissions."

With regard to the hazardous mists generated by operations conducted in the plating tanks themselves there were the scrubbers that cleaned the air sucked from the tops of the plating tanks. These were the boundaries. But the scrubbers were run without necessary water, without maintenance and without being monitored. All of these statements are documented with official shipyard documents provided on this web site. The simple fact is that when all is considered the conclusion is that there were no boundaries. The effect of the plating shop was on the entire shipyard because there were no boundaries and plating operations might as well have been conducted in the outside air.

Here is a picture of typical chrome plating tanks under constant air agitation in the same way they were constantly agitated in the plating shop at Mare Island:

It is now illegal in the State of California to constantly agitate chrome plating tanks with air in this manner because it produces a non-stop and large emission of chromium acid. It also results in a tremendous release of sold chemical dust whenever chemicals are added to the tank.

Throughout this document I am going to refer to the main toxic chemical as Chromium Acid. This is for the sake of consistency. Chromium Acid has a great variety of names, all of which refer to the exact same thing which is Chrome in the plus six oxidation state otherwise known as hexavalent. Chromium Acid is purchased in the form of a red flaky powder. It has no odor and imparts no sensation to the skin when it is touched. It's chemical name is Chromic Acid, Chromium Trioxide, Hexavalent Chromium and there are others. This chemical has been in use for so long that many names for it have been generated.

The plating shop was an ever present dangerous secret of tremendous desperation and was an accident always in a state of continual progress. Here is a link to a plating shop maintenance document from 1983 that explains everything about this. The best name for this document, which was written by the plating shop foreman, is "67 Years of Trouble".

67 Years of Trouble

The plating shop had been operated from 1916 - 1918 up to its final closure in 1990 and in all that time it had just been used and kept from collapsing under its own weight. Finally, in 1988 the end came but no one could see it or understand its causes until now. The end began with a tremendous spill of Chromium Acid to the air. Here is a link to the official spill report:

February 17, 1988 Spill Report

On February 17, 1988 there was a massive discharge of Chromium Acid out of the exhaust on the roof of the metal plaiting shop in building 225. I was unknowingly exposed to this and from that time my health has been severely impacted. My lungs were ruined and I was made severely allergic and weak and I have little endurance. This makes everything difficult, but it has given me time to think everything over very carefully before putting these words down for you to read. I personally know some of my fellow victims, but they are not named here for the sake of privacy. But there are persons named in some of the documents which will be presented and made available on this site. All I can say about this is that if a person works hard to make sure everything he or she signs is true, correct and complete there will never be any cause for regret.

It is possible to get a very good idea of the total amount of Chromium Acid discharged out of the roof of the plating shop in one year. In 1989 the shipyard provided a Toxic Inventory Preview to the BAAMQD. Even through the plating shop had been inactive since September 1988, numbers were provided in this preview on page 9 allowing an accurate calculation of total Chromium Acid Emissions. Here is a link to a copy of it:

Shipyard Toxic Inventory Preview 5-12-1989

It is possible to calculate the total amount of Chromium Acid discharged into the shipyard from the plating shop in one year from this data and the BAAQMD test reports of 5 and 6 April, 1988:

A. The Toxic Preview lists the following ampere-hours for each tank containing Chromium Acid. An ampere hour is one ampere of electricity applied to the tank for one hour:

Source No. 436 Chrome Plating Tank No. 1R = 1,250,000 amp-hours per year.

Source No. 437 Chrome Plating Tank No. 2R = 1,300,000 amp-hours per year.

Source No. 439 Chrome Plating Tank No. 5R = 780,000 amp-hours per year.

Source No. 441 Chrome Plating Tank No. 9R = 2,600,000 amp-hours per year.

And these total to 5,930,000 amp-hours per year.

B: The BAAQMD Test reports of April 5 and April 6, 1988 determined the scrubbers had an overall efficiency of 96%. This was for completely rebuilt scrubbers being operated to obtain maximum efficiency. But we know from shipyard maintenance and Contractor documents that for the most part the scrubbers were run without water flow rendering them completely ineffective at absorbing Chromium Acid. The two BAAQMD tests determined the following Chromium Emission rates per amp-hour:

Scrubber A436 Chrome Plating Scrubber = .1446 milligrams Chromium Acid per amp-hour average.

Scrubber A439 Chrome Plating Scrubber = 0.9315 milligrams Chromium Acid per amp-hour average.

The average of these two is 0.5381 mg per amp-hour with scrubbers which were 95.7% efficient. When the scrubbers were operated without water they were 17% efficient and so the normal condition average Chromium Acid emissions would be 0.5381 X 95.7/17= 3.02 mg per amp-hour.

C. The total amp-hours for the shop is 5,930,000 and when this is multiplied by the normal scrubber condition emission rate of 13.45 mg per amp-hour the calculation results in a yearly discharge of 79,758 grams or 155.5 pounds of Chromium Acid per year under normal operating conditions. This is a fantastically huge amount of Chromium Acid.

D. The 2006 California Regulation Basis Document contains a graph that allows us to see just how fantastically large the emission of 155.5 pounds of Chromium Acid per year really is:

This graph shows that the average plating shop discharges about 2.4 pounds per year. This demonstrates that the Mare Island Plating shop had far too much work pushed through a shop that was overwhelmed by it.

E. It is possible to determine the square area of the shipyard 155.5 pounds of of Chromium Acid would contaminate to a level of 0.05 mg/m2.

79,758,500 mg divided by .05 mg/m2 = 1,595,170,000 sq meters

1,595,170,000 square meters divided by 62,224 square meters per square mile = 25,636 square miles.

D. This is a ridiculous number and so its best to find out the overall Chromium Acid contamination level produced on Mare Island by the emission of 155.5 pounds of Chromium Acid. The entire island is about 3.5 miles long by one mile long and so this is rounded up to four square miles. The contamination level is:

25,636 square miles at 0.05 mg/m2 divided by four square miles = 320.45 mg/m2:

This explains why, when they had to tell the truth to themselves, when it was keep the plating shop or close it, shipyard OSH personnel honestly calculated that for the entire four square mile shipyard complex the plating shop produced a calculated Toxic Substance (TS) hazard index of 700 with chrome plating and 13 without it. Then, having been honest among themselves they decided to close the shop to avoid having to inform the people on the shipyard and in the City of Vallejo about the terrible damage that had been done to them.

The question is, are these calculations reasonable? In 2000 Chromium Acid emission tests were performed at the Navy Air Depot plating shop at Cherry Point of the hard chrome plating tanks. The purpose of the tests was to measure the emissions per amp-hr both with and without a fume suppressant additive. The tests had the following results:

These results from Cherry Point demonstrate that the calculations performed above are very conservative. The Cherry Point emissions, without the fume suppressant average 21.33 mg/amp-hr. This indicates the calculations above are very conservative and likely underestimate the actual Mare Island emissions by about 150%.

The scrubbers had been installed in 1951 and were operated without the necessary water flow or maintenance for long periods of time. Finally on February 17, 1988 a major accident happened as a result of these factors. The following documents demonstrate that a massive spill of Chromium Acid happened on February 17, 1986. They also demonstrate who knew about it, its importance, and what was done about it. None of which included us, the ones who were exposed.

This is a link to the original Shipyard Chrome Acid Spill Critique Report:

Spill Critique/Scrubber Critique 2-17-88

This spill resulted in a complete stop of all chrome plating operations in the shop and it required a critique. These two outcomes define the spill to be a situation of "Imminent Danger" as defined by the shipyard OSH Manual and this requires exposed employee notification and the prominent posting of notices. Neither of these were done. Here is the section of the OSH Manual that mandates these things be done:

Shipyard OSH Manual Imminent Danger

Here is a link to a transcript of the Critique Report Statement made by the man present in the plating shop when the spill was first discovered:

Statement of Mr. Schuck

Notice that in the statement there is the admission that the liquid blown out of the top of the chrome scrubber on the roof of building 225 had a Chromium Acid concentration of from 500 to 700 Parts Per Million. The U.S. Department of Labor states that the airborne concentration of Chrome Acid that is Immediately Dangerous to LIfe and Health is 30 mg/m3 (milligrams per cubic meter of air). The concentration of Chromium Acid in the mist emitted from the plating shop scrubber during this spill had a concentration of about 600 mg/m3. Did you know about this? Were you informed of this exposure as required by Federal Law and by OSH Instructions and Union Contract? I know you were not. And I also know that if you did find out about it and went to a local Doctor about it they would have called the Shipyard and the Shipyard would have called you a liar.

Mr. Schuck also makes the point that the scrubber water recirculation tank capacity was much smaller than the volume of water present in the system when it was operating. Every time they tried to stop the scrubber water recirculation pump the tank would overflow, so they just kept the pump running. This is a very important admission because it shows the people who designed the system were completely incompetent. The plating shop people, who were electricians, were handed a very complex and badly designed fluid system and then were just told to operate it. The chrome plating scrubber system was designed by people who knew nothing about what they were doing. The system could not possibly operate properly because the recirculation tank was too small, and then it was turned over to be operated by people who under the best of circumstances knew nothing about how to operate it properly and could never figure out what was wrong with it. The system was designed to be a constant source of trouble, a constant source of hexavalent chromium emitted into the air and eventually a catastrophe where innocent victims were immediately and permanently robbed of their health.

In 1985 the shipyard knew that Chromium Acid was a human carcinogen. But it was providing this information only to a very highly select group of employees who handled hazardous waste (Hazardous Waste Handler Training). But Chromium Acid had been determined to be a human carcinogen much earlier in 1972. Finally in 1987 the International Agency for the Research of Cancer (IARC) determined that Chromium Acid (Chromic Trioxide) was a known human carcinogen. And so by the time of this spill it was well known by shipyard OSH personnel that the spill was a release of a very powerful human carcinogen and yet they kept the exposure a secret from those who had been exposed to the spill. They also knew very well that the plating shop had been emitting very high levels of Chromium Acid for many years and yet had done nothing about it.:

IARC Chromium Acid Human Carcinogen 1987

Here is a link to the Corrective Actions for the Spill. Note there is nothing about the Federal Employee Right to Know, informing exposed employees, cleanup of working spaces, prevention of smoking or eating, medical surveillance, setting up boundaries or anything of the sort which is clearly stipulated in the Hazardous Waste Handler Training Plan. Those who were exposed were left to live or die as fate decreed. Mare Island knew that if anyone died from this exposure no one would ever figure it out.

Spill Critique Course of Action

Notice the last Corrective Action is to establish a Chrome Scrubber Preventative Maintenance Procedure. Up until this time no one knew how to maintain the scrubbers. Scrubbers were used on the top of the plating shop from about 1951 to 1990 and it was only in 1988 there a preventative maintenance schedule or program for them.

Here is a link to the Critique Attendance Sign In Page:

Critique Report Attendance Page

Notice that a Code 106 OSH representative was there so there's no excuse for the spill remaining a secret until I found this document by accident in 1995.

This is a copy of the Official Navy Letter the Shipyard sent to the State of California to notify the state of the spill in accordance with State Law. It seems the Shipyard was afraid of the State finding out but they were not afraid of the exposed employees finding out about it.

Spill Letter to State of California

This letter demonstrates that everyone in the upper levels of the Shipyard Command knew all about this spill. They simply didn't want to pay for all the injuries. Money was the only thing on their mind and people were nothing to them. Documents that positively demonstrate the only thing on the mind of Code 106 Occupational Health and Safety Management and the Shipyard Commander was money will be provided later in the Smoking Gun section of this site.

The scrubbers had been run without the necessary water flow routinely from the day they were installed in 1951..

No Scrubber Water

The Shipyard was obligated by its own instructions to notify exposed personnel because this spill was a defined Serious Incident requiring notification to the highest levels of U.S. Navy Management:

Shipyard OSH Manual Incident Defined

The main reason for this spill was that the scrubbers were worn out and used up. They had been installed in 1951 and by 1965 the shipyard estimated they had a 10 year service life remaining. They had been operated for years without water flow and without maintenance and were simply used up. In 1985 a Contractor provided study of the plating shop contained this information:

Waste Reduction Plan

If you want to know more about the current IDLH and carcinogenic nature of Chromium Acid use this link to go to the NIOSH Web Site for Chrome 6:

NIOSH Chromium Acid

or if you want to know everything you can review this 1998 EPA report about the Toxicity of Hexavalent Chromium:

EPA IRIS Hexavalent Chromium 1998

This spill and the actions that followed it show conclusively that no one from the inside of the plating shop to the highest levels of Shipyard Navy Management ever turned a single thought to the people who were exposed in adjacent buildings or who were innocent passers by at the time. Later documents to be provided will conclusively demonstrate that there were only two things on their mind and this was the resumption of production within the shop and the saving of money with regard to personnel exposure. If you want to understand everything it is important to keep these thoughts in mind. It is singularly important that the Code 106 response to this spill was totally with regard to the resumption of production. The Code 106 source documents, which will be presented later on, clearly demonstrate that the stated purpose of Code 106 was personnel protection; but its real purpose was the promotion of production and the avoidance of injury claims. This is a pure exercise in inhumanity. The only possible conclusion to draw is that the real purpose of Code 106 was to provide the sham appearance of personnel protection.

It is my intention to develop the entire story over some time. I know from my personal experience it takes the mind some time to come to grips with the fact that one has been deliberately poisoned and then left to die and rot, to be crippled, maimed, diminished in health, or to die of cancer when you are still young.. Because of this I am concerned of generating a "too much information" situation. So with this caution I will begin with the real reason why the Mare Island Naval Shipyard was closed. It is this reason that is behind everything else as you will see as this site develops.

This is an aerial view of the Building 225 Metal Plating Shop along with adjacent buildings. The scrubbers have been removed, but you can see where they were located by the coverings. The two chrome plating scrubbers were located in the places occupied by the two closest covers to the bottom of the picture. Note also that while the square adjacent building appears to have a ventilation system installed on the roof, there were no fans in it and so that building had only ventilation through the windows.

 

This is a close up picture of one of the scrubber hole covers on the top of the plating shop

 

 

No Chromium Acid Exposure Due Diligence

Negligence and Reckless Endangerment

There is no excuse. Mare Island was a large scale industrial user of Chromium Acid for about 90 years. Chromium Acid has never been an innocent chemical. It's always been known that it has adverse health effects. This chemical has never been used as a food additive or anything like it. It has absolutely no beneficial effect on human health. Individuals who use it have always been under a special responsibility to keep the exposure to others as a result of their use of it to below the level of exposure known to have an impact on human health. Any large scale industrial user is under a powerful responsibility to keep in touch with the most recent developments concerning its toxicity and to adjust, modify or change its operations so that its operations with this chemical are always safe. Mare Island kept up with the information, but they did not keep up with keeping its workers safe. Documents obtained from the Shipyard Library and the Occupational Safety and Health Office and which are presented here demonstrate this fact.

In order to make things as easy as possible on itself the shipyard engaged in a big confidence swindle against its employees. What it did was to universally apply the Department of Labor Permissible Exposure Level (PEL) for Chromium Acid of 0.1 mg/m3 to all personnel who handled chemicals directly and the Department of Labor Action Level (AL) of 0.05 mg/m3, which is half the PEL to everyone else. This was the swindle. It was not legal to do this; and this is where the situation became negligent and reckless. It was correct to apply the PEL and the AL to workers who directly handled regulated chemicals such as workers inside the plating shop or hazardous waste workers, but it was not correct to apply it to other personnel, especially office workers. The reason for this is simple. The Department of Labor is responsible for the Employee Right To Know provisions of federal law which are implemented by the Department of Labor in the form of Hazard Communication regulations published in the Code of Federal Regulations. The PEL and AL are part of this set of regulations. But so also is the definition of who is an "Employee" covered by the regulations. The shipyard used the natural confusion between an "employee" who is paid to come to work and an "employee" as it is defined by the Right To Know Regulations to do what it wanted to do. If the regulations do not define you to be an "employee" for the purposes of the regulations, then you are not a defined "employee" and you are not covered by the Regulations and the PEL and AL do not apply to you. The regulations, 29 CFR 1910 - 2000 define an employee to be:

"Employee means a worker who may be exposed to hazardous chemicals under normal operating conditions or in foreseeable emergencies. Workers such as office workers or bank tellers who encounter hazardous chemicals only in non-routine, isolated instances are not covered."

 

These words mean that under the Employee Right to Know provisions of the Hazard Communication Standards you are one of two separate things. You are either an "employee" who is routinely exposed to chemicals as a result of the work assigned and is under the regulations; or you are a "worker" who should be as safe from chemicals as if you were inside a bank, and you are not covered by the regulations.

When you read the Shipyard Occupational Safety and Health manual you will notice that the Regulations are referenced as a source of authority and the word "employee" is used in them. This means simply that if you're an office worker or other kind of worker who is not an "employee" the OSH Manual did not apply to you.

This regulation definition of "employee" means the PEL or AL do not apply to persons who are not defined to be "employees" which is personnel not working with hazardous regulated chemicals as directed by management, such as office workers. The question then is, what standard of exposure to hazardous chemicals should apply to "workers" not covered by the Hazard Communication regulations? It is clearly not permissible to expose such persons to more of a regulated chemical than those who are covered. Nor is it permissible to expose them to hazardous levels of harmful chemicals and not tell them. The regulations say that "workers" not covered by the regulations should be as safe from chemical exposure as are bank tellers. This means they should be exposed to concentrations of regulated chemicals that produce absolutely no adverse health impact. Since the main impact of exposure to Chromium Acid is cancer, the Chromium Acid exposure control level the shipyard should have applied to "workers" must be in accordance with its cancer causing health impact so that there is no health impact at all.

We know that the shipyard considered office workers in the buildings adjacent to the plating shop to be "non-employees" or office workers because no one in those buildings was ever informed of the exposure to hazardous levels of Chromium Acid released into their breathing air by the spill of February 17, 1988. We know the spill entered the building air because those buildings had no ventilation system of their own; the only source of ventilation was open windows. The plating shop was subject to re circulation, and the spill wetted the sides of the buildings. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the shipyard wanted to have it all its own negligent and reckless way and did not inform office workers who had been exposed to highly toxic levels of a chemical the shipyard knew caused great health damage in extremely low concentrations because it did not want to pay the money.

What Safe Level of Chromium Acid Exposure Should Have Been Applied to "Workers"?

There was only State regulation of the industrial use of Chromium Acid until 1936 when the Walsh-Healey Federal Contracts Act was signed into law. It said: "

And so the federal law was to obey what the State said to do. The State of California did not designate Chromium Acid to be a Toxic Air Contaminant until 1986 and Chromium Acid in the workplace was effectively unregulated until 1970 when the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed into law:

Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970

But the requirements of the Occupational Health and Safety Act did not get implemented immediately and it took until about 1975 when the shipyard issued its first Occupational Safety and Health Manual. But this OSH Manual did not specify any control level for Chromium Acid. It merely required that an independent assessment of available authorities on the subject be consulted to determine the proper control level.

I was not able to find out what the control level for Chromium Acid was on the shipyard in 1975. But three sources provide a recommended control level. The first is from a copy of the American Conference of Government Industrial Hygienists. It stipulated a control level of 0.1 mg/m3:

ACGIH Manual 1973

In 1973 the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommended a level half of the ACGIH. The NIOSH document, "Occupational Exposure to Chromic Acid", contains a recommendation of 0.05 mg/m3 of air. At this time this is the level the shipyard should have applied.

NIOSH Chromium Acid Exposure Standard 1973

NIOSH clarified the no health impact Chromium Acid exposure limit in 1978 and reduced it by half again to 0.025 mg/m3 of air and so the exposure level should have been decreased in 1978 by half again. In 1978 Chromium Acid was considered to be non-carcinogenic, but some forms of Hexavalent Chromium other than Chromium Acid were considered to be carcinogenic and the exposure level for these was set to be 0.001 mg/m3.

NIOSH Chromium Acid Exposure Standard 1978

The Shipyard was required by its OSH Manual in 1975 to not blindly follow a recommended exposure limit which it found convenient to enforce. It was required to evaluate all sources of information and independently determine a level of exposure that was safe for the employee:

Mare Island OSH Manual 1975

But they didn't do this.

However, in 1985 the shipyard instituted a training program for hazardous waste handlers. In this training program Chromium Acid was identified to be a human carcinogen, and so at this time the shipyard should have implemented the 0.001 mg/m3 standard recommended by NIOSH in 1978. The Shipyard OSH office approved this training. Essentially the persons most likely to be exposed to Chromium Acid such as workers inside the plating shop were not informed it was a carcinogen and the hazardous waste workers were misinformed that cancer could only occur at repeated exposures above the local control level, which was a lie at that time.

Hazardous Waste Handler Training

In 1984 the shipyard issued its last revision to the Shipyard Occupational Safety and Health Manual. This 1984 version was carried in its 1984 state until the shipyard closed in 1996. This Manual stipulated that Chromium Acid was a "class B" health stressor or merely an irritant and stipulated a shipyard wide exposure PEL of 0.1 mg/m3. But the manual also states that any human carcinogen must be controlled as a "class A health stressor". The Manual should have been revised to implement the fact the shipyard knew Chromium Acid was a known human carcinogen in 1985 but they didn't do it.

Shipyard OSH Manual Pages

It is very important to notice that paragraph 1 of this section of the Manual states that the OSH Manual applies to "employees" and does not use the word "workers". It is my belief this means simply that the shipyard considered it had the obligation to control the exposure of "employees" to hazardous substances and chemicals to within federally specified limits and it had the right to expose everyone else to whatever it wanted to whenever it wanted to and to as much of it as it wanted to and it didn't have to account to this to anyone ever. But they couldn't have it both ways. It has to be that everyone who was paid to work on the shipyard was an "employee" or those who were not employees had to be kept to exposure levels consistent with working inside a bank and this the shipyard certainly did not do.

In January 1986 the California Environmental Protection Agency Air Resources Board determined that Chromium Acid was a human carcinogen so powerful there was no identifiable level of exposure where cancer in humans did not occur:

California Air Toxic's January 1986

At this point the shipyard should have set the "non-employee" Chromium Acid exposure level to be below the carcinogenic level of 0.001 mg/m3 recommended by NIOSH in 1978. But they didn't do this.

And finally in 1987 the IARC determined that Chromium Acid was an internationally recognized human carcinogen:

IARC Human Carcinogen 1987

The shipyard could be in no doubt that Chromium Acid was a confirmed powerful human carcinogen in January 1988 when they were informed of the shipyard cancer risk due to Chromium Acid by the BAAQMD:

BAAQMD Letter of 1-20-88

Which means they had to know that the people in adjacent buildings were "at ground zero" of maximum concentration during the Chromium Acid spill of 2-17-88:

Chromium Acid Spill Critique 2-17-88

Nor could the shipyard be unaware of its responsibility to notify those who had been exposed that they had been exposed to a human carcinogen. Carcinogens are, by definition, Category "A" stressors. Exposure to a carcinogen requires at least a one hour briefing about it. See paragraph 6.5 of the following shipyard OSH Manual page:

Requirement to Notify Those Exposed

The Shipyard Commander himself wrote a letter binding the shipyard to provide a "Safe and Healthful" working environment, but this did not happen:

"Safe and Healthful"

This is an obligation of federal law but also of the Negotiated Union Contract:

I.F.P.T.E. Local 25 Contract OSH Provisions

The documents are clear. The documents provided for download in this section were found in the Shipyard Code 106 library and so they were well known to OSH personnel. There can be no good reason for the Shipyard to use the DOL mandated "employee" 0.05 mg/m3 Action Level occupational standard for "workers" when the U.S. Government Entity responsible for the prevention of cancer in the workplace recommended one that was 10 times lower in 1973 and then another 50 times lower in 1978. This is further compounded when the State of California formally declared Chromium Acid to be a powerful human carcinogen in 1986. The only conclusion to draw from all these documents is that the Shipyard not only did not demonstrate due diligence in the setting of a Chromium Acid exposure standard for workers, they were deliberately negligent and reckless; and in this explicitly violated the Union Contract. Furthermore, they did not even obey their own instructions to themselves to notify those who had been exposed to harmful levels of Chromium Acid. It is not just there was no due diligence, the shipyard was absolutely and completely negligent and reckless in every way it is possible to be.

A phenomenon called "re circulation" happens when the exhaust stacks on the top of a building are too low. Re circulation is when the contaminated air is sucked down and back into the building. This was happening at the plating shop and it happened from 1918 until 1990. This caused contaminated air having a strongly carcinogenic level of Chromium Acid to be constantly pulled down into the areas between buildings 225, 101 and 273. This contaminated air was drawn into buildings 101 and 273 because these buildings had no air ventilation systems and only ambient air through open windows. The incorrect height of the Chromium Acid scrubber exhaust stacks was also recklessly negligent. Good engineering practice dictated that they be at 1.5 times the height of the closest building, but they were not and never were extended to this height. This stack height first became a problem in 1988 when the shipyard was preparing the plating shop for its post spill visit by BAAQMD personnel:

Extend the Stacks by Three Feet

But this was insufficient and the shipyard knew it. The fact the stacks had to be 1.5 times the height of the closest building was admitted in 1990:

Stack Height Must be Much Higher

Finally the highest level of U.S. Navy Authority told the shipyard to extend the stacks to a height 1.5 times the height of the closest building plus an additional ten feet:

U.S. Navy Stack Height Recommendation

This letter is extremely important because it makes it clear that even with the 1988three foot extension the stack heights were not high enough to prevent Chromium Acid scrubber exhausts re circulation. The Navy admitted there was re circulation in this letter but never thought of informing those who had been exposed for so many years.

Finally there is the simple fact that the Chromium Acid scrubbers were simply long ago completely worn out and used up by the time of the spill on 2-17-88. The Navy conducted a study of the plating shop in 1987 to plan waste reduction strategies. In this plan the scrubbers were identified to have been installed in 1951 and they were estimated to have a ten year service life in 1965. See paragraph 3.9.2. on Page 10 of this document:

Plating Shop Waste Reduction Plan 1988

 

The Main Poison - Chromium Acid - Human Carcinogen

And Cauterizing and Burning Agent

I studied a lot of chemistry in college and was particularly fascinated by the chemistry of chromium. It was apparent to me in 1983 that the momentum and the trajectory of the information about the hazardous nature of chromium chemicals was such that the entire family of chrome based chemicals, chromic acid particularly and hexavalent chrome in general were just going to be found out to be worse and worse and more and more toxic to all forms of life the more they were studied. The big problem with respect to humans is that it is unethical and is prohibited to to deliberately exposed human beings to known poisons in order to find what happens to them when they are exposed to a poison. The poisonous nature of chromic acid was noticed as early as 1918 and so for a very long time it went unstudied. Then there is always the problem of usefulness and money getting in the way. When a chemical, even a very toxic and dangerous one, has a very large economic value and makes a lot of people a lot of money it is almost impossible to get any kind of publicity about it into the public mind. This was, and still largely is today a big factor. It was only until the middle 1990's when China began its fast industrialization in the middle of no environmental or safety regulations that relatively large populations such as entire villages began to become poisoned by chromic acid being discharged into the streets, and finding its way into drinking wells, by chromium platers out to get rich fast. This data could not be ignored and so we should be grateful to the poor innocent Chinese who are suffering today from the symptoms of irreversible chromic acid poisoning for the circumstance that the situation here with regard to chromic acid and its effects are becoming more prominent and are finally getting some of the attention deserved.

But the key thing to understand is that the U.S. Navy had plenty of money to hire as many smart industrial hygienists and doctors as they needed to get a good and accurate assessment of the toxicity of hexavalent chrome and chromic acid. If they had done this in 1983 they would have come to the same conclusion about it that I did at that time. They didn't do this. What they did was to hire pitiless murderous highly educated mouthpieces who would do everything in their power to keep the facts hidden and to act to frustrate valid complaints and interfere with the medical treatment of the people who had been poisoned. The U.S. Navy even went so far as to set up mock television studios so that their mouthpieces could be trained to lie well under pressure.

Anyone who worked at Mare Island during the time period starting in about 1916 and ending in 1990 was, in the opinion of the BAAMQD, expressed in 1988, and in the in the secret opinion of the shipyard in 1990, exposed to levels of Chromium Acid sufficient to generate a massive shipyard wide cancer risk. This risk came solely from the Chromium Acid emitted from the outlets of the chrome plating tank and anodizing tank air exhaust scrubbers on the roof of the plating shop. There were large tanks of Chromium Acid used in the metal plating shop and it was discharged from there all over the shipyard. It wasn't just the people inside or around building 225 who were severely exposed, it was everyone including those who worked so hard and so diligently to keep this a secret. No one was safe.

Hexavalent chromium or Chromium Acid is an evil chemical. There's no other way to put it. It is a local anesthetic and is odorless and colorless when released into the air and so when you are seriously exposed there is absolutely no physical sensation. It is completely imperceptible to the senses. When you are exposed to it internal organs such as the kidney and liver are injured and so you become subject to a great variety of apparent illnesses whose symptoms mimic colds, the flu, asthma, weakness, vision troubles, in women miscarriages, and these can persist for a lifetime. This is one of the reasons it was not properly regulated for so very long. Chromium Acid destroys DNA and therefore destroys living tissue painlessly, silently and slowly.. The tissue that is destroyed simply disappears without any physical sensation. Many years ago a solution of Chromium Acid was used by doctors to treat warts on the skin. The cancers that developed in place of the warts quickly stopped this practice. But you can see from this that if you are exposed to it you can't possibly know that you have been exposed to it unless you are told you have been exposed to it by those who are responsible for the exposure. All of this was well known by shipyard OSH personnel up to the head of the OSH Department. This knowledge imparts a state of perfect guilt for all the deaths, crippling's, miscarriages and all the other injuries that came out of the plating shop Chromium Acid discharges.

It has only recently been discovered that Chromium Acid in combination with vitamin C causes damage 10 to 50 times greater than if there is no vitamin C. So workers exposed to Chromium Acid who were also taking extra vitamin C are at much higher risk for developing the lung cancer which is the most serious outcome of Chromium Acid exposure. Research is continuing now at a faster pace and I expect to have many more horrors about this chemical to report in the days and weeks to come.

The toxic and carcinogenic effects of chromium Acid are so tremendously great that the State of California and the Federal Government have recently acted strongly against it and are effectively regulating it out of industrial use due to its extreme danger. The European Union is taking action to eliminate chrome plating and anodizing completely due to its impact upon the health of society. Recently the DOL PEL allowable exposure level was decreased by a factor of 1000 and it would have been made lower except that many large users of Chrome 6, including the U.S. Navy, complained that at a lower level of regulation they could not conduct business at all.

You would suppose that the Shipyard would have a due diligence system of constantly reviewing the chemicals used there and to upgrade or downgrade the risks identified in its Occupational Health and Safety Manual according to the latest developments in the field. But this was not so. The OSH Manual was revised in 1984 and was never revised afterward and remained in its 1984 condition from 1984 to the day the shipyard closed in 1996. This is in spite of the Waste Handler Training that identified Chromium Acid to be a carcinogen which was also signed for approval by the OSH office. Here are the pages of the Shipyard OSH Manual dealing with Chromium Acid (Hexavalent Chromium). There it is listed as a Class "B" health stressor which is effectively a skin irritant. It should have been changed to Class "A" as early as 1973, and certainly in 1985 with the publishing of the Hazardous Waste Handler Training Plan, but without a doubt absolutely in 1988. There is nothing but the purest well educated premeditated malicious reckless neglect here.

Shipyard OSH Manual Chromium Acid

If you would like to learn more about the non cancer toxicity of Chromium Acid you can use the following links:

Here is a link to the Wikipedia Article about Chrome 6 and its toxicity:

Chromium Acid Toxic Carcinogen

Here are two links to modern Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for the Chromium Acid used for chrome plating and pipe cleaning:

MSDS 1

MSDS 2

These describe many of the illnesses, injuries and diseases caused by Chrome 6. You can also Goggle "hexavalent chromium" and a great wealth of modern health information will come up. More and more is being learned about this chemical every day and so the Internet is the only source of the most up-to-date information about it.

It was not until 1991 that the State of California officially decided to publicly publish that Chromium Acid was so toxic it had no threshold of perceptible human effects from exposure to it. If you would like to review this document use this link:

1991 California Chromium Rule.

The words, "No threshold of perceptible human effects" are as serious as words can be. These words mean that as of that date the State of California was on the track to completely eliminate the release of any amounts of Chromium Acid into the environment no matter how small they may be.

If you would like to know precisely what the State of California determined in 2006 about this highly toxic substance you can review the regulatory basis document through this link:

California Air Resources Board 2006 Chromium Regulations Basis Document

It is clear to me that the bad news about Chromium Acid is only going to continue to get worse as time progresses. The most recent U.S. Government report about Chromium Acid toxicity can be obtained using this link:

EPA IRIS Hexavalent Chromium Toxicity Review 1998

The Building 225 Metal Plating Shop Disaster

When you look at the picture of the plating shop building at the top of this web page you are looking at a building that was built right around 1918. A lot of things changed between 1918 and when it was closed in 1990. The main thing that changed was that it got busier and more and more work was passed through it. But as the workload increased the size of the building stayed the same. Air pollution scrubbers were installed in 1951 and they were completely worn out by 1975, but they were just kept there as an empty symbol and promise of safety that was effectively meaningless.

The metal plating shop was always a disaster in progress. There were no boundaries between the highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and processes conducted inside the shop and people outside. The walls had holes which always leaked contaminated liquid, the window panes were falling out, the doors did not seal, and the scrubbers were neglected, worn out and ineffective.

The Shipyard Metal Plating Shop in Building 225 had been in existence since sometime around 1918 which is about the time chrome plating was invented. By the early 1980's it was a worn out ramshackle building that was given only the most minimum of maintenance to keep it from collapsing in on itself. It was in a continual state of disrepair and was always under some kind of construction to keep the decks or the roof from falling in. It was a box of the most toxic chemicals and most powerful carcinogens known to man. The simple fact of the matter is that it was an extraordinarily dangerous thing and because it had always been there it had come to treated with contempt with the result everyone was poisoned.

The best way to look at the plating shop is that it was an undersized box with windows that were falling out and holes in its walls containing large vats of the most toxic chemicals and the strongest acids there are. These tanks were kept heated with steam coils and were under constant agitation by having air blown through them. The exhaust fans on the roof were kept running continually twenty four hours per day, seven days per week, and 365 days per year.. The entire thing was in a state of constant falling in from acid attack, was in a constant state of disrepair and was always blowing Chromium Acid out of the stacks on its roof.

All of the chemicals used in plating shop processes which were not secret are listed here. This is a link to an investigation of the Plating Shop conducted in 1987. If you Goggle the chemicals listed in it, and once you've reviewed the building maintenance documents that are provided on this site, you will understand that extreme toxins were treated with only the most extreme carelessness. You are also going to be presented with testimony from a grievance arbitration hearing that will demonstrate that the people who worked inside the plating shop were treated with only the most extreme cruelty and disrespect for their most basic human rights.

This Plating Shop Investigation Report from 1987 identifies most of the chemicals used inside the plating shop in 1987:

Plating Shop Chemicals in 1987.

 

Here is a diagram of the plating tank layout in the plating shop:

 

The plating shop discharged chemicals to the outside environment in three main ways.

1. The first is by the direct release of contaminated liquid through holes in the walls of the plating shop.

2. The second is by release of particles of dried chemicals and dirt from the shop.

3. The third is by release of plating chemicals and acids from the tops of the tanks that contain the chemicals. This was continuous because the chromium plating tanks were continuously agitated (sparged) with air and were kept hot. See paragraph 3.1.1. of the Waste Reduction Plan of January 1988:

Waste Reduction Plan

Shipyard maintenance documents demonstrate that leakage though the holes in the walls was very large. The State of California stated in its Regulation Basis Document of 2006 that, depending upon the degree of cleanliness and housekeeping the discharge from particles of dried chemicals and dirt can be as large or much larger than the release from the tanks. With regard to the discharge from dried chemicals and dirt the best thing that can be said about the plating shop is that it was a pig sty. Documents have been provided to demonstrate this. My estimate is that per the State of California findings in 2006, housekeeping discharge from the plating shop was probably about equal to the discharges from the exhaust outlets on the roof. I don't have any records to prove this for one simple reason. The shipyard did not record any of its samples taken from outside the plating shop. They did sample, and Code 106 knew the results, but they were so secret the documents were destroyed about as soon as they were produced.

Metal plating tanks generate airborne discharges in three ways:

1. Electrical: The electrical current that passes through the tank of plating chemicals causes the water to disassociate with the formation of hydrogen and oxygen gas bubbles. These bubbles rise to the top of the liquid and when they break the surface they cause small droplets of the plating bath to be ejected into the air. The degree of this depends upon the bath electrical efficiency. Baths which are highly electrical efficient require less electricity than baths which are electrically inefficient. An example of an efficient bath is gold and the most inefficient bath is chrome. About 90% of the electricity input into a chrome bath goes up into the air as oxygen and hydrogen bubbles, each of which has a covering film of Chromium Acid. Chrome plating requires a lot of electricity and so it generates a lot of airborne Chromium Acid mist.

2. Agitation: the chemicals in the bath are kept uniformly dispersed through agitation. In the Mare Island Plating shop the chrome baths were agitated by sparging a constant flow of air through the bath through piping placed in the bottom of the tank. This also helped mixing when fresh chemicals were added. The constant flow of air bubbles passing through the bath caused a constant ejection of droplets from the surface of the bath into the air above the bath.

3. Use: When articles are put into or taken out of the bath this results in the generation of airborne droplets of the plating bath.

The release of the plating bath chemicals to the air outside the plating shop was guaranteed by process instructions that decreed that the tank ventilation fans must be kept running continually while there are chemicals in the tanks. Note that in his statement from the February 17, 1988 spill critique Mr. Schuck states that the airborne spill was only stopped when the chrome tanks were covered with plywood and herculite.

It's also important to realize that it wasn't until the State of California had completed its studies and published them in 2006 that it was discovered that everyone had made a big mistake about chrome plating. This is a very important mistake with regard to personnel exposure. It is demonstrated in the Plating Shop Emissions Study conducted in 1986 and in the subsequent RSA Associates Study. There are five uses of Hexavalent Chromium in the form of Chromium Acid in the metal plating shop:

1. Hard Chrome Plating: Hard chrome plating is a thick plate of chrome intended to either prevent wear or to build up and repair damaged components. Hard chrome holds oil very well and is very hard and wear resistant. The inner surfaces of submarine diving plane hydraulic cylinders are hard chrome plated for purposes of giving them a long service life. The main difference between hard chrome and decorative chrome is how long the piece is left in the plating bath and how much electrical current is applied.

2. Decorative chrome plating. This is a very thin coat of chrome used for the purpose of proving corrosion prevention or for the purposes of decoration.

3. Aluminum anodizing: Chromic acid bath is used to anodize aluminum to military specifications.

4. Cleaning of stainless steel and this was also performed in a massive way at the Pipe Shop.

5. Chromium Conversion.

Up until 2006 everyone and I do mean everyone had assumed that the largest source of emissions of Chrome 6 were in the following order:

1. Anodizing

2. Hard Chrome Plating

3. Decorative Chrome Plating

4. Cleaning

5. Conversion

After the proper studies were performed this was the result:

1. Decorative chrome plating

2. Hard Chrome Plating

3. Anodizing

4. Cleaning

5. Conversion

Regulators were amazed that decorative chrome plating was the largest source of emissions. The reason for this turned out to be droplet size. Decorative chrome plating generates airborne droplets in a size range that nature decrees will be the most difficult to capture by filtration. This has resulted in special scrubbers that use special pads of filter elements rather than packing. So for all the years of chrome plating operations the one operation most responsible for airborne emissions was effectively the least controlled.

If you are interested in the details of Plating Shop operations you can review a copy of the Plating Shop Process Instruction. It's going to be used in some arguments provided later on. Due to its size it is presented in two parts:

Front Page to Appendix 3

Appendix 3 to the End

Notice that this Process Instruction was updated in March of 1988 as a result of the spill and that Occupational Health and Safety Department personnel signed the change record pages.

The Plating Shop Scrubbers

Air was continually drawn off of the top of the plating shop tanks containing Chromium Acid, transported to the scrubbers, and then exhausted to the outside. Air was drawn off of the tanks surfaces with the intention to keep the exposure of the workers inside the shop at or below safe limits. The air was moved through duct work to scrubbers on the roof of the plating shop. These scrubbers removed the droplets of Chromium Acid from the exhaust air before it was released to the ambient air. Scrubbers must have a continuous flow of clean water to them to remove the Chromium Acid and carry it away. It is only common sense that because scrubbers are safety equipment meant to protect people outside the shop their performance must be monitored regularly on a schedule, they must be regularly maintained to keep them in top operating condition. Also, because scrubbers emit a portion of the water used in them in the form of mist the water put into them must be very clean. Maintenance documents provided here conclusively demonstrate that the plating shop scrubbers were never monitored, they were not maintained, and the level of Chromium Acid in the water provided to them exceeded levels known to be unsafe.

How A Scrubber Works and How It Clogs

The first thing to understand about scrubbers is that they are simply extremely fine mesh continually self cleaning filters. They are not rocket science. All the air that is passed through a scrubber is scrubbed to the microscopic level by a water spray running over packing. This means that if the air is very dirty from general environmental dirt and debris this also will become captured by the scrubber. The scrubber is such a fine filter it doesn't take much plain dirt to clog it. Even before it becomes clogged to the point where air flow through it becomes restricted, the chemical cleaning efficiency of a scrubber will be seriously decreased through the absorption of dirt. A scrubber is designed to absorb and then transport out of it liquid droplets and microscopic dried particles of water soluble chemicals. It is not designed or intended to absorb particles of dirt, grinding dust from grinding wheels, dust from the ground, and all the other kinds of grit and grime generated on the shipyard.

A Scrubber is One Part of a Two Part System

A scrubber is designed to be a component of a system composed of two main parts. There is the scrubber and its fan making up one part, and there is the fan and filters which cleans the air entering the shop of general environmental dirt. The incoming air must be filtered to ensure the scrubber does not absorb and become made ineffective by just plain dirt. This is called a "push and pull ventilation system" The problem is that the plating shop only had the scrubber part, or the pull part, of this system. Because of this the scrubbers were continually clogging from shipyard dirt. They clogged quickly and often. When a scrubber becomes clogged the circulating fluid gets put into the ventilation lines and is transported back to the plating tanks. Because this water contains dirt the plating tanks become contaminated and ruined. This is very troublesome and costly. The natural and normal response of shop personnel subject to tremendous production pressures is simply to turn the water off to the scrubbers and run them dry. This is what happened. When a scrubber is run without circulating water it is 100% ineffective and the result is just the same as if it was not there.

The fact that the use of Chromium Acid requires the use of a push and pull type of ventilation system is clearly stated in the Kencro Chemicals MSDS for Chromic Acid where it is explicitly stated that makeup air should be provided to balance the air removed from on top of the plating tanks:

"RECOMMENDATIONS LISTED IN THIS SECTION INDICATE THE TYPE OF EQUIPMENT, WHICH WILL PROVIDE PROTECTION AGAINST OVER EXPOSURE TO THIS PRODUCT. CONDITIONS OF USE, ADEQUACY OF ENGINEERING OR OTHER CONTROL MEASURES, AND ACTUAL EXPOSURES WILL DICTATE THE NEED FOR SPECIFIC PROTECTIVE DEVICES AT YOUR WORKPLACE.
VENTILATION SHOULD BE CORROSION PROOF. LOCAL EXHAUST VENTILATION SHOULD BE CORROSION PROOF. MAKE UP AIR SHOULD BE SUPPLIED TO BALANCE AIR THAT IS REMOVED BY LOCAL OR GENERAL EXHAUST VENTILATION. VENTILATE LOW LYING AREA SUCH AS SUMPS OR PITS WHERE DENSE DUST MAY COLLECT."

Here is a shipyard document that illustrates what happens when the the air the scrubber sucks is full of general environmental dirt:

Dirty Air Clogging Scrubbers

This problem was never corrected. Like most of the plating shop problems it was a problem which was never properly addressed. This is a picture of the shop air intakes in the alleyway between the building 225 and the adjacent building. As you can see there are no filters on the outside of the shop air inlets:

Nor are there any filters on the inside openings of these inlets:

This plating shop maintenance document clearly demonstrates that the Chromium Acid scrubbers on the plating shop roof were routinely run without water for extended periods of time. The scrubbers were run without water to the extent that when they got so clogged air would not pass through them they had to be completely rebuilt.

Scrubbers Run Dry

This is also independently verified in an outside contractor report conducted for the Army Corps of Engineers:

Dry Scrubbers in 1985

Note that the 1981 document was also routed to Code 106, the Occupational Health and Safety Department and no one in adjacent buildings was informed of their exposure to Chromium Acid that resulted from this.

The Chrome Acid scrubbers were nothing but a continual source of trouble from the day they were installed. These documents from the years 1981 to 1988 demonstrate this and the also demonstrate that it was only in preparation for the scrubber tests mandated by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) that in March 1988 that they were taken seriously and $41,000 was allocated to making them right. These documents demonstrate that continual scrubber system problems that rendered the system inoperative were delayed and then cancelled or shifted to other work orders which were never issued. It was just all smoke and mirrors and scrubbers run dry.

Scrubber Troubles

The Scrubber Re-circulating Tank Problem

While a scrubber uses water it does not use water directly from the tap. The scrubber requires such a large water spray that a separate pump is needed to push the water through it. This pump sucks water out of a storage tank called a recirculation tank. The water is pumped from the tank to the scrubbers and then is returned from scrubbers to the recirculating tank. As the scrubber removes the Chromium Acid from the air passing through it the water in the recirculation tank becomes more contaminated. The method used to keep this contamination under control is to constantly feed a flow of fresh water into the recirculation tank while draining contaminated water from it. The spill that happened on 2-17-88 resulted from no fresh water being supplied to the recirculation tank. With no fresh water or contaminated water drained out the result was the concentration of Chromium Acid just continued to increase until finally the water spray in the scrubbers began to foam. When the spray water began to foam it was carried out of the scrubber because the scrubber is not designed to capture foam.

A scrubber is always going to emit some mist. The spray inside the scrubber is not completely captured and is emitted from the scrubber outlet. For this reason it is extremely important that the concentration of Chromium Acid in the spray inside the scrubber be kept very low so that this mist will not become harmful to persons outside the shop. There can be no doubt that this mist represented a substantial threat to the health of the people exposed to it a long time before the spill of 2-17-88 happened. The shipyard admitted in a memo that the scrubber spray water would only produce safe mist according to 1988 exposure limits if the Chromium Acid concentration in the spray water was kept below 2 parts per million. Given that the spray water had a Chromium Acid concentration of in excess of 500 PPM at the time of the spill its obvious the scrubbers were emitting an extraordinarily hazardous mist long in advance of the spill.

Here is a copy of the manufacturer's operating manual for plating shop scrubbers. This document was provided to me by management as part of the grievance, but other documents identify the maker of the Chromium Acid scrubbers to be Trane. In any event all scrubbers are fairly identical in design and operation and so if you want to know more here is the manual:

Harrington Scrubber Manual

Here is a link to a drawing of the scrubbers used in the plating shop. It was part of the February 17, 1988 critique report, and although it is very crude it's easily understandable. It also shows that the personnel in the plating shop knew all about the scrubbers, how they worked, and what it meant to turn their water off.

Scrubber Diagram

Scrubbers were not always used on the plating shop. Prior to the installation of scrubbers in 1951 devices called "Rotoclones" were used to clean the air drawn from the tops of the plating tanks. These devices are basically fans with a water spray inside them. Water is continually introduced into the rotoclone and this water is discharged to the drain and then to the sewer. As previously discussed, prior to the construction of the IWTP in the 1971 - 1972 time period there was no problem with this because everything was discharged to the Mare Island Strait through outfalls. The IWTP was designed mainly to handle plating shop waste, this is what its total capacity was based upon.

The change from rotoclones to scrubbers introduced a lot of problems. The first is that scrubbers require regular maintenance and rotoclones just run on their own for years without any problems. The second is that the scrubbers are full of water and this makes them very heavy. The plating shop roof was not made to support scrubbers nor was it reinforced when they were installed. Most importantly no provision was made for sampling the air discharged from the scrubbers. It will be demonstrated with documents later that in order to draw samples from the scrubber outlets it was necessary to install special scaffolding. It's also obvious that because the plating shop roof was caving in from the weight of the scrubbers no one wanted to go up on the roof ever.

The rotoclones are referred to as "rotochromes" in all of the plating shop maintenance records that are going to be provided on this site.

Rotoclones are now known to be 100% ineffective at cleaning the plating shop exhaust air of Chromium Acid. It cannot capture the particle size of the droplets generated by plating. The result of rotoclone use was effectively as if there was nothing at all between the top of the plating tank and the ambient air. During the period of rotoclone use emissions from the plating shop were effectively uncontrolled.

Here is a link to a drawing of a rotoclone from the American Society of Government and Industrial Hygiene manual: On the top of this page is a picture of a type of scrubber not used on the plating shop. On the lower part of the page is an illustration of a rotoclone.

Rotoclone Picture

The scrubbers were poorly maintained and were routinely operated without water and were therefore often completely ineffective. In 1985 the Army Corps of Engineers contracted Chem2Hill to investigate processes to reduce hazardous waste at DOD facilities. They visited the Mare Island Plating shop and observed that the Chrome plating and acid tank scrubbers were poorly maintained and were routinely run dry. Here is a link to the appropriate pages of this report:

Plating Shop Discharge Report

Notice that this report clearly states that when the scrubbers were operated the result was the concentration of Chromium Acid in the re circulating tank water exceeded the IWTP discharge limit of 50 PPM Chromium Acid. This means that even when they were operated properly the mist discharged from the scrubbers contained unsafe levels of Chromium Acid. They were simply much more unsafe when run improperly than when run improperly.

The reason for this seemingly strange behavior is that the scrubbers had been completely worn out by 1975. This fact is produced in a Contractor Provided Waste Reduction Report provided to the shipyard in 1988. It contains the statement that the Chromium Acid scrubbers had been installed in 1951 and were expected to be at the end of their service lives in 1975:

Plating Shop Waste Reduction Report

 

The Ramshackle Plating Shop

There was no housekeeping inside the plating shop. The floors were continually awash in poisonous chemical contaminated liquid. When the level of this liquid became too high it simply escaped to the outside through holes in the building walls. This was into the alley way between the plating shop and the two adjacent buildings. This material would dry and then be carried by the wind into adjacent roadways or into the windows of adjacent buildings to settle on surfaces upon which people worked and ate.

When it investigated chrome plating the State of California found that releases of toxic chemicals in the form of liquids, dried chemical dusts and chemical contaminated dirt and dust could be as great as or greater than airborne releases from air exhausts. There can be no doubt that the releases to the environment of Chromium Acid from the plating shop due to negligent maintenance and the absence of housekeeping had to be as great if not greater than what came out of the exhaust stacks. Here are some links to maintenance documents written by plating shop personnel. You can read all about it in their own words:

The plating shop was allowed to leak chemical contaminated fluids outside of the shop for years. This condition was identified by plating shop personnel many times and these reports were routinely ignored. This is a link to reports of uncorrected long term chemical contaminated liquid flow out of a hole in the wall in the plating shop:

Leaking Wall Hole Reports

From its start in 1916 until it was closed in 1990 the floor of the plating shop was a chemical swimming pool continually filled with highly corrosive chemical contaminated liquid which was a continual cause of external leakage, equipment destruction and danger to shop personnel. Notice the last document is the cancellation in 1991 of a maintenance request filed to be an emergency in 1987.

Swimming Pool Decks

The plating shop roof was in such a state of ruin that in 1985 a request was made that it be replaced because leakage during rains was causing the loss of tanks of valuable chemicals. Nothing was done to correct anything as the 1987 document demonstrates. The plating shop might as well as had a thatched roof.

Thatched Roof

The insides of the plating shop were also in a continual state of falling to pieces. These documents demonstrate that it was simply a terrible place to work and was a wreck that should have been condemned as unfit for human occupation. It was a totality of discomfort, inconvenience and danger to operating personnel.

A Palace of Dangers

This is a picture of the back wall of Building 225 showing the some of the wall holes that were only finally sealed when the shop was closed.

Notice on this picture how the gravel color gradually goes from gray to a reddish color towards the back. This is due to staining caused by the chromic acid released by the chrome plating scrubbers over the years. Notice how the yellow of the building side stays the same and yet the gravel color changes. This picture has not been retouched, modified or altered or change or magnify any color. The three building side covers shield the open holes through which the building was allowed to drain. The chrome plating tanks were located directly on the other side of this wall.

This is a picture of the alleyway between building 225 and building 63

This is a picture of the alley between building 225 and building 101. Notice in the very back the strong pink chrome staining of the concrete pavement is clearly evident.

This is a picture of the windows that were never repaired

The Smoking Gun - History and Analysis

 

It all started with a routine application submitted by the Shipyard to renew the operating permits for the plating shop scrubbers. A normal application was submitted to the San Francisco Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). The reply to the Shipyard, dated 1/20/88, was an acknowledgement of the application along with some extremely important additional information requests:

BAAMQD Letter of 1-20-88

It is most important to notice that in paragraph 2. Reference is made to "District Source Tests 88056 and 88076". This is a set of tests which were obviously performed on the plating shop chrome scrubbers in 1985. I don't have copies of these because management refused to provide them to the Union. But the main thing is that the cancer risk the BAAMQD calculated from these tests is 3 per 1000 people on the shipyard. A cancer risk of 3 per thousand exposed personnel is 3000 times greater than is considered negligible. It is a TREMENDOUS Risk. It is a risk so great that all personnel in the vicinity should have been informed, the plating shop closed, and adjacent buildings closed. Exposed personnel should be provided with lifetime medical surveillance and treatment at Navy cost. I know that Code 106 conducted secret tests of areas adjacent to the plating shop to see if the Chromium Acid was made safe by time and exposure to the environment and that it was found that IT WAS NOT..

The result of this letter from the BAAQMD was a memorandum about the forthcoming tests:

Memorandum of 2-4-1988

This memorandum has other implications that will be discussed a little later.

The main thing to understand from this memorandum is that Mare Island was incapable of measuring the Chrome Acid emissions from the scrubbers.

Then attention was turned to the scrubbers to prepare them for the upcoming tests. They were completely rebuilt at a cost of at least $41,000.00 to rebuild two scrubbers:

Rebuild the Scrubbers 3-15-88

It is extremely important to note that in the center of page 3 of this Work Order there is an instruction to "Fabricate and install ...plastic cover to block off the 5.7 square foot ventilation suction opening above a Chromium Acid tank. This was done to increase the suction of the system above the tanks being tested. The result was to effectively increase the air flow from these tanks and this would further dilute the Chromium Acid being discharged from the exhaust of the scrubbers. A 5.7 square foot opening is a very large opening and this last minute modification likely had a very large effect on the final test results. Also, completely clean scrubbers with brand new internals will also tend to bias the test results towards a lower calculated chrome exhaust concentration. Previous documents demonstrate that if these scrubbers were to be tested as they were normally operated it would be with them running dry and clogged from having been run dry for a long period of time.

Extend the Scrubber Exhaust Ducts 3-28-88

The scrubber exhaust ducts were extended with an additional three feet of height. Note that this Work Order states the BAAQMD would be on the Shipyard on 4-5-88 to certify the shop to be safe to operate so that the operating permits could be renewed. Obviously the visit did not have the anticipated positive result. The Shipyard thought the BAAQMD was coming for an inspection and instead they came to conduct official testing of the scrubbers to measure their performance. These tests were conducted and the results were worse than anyone could have anticipated. Two days of testing were conducted on 4-5-88 and 4-6-88. On 4-6-88 the decorative chrome plating tank exhaust was tested and this test is the smoking gun.

THE SMOKING GUN: BAAQMD TEST OF 4-6-88

The most important number in this report is on page 2 of the "Summary of Test Results". It is at the top of the page and it is an average chrome acid concentration in the exhaust of grains per standard cubic foot (gr/sdcf). The EPA provides a conversion factor to convert airborne chrome acid discharges in gr/dscf to milligrams per dry standard cubic meter and this is 2,290. When the results from this test is converted the results are:

Run 1: 0.0000219 gr/dscf = 0.0502 mg/dscm

Run 2: 0.0000228 gr/dscf= 0.0522 mg/dscm

Run 3: 0.0000243 gr/dscf= 0.0556 mg/dscm

Run 4: 0.0000230 gr/dscf = 0.0527 mg/dscm

In 1988 the Department of Labor specified the workplace Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) for exposure to chromium acid was 0.05 mg/dscm. The exhaust from this scrubber exceeded the safe limit even when the entire scrubber system had been completely overhauled and was being operated at optimism conditions which were indescribably better than normal operating conditions. This result mandates the payment of a 25% Hazardous Pay Differential to every person so exposed.

There are many reasons why hazardous differential pay is merited. First and foremost of these is that the people who were exposed were not informed of the exposure. The Department of Labor specifies an "Action Level". The action level is one half the PEL. When the Action Level is reached the law mandates that exposed personnel be officially notified of the exposure and that many other actions be taken to reduce the exposure to below the action level. None of these things happened. The responses required to exposures above the Action Level (AL) are specified in the Shipyard Occupational Health and Safety Manual in paragraph 3.1 and 3.2.

Shipyard OSH Manual Paragraphs 3.1 and 3.2l

The BAAQMD tests of April 5 and 6, 1988 were NOT provided to the Union when it demanded all papers and documents related to the plating shop scrubbers in 1995 and 1996. It was accidentally found after many hundreds of hours of Internet searching. It was located on an obscure EPA web site. Without it a complete understanding of what transpired could not possibly occur. It was the purest fraud for the Shipyard to deny it to the Union. Because the Union did not have this document it could not possibly have won the grievance. It is a violation of federal law and the Union contract for this test to have been refused to the Union and therefore the original grievance is defective and the issue is now open again. YOU need to take action now to protect YOUR rights and entitlements which have been denied unjustly.

Action Level Actions By The Book

Note that the OSH Manual refers to "stressors" instead of chemicals or Chromium Acid. Chemicals, heat, dust, dirt are all considered to be health stressors by the OSH Manual. The OSH Manual is also very deceptively clever. In paragraph 3.2 it requires "Supervisors" and not OSH personnel to take actions when the stressor level "has the potential" to exceed the Action Level. In paragraph 3.1.5 the OSH office is required to notify employees of exposure to stressors above permissible limits, but they never did with with respect to plating shop spills and regular emissions.

You may ask, what about the Shipyard Medical Office. Didn't they know anything about this? The answer is yes, they knew everything about it but did nothing. Documents will be provided as this site is completed to demonstrate what the Medical Department knew, did and said to others about it.

The main question is what was emitted normally when the scrubbers were operated without water flow? The answer can be calculated from the test results. Using them to find the efficiency of the scrubber will allow the uncontrolled exhaust concentration to be found. Doing the math gives the result the scrubber was 96% effective at removing the chrome acid discharged from the plating tank. Doing the math has the following results:

Run 1: 1.26 mg/dscm

Run 2: 1.31 mg/dscm

Run 3: 1.39 mg/dscm

Run 4: 1.32 mg/dscm

These exposure levels are just massive and cause the corruption of the health of anyone exposed. The next question is, given today's exposure limits, what was the safe distance to be from the plating shop? The State of California in its 2006 Chrome Plating Regulations Source Document provided the key to the answer. It contains a graph that allows an easy and quick determination to be made.

This graph is not in enough detail toward the longer distances to allow an exact determination. But it gives us an idea of the order of magnitude of distance is required. With today's "control" level of 0.0005 ug/dscm during normal operations one would have to be well in excess about one kilometer away. To be at the 1988 control level one would need to be about the same distance. This covers the entire shipyard and the implications of this are extremely important.

Every Department Head on the Shipyard was aware the scrubbers would not pass a real performance test. Returning to the Memorandum of 2-4-88 and paragraph 3:

Memorandum of 2-4-88

It can easily be understood that prior to the BAAQMD Tests the Public Works Department Head sent a very clearly worded warning to all Department Heads that there was a very high probability it might become necessary to replace the scrubbers with a much more advanced technology. Note that the distribution list on this memorandum directs that the memo be provided to every Shipyard Department Head from the Shipyard Commander on down and even including the Office of Naval Reactors. This is how important the capability to plate chrome was to the shipyard at that time. Deals just didn't get bigger than this on the shipyard. It was a full blown emergency.

Also, there's no way that heavy metal and very large electrostatic precipitators, with their large and heavy power supplies, were going to go onto a leaky roof that was already caving in from the excess weight of plastic scrubbers full of plastic packing.

The bad test results from the 4-6-88 tests put the plating shop BAAQMD operating permits into real jeopardy. This record of a telephone call between the BAAQMD and the scientific representative hired by the shipyard to act as a go between makes this clear:

BAAQMD Telephone Call of 5-12-88

The response of the shipyard was to conduct biased testing in an attempt to find chrome plating parameters that would keep emissions below the proposed forthcoming regulation values. To do this the shipyard hired a local scientific testing company, Risk Science Associates, to conduct a second serious of tests on the plating shop chrome acid scrubbers. Preparations were made and special scaffolding and other modifications were made to the scrubbers for the performance of this testing.

Install Testing Scaffolds 7-8-88

The scaffolds were installed and testing was conducted on August 16 and 17, 1988.

RSA Chrome Scrubber Test Report

These tests were crooked and were biased by strong adjustments to chromium plating and anodizing operating parameters from their normal values deliberately predetermined to produce reduced emission levels allowing permit renewal. This is discussed, in part, in the letter from the author of this report to the Shipyard in which he admits the BAAQMD had read the report very carefully and had caught one of the "fixes". These fixes were calculated by Code 106 personnel and were presented to Mr. Mike Noble who stashed the pages inside one of his reference books:

Requirements To Continue Chrome Plating

There is one insurmountable problem with these requirements. In paragraph 5 it is specified the amount of fresh water added to the scrubber re circulation tank daily must be at least 8,640 gallons per day. This is the amount of contaminated water which must also be removed which cannot be disposed of to the IWTP because at that time it was closed.

Coincidentally, the BAAQMD issued operating permits for the Shipyard to operate on

Permit Approval 8-19-88

But this was not the end of the issue. The Shipyard and the BAAQMD were in continuous communication regarding the plating shop emissions and the RSA test report and there were problems. The permits were approved prior to the submission of the RSA test report, and this is very interesting. Clearly, the shipyard made assurances to the BAAQMD that caused them to issue the permits even though the BAAQMD test results showed the shop was unsafe.

It took some time for the BAAQMD to completely digest and analyze the twisted RSA Test Report. They were bound to be extremely skeptical of any report whose findings would contradict results produced by sampling and analysis conducted by their own personnel. There can be no doubt that during this time a lot of people were talking to each other on and off the Shipyard. It wasn't until 3-28-90 that the BAAQMD decided to call the RSA report defective.

Dr. Gribb Letter of 3-28-1990

It is important to note that this letter is addressed to the Occupational Health and Safety Department. This makes it clear that by this time the whole matter of the scrubbers and the plating shop permits had been assigned there. There is a big contradiction in this because the first letter to the Shipyard of 1-20-88 had been addressed the Production Department which was appropriate. Now it seems the Safety Department is in direct control of what is entirely a production issue. This is the letter that demonstrates that Code 106, the Occupational Health and Safety Department, was actually no such thing. It was a hollow sham entity producing phony official documents to create the impression its purpose was safety when in actual fact it was to progress production and thwart the filing of just occupational injury claims by people who had been injured as a result of their professional malfeasance.

Note that the contents of this letter reinforce the fact that even with everything biased in favor of low results the decorative chrome and anodizing tank scrubber exhausted Chromium Acid above the Action Level. It is also important to note that if you read the BAAQMD test report from 3-5-88, the brand new and perfectly operated scrubber serving the hard chrome plating tank emitted Chromium Acid just slightly below the Action Level. The scrubber situation was just plain bad all around.

BAAQMD Test of 4-5-88

The Mare Island Plating Shop in Building 225 had always been a volcano constantly erupting Chromium Acid from the day it was opened.

In order for Mare Island to get the permits it had to agree to operating limitations on the chrome plating and chrome anodizing tanks that were impossible to live with. There was no other way. Mare Island obviously agreed to these operating limitations and the BAAQMD issued the plating shop chrome plating permits to the Shipyard.

Here Are Your Permits

It is important to realize that it was absolutely impossible for the shipyard to observe the requirement to provide fresh water to the scrubber recirculating tanks at a rate of over 8,000 gallons per day and so they were obtained under the auspices of a bald lie. These operating permits were not used for very long. New Chromium Acid regulations that mandated a complete health risk assessment of the entire Shipyard were shortly to come into effect. This memorandum clearly demonstrates that the one and only concern of the Occupational Health and Safety Department was to avoid the costs that would result from having to produce a public document that disclosed all of the adverse health effects of the plating shop on Shipyard personnel. Note that the distribution of this document is to the Head of the Occupational Health and Safety Department.

Alimam Memo of 4-5-90

This memo makes it very clear that the cancer risk stated in first letter to the shipyard from the BAAQMD of 1-20.88 of "3 per thousand" was an incredibly vast understatement because it was based on false data provided to California EPA by Mare Island OSH personnel. It is hard to come to to grips with the fact that the plating shop alone represented 687 hazard points out of 13 for the entire shipyard hazard assessment. It is also a Crime Against Humanity for the Occupational Safety and Health Office to be recommending the plating shop be closed to avoid having to notify shipyard employees of their exposure to chromic acid. This act is completely Nazi Death Camp in its content and character.

We know that the Shipyard, The U.S. Navy, and Mr. Alimam were highly concerned about the adverse health effects the plating shop was having on Shipyard personnel. A Health Risk Assessment Report had been produced in 1989 and provided from the Shipyard Commander to the U.S. Navy. A copy of this report has not yet been found, nor was it provided to the Union. But it is named and referred to in the following Shipyard Commander Letter of 3-31-89.

Reference To Health Risk Assessment

It would be a good thing for the U.S. Navy to release this Health Risk Report to the public. My feeling is that if it had anything good to say it would have been provided to the Union when we asked for all plating shop documents in 1995.

It did not take long for the Shipyard to act on Mr. Alimam's memorandum and to request the BAAQMD cancel the operating permits:

Mare Island Letter of 6-29-90

But the cover up did not stop here. It continued. On March 17, 1992 the Shipyard Commander informed the U.S. Navy that the plating shop would be formally closed. In so doing he said the plating shop permits had been allowed to "expire". They did not expire, they were cancelled to avoid having to inform Shipyard personnel that their health had been adversely affected to the extent they had the right to file FECA claims.

Shipyard Commander Letter of 3-17-92

Notice that this letter refers to surveys outside the plating shop to determine the extent of contamination. This is another set of secret documents which would probably have been provided to the Union if they had any good news. The letter also contains another BIG LIE. This is that plating operations were suspended in August 1988. This is not true. They were continued and the scrubbers were operated without water per normal operating policy.

If you think the Navy has changed anything between then and now and 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:

You Can't Trust the NAVY

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.

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 hazardous waste. What the Navy did was to ship all of the shipyard sewage 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 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 all of the Mare Island sewage, falsely called bilge water, to a disposal facility in Utah that did not know it was sewage. They thought it was just bilge water which is basically clean fresh water with a little oil in it. The result was the disposal facility was severely damaged and 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 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 complainant was told 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.

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 anything in any document concerning Mare Island and the cleanup of that place must also believe in the tooth fairy.

 

Your Statutory and Legal Remedies

If you worked at Mare Island or another Federal Facility at which chrome plating has taken place, and you remember feeling good before you started employment there and then remember feeling ill afterward you are probably a victim of exposure to Chromium Acid. It's effects are slow and insidious but largely permanent.

Shortly after the IFPTE Local 25 grievance was filed the management response to it indicated that it was a much bigger deal than had been suspected. In order to find out if the prosecution of the grievance was worth all of time, trouble and warfare it was going to take the Union President took the time to walk through the shipyard and to have informal spontaneous conversations with the people represented by his Union. These conversations were not about health, but about general concerns. He just wanted to hear what people had to say. His experience was that in the vast majority of these conversations the personnel made the statement that prior to working at Mare Island they were full of health and were happy but since then they suffered from a great variety of illnesses and their family life had gone downhill. It was this experience that has directly led to the production of this web site. This site is nothing more or less than an exercise of personal conscience. I'm sorry it took so long, but it would have been a lot quicker if the Navy hadn't been so careful to hide the crucial documents.

You can obtain your Rights and Entitlements for your injuries from Chromium Acid exposure in four ways:

1. File a Federal Employee Compensation Act claim for compensation for injuries.

2. Involve the Unions

4. Sue the Union(s)

5. Sue the Navy

1. Filing a FECA Claim for Medical Treatment, Costs and Compensation

The following experience related guidance is intended for persons exposed to chromic acid during federal employment and particularly at a U.S. Navy facility. If your injury is federally work related but due to another cause some advice may not apply.

The Federal Injury Compensation Act (FECA) was made law by Congress to remove the right of anyone injured on Federal property to sue the U.S. Government for damages due to the injury. In the place of the right to sue a program of entitlements was instituted and assigned to the Department of Labor to administrate. Up until 1972 the Department of Labor paid all of the costs for all claims and so all the individual federal agencies had no problem with the FECA program because it cost them nothing.. But in 1972 the costs of successful claimants were assigned to the federal agency responsible for the claim. This cost shifting immediately resulted in a process, continuing today, whereby federal agencies began to do everything in their power, right or wrong, to avoid having to pay claims costs. Over the years since 1972 the U.S. Navy has carefully selected genius psychopaths and other criminal types and has trained and rewarded them with high titles, positions and pay rewards for being successful, resourceful and inventive in making sure as many of injury victims as possible are defrauded of their just entitlements in the event they are so unfortunate as to be injured on U.S. Navy Property.

This FECA program was intended by Congress to be generous because it removes your right to sue the U.S. Government or its employees and replaces it with a formal compensation system. But because it costs the employer money, over time it has become corrupted. Local compensation offices are staffed with psychopathic lawyers who look for every technicality possible to obtain disapproval of a claim. Office staff are instructed not to counsel you with regard to critical rights. This little section of this web site is based upon direct personal experience and so you should read it with great care over and over again before you either discuss your injury with anyone or much more importantly go to your local injury claim office.

The safest thing to do is to believe that your local FECA claim office is just a box of well paid, educated and experienced enemies who will get a nice fat bonus if your claim is disapproved and who do do everything they can, fair or dishonest to get this done. So DO NOT TRUST THEM OR ANYONE ELSE ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR CLAIM FORM. DISCUSS YOUR CLAIM ONLY WITH YOUR LAWYER OR YOUR DOCTOR AND NEVER EVER WITH ANYONE AT WORK.

The way the program works is that it is the Department of Labor that examines and decides all claims. Your local claim office is supposed to be neutral and is supposed to merely make sure the paperwork is correct before sending it on to them. But this is not the way it really is. Your local claim office staff is paid by your employer who may very well be highly rewarded with generous bonuses for every claim they get disapproved. The reason for this is that while the Department of Labor decides the claim, it is your employer who pays all the bills and they don't like it. At Mare Island it was policy that all injured employee costs would be directly deducted from the employee's department management yearly bonus fund which always got gobbled up by management. Consequently, the local claim office had no lack of little helpers and conspirators to do everything in their power to trip an injured employee up. TRUST NO ONE but your doctor, lawyer and Congressional Representative (more about this later).

The Generosity of the FECA Claim Process

The FECA Claim process is generous in ONE and only ONE way. This is it covers anything that happens at work that is FULLY OR PARTIALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR:

1. A job related injury that is immediately obvious like a broken limb, cut, scrape, abrasion, fainting or anything else that can be immediately seen and is obvious.

2. A pre-existing condition like asthma, emphysema, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, that is AGGRAVATED by conditions at work.

3. A condition which is caused by the working conditions but which does not show up for a long time like lung cancer, sinus cancer, eye cancer, emphysema or anything else related to work such as secret exposure to chromic acid mist from a junked up scrubber.

Other than these three things the FECA Claims process IS NOT GENEROUS.

People at your local claims office are likely to ask you leading questions like "have you ever smoked" or "have you ever worked around asbestos"to try to discourage you from filing a claim. If you feel the need to fill a claim just go ahead and do it. Everything they say means nothing. Just tell the truth and give them the claim form within 30 days and all will go properly.

The BIG 30 Day Statute of Limitations

Whenever you are injured at work, no matter how small or great your injury may be, there is an IRON CLAD 30 day statute of limitations. This means simply that if you tell someone you were injured at work and then later file a claim, you have 30 days from the time you became aware your injury was work related to submit your papers to the local Injury Claim Office or you loose forever any and all rights to compensation for the injury forever no matter what.

The question is when do you become aware? It's easy if you fall off a ladder. But what if you are secretly poisoned with chromic acid? The answer is you become aware the instant the doctor says that he believes your injury, disease or condition is related to exposure to chromic acid which took place while you were at work. This is your answer if ever you are asked by anyone when your state of awareness began. The reason for this is simple. You are not qualified to judge whether or not anything that you feel is wrong with you was caused by chemical exposure. Only Doctor's can do this and only they are licensed to make this decision and make it stick.

With regard to chemical injuries it is not at all unusual for injuries to be delayed in their appearance for as long as 20 years. The question is, after any injury when does the 30 day time period start? The answer is it starts one of five ways, depending upon the circumstances.

1. The clock starts the instant your employer officially notifies you by word or by writing that you have been exposed to levels of any chemical at any level. Federal employers are clever and often they will get a doctor to sneak in an official notification at the end of a physical. If you are asked to sign anything, or if you are given a paper, or if a supervisor or doctor or anyone else in authority tells you that you were exposed to ANY LEVEL of any chemical you have 30 days from that moment to file your papers with the Local Claim Office. It doesn't matter if the doctor or supervisor tells you the level you were exposed to is not harmful. It might not be known to be harmful now, but could be known to be very harmful later. The thing to keep in mind is that if you have been notified they are worried about it. If you have been notified then file a preventative claim (more about this later).

2. Your doctor tells you that an injury disease or condition is job related. This will also start the 30 day clock.

3. You go to your supervisor, a co-worker, a friend, the Union, the Local FECA claims office or anyone else and tell them you think you have a job related injury. If you think you have a job related injury KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT until your doctor makes an official diagnosis. Then, continue to KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.

4. You go to your local Injury Claims Office for any reason. Do not go there for any reason until the instant you are ready to pick up a claim form and start the 30 day clock. They identify everyone who "stops by" and so it is absolutely unsafe to go there for any reason until you are ready to start the clock.

5. If you have a chemical injury that doesn't show up after a year, five years, ten years or twenty years or sometime in between, and your employer did not notify you of the exposure then the clock does not start until your doctor tells you it is his opinion the injury, condition or disease is job related; even if he says this 20 or more years after the exposure.

The First Step

If you believe you MAY have a job related injury, disease or condition the first thing to do is nothing. It's easy to screw things up moving too fast. Just sit down and get over the emotions. Once you fill in your claim papers you are entering an entirely unemotional claim process and the local Claims Office is counting on you being emotional and thy are more than ready to take full advantage of this and steer you wrong. Take the time to get over your anger and then make your moves to obtain your rights.

RULE No. 1: Do not self censor yourself. The Department of Labor is the sole agency having the legal right and responsibility to evaluate any and ALL job related injury claims. It is not enough for you to go and tell your supervisor. If you do all you will likely get is nothing if your 're lucky and discrimination if your not lucky or work for the U.S. Navy. If you even think or suspect you have a job related injury just file a Preventative Claim (more about this later). Once you file a claim your rights are fully protected and you are also protected from harassment or intimidation. So in the event of any suspicion of anything job related that could now or later result in disability FILE A PREVENTATIVE FECA CLAIM as soon as you can.

The second part of the first step is to make absolutely certain that each and every question you answer about your injury, claim or income is answered honestly. The Local FECA claims office is going to be looking for the slightest form of fraud that can be used as part of an argument to get your claim disapproved. Be totally honest but don't answer any questions you are not asked and do not volunteer anything. Be completely honest about any prior exposures to chemicals, asbestos, cigarettes, cement or anything else. It doesn't matter if you were previously exposed to even chromic acid somewhere else if you were a leather tanner. All that matters is that you were exposed to it while you were in Federal Employment.

The ENTIRE Claims process is based upon the DOCTOR's opinion. This is it. No matter what else, if the doctor says you have a work related injury that's it. If he says you don't that's it. So it is of utmost importance that you choose a QUALIFED doctor who the employer has not already put into his pocket.

How To Choose Your Doctor

Rule 1: AVOID HMO'S AT ALL COST AND MOST ESPECIALLY KAISER PERMANENTE. The U.S. Navy has prudently made investments in Kaiser (and other HMO's I am sure) to subsidize the construction of Kaiser Permanente facilities in the vicinity of Navy bases. They have not done this for nothing. They have convinced Kaiser (and other HMO"s I am sure) that if you show up there and complain of a chemical injury without a U.S. Navy document certifying the exposure that you are a liar and a malingerer. STAY AWAY FROM KAISER and all other HMO's.

Rule 2: If your claim is going to have expensive results; and a chromic acid cancer is going to be very expensive, it is highly likely that the Department of Labor will be requested by the U.S. Navy to have a specialist doctor examine you to provide a second opinion if your doctor certifies your injury or disease to be work related. Don't waste time and effort. Find the best doctor you can to start with because you don't have to pay his bills anyway (more about this later).

The FECA claim process allows you the first choice of doctor. You do not have to deal with anyone "suggested" to you by anyone at work. With regard to any chemical injury, condition or disease I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you stay away from any doctor who has ever had anything to do with your employer, who is suggested by them or who is within a one hour drive of your place of work. Contact your local State Medical Licensing Bureau and ask to be provided with a list of specialists in the field of chemical toxicology who are located AT LEAST one hours drive from your employer.

One you choose a doctor and you file your papers, you are married to that doctor and only the FECA main office can allow you to change doctors. YOU MUST CHOOSE YOUR DOCTOR WITH AS MUCH CARE AS WHEN YOU INTEND TO MARRY SOMEONE.

Strongly Consider Filing a Preventative Claim

Here's one thing to keep in mind. If you believe you were exposed to chromic acid you need to file a protective FECA claim. Even if you have no symptoms, but you know you were exposed to a terribly harmful thing like chromic acid, you can file a FECA claim for the express purpose of protecting your rights and forever stopping the 30 day clock. Here's what you do:

1. Go to your local FECA Claims Office and get a claim form.

2. Put your name on it, sign and date it.

3. In the statement block write this: "I have been secretly exposed to levels of chromic acid which I believe may have been harmful. In order to protect my rights to make a future claim in the events symptoms should develop I ask the Department of Labor to conduct an independent assessment at its convenience. I will fully cooperate with anything the Department of Labor may require as part of this process".

4. Make a copy and turn it in to the local FECA Claims Office.

The Department of Labor will assign a claim number, will obtain a doctor's appointment for you and will notify you by letter. Tell the doctor everything you know and have all the documents you need convince him you were exposed to chromic acid, at any time and at any level. Let the Department of Labor make all the decisions. In this way you completely avoid having to do or say anything except the bare minimum.

In the future the bad news about Chromic Acid is only going to get worse. File a protective claim and lock your rights into place so that no matter what happens in the future you don't need to start a new claim, you merely need to reopen an old one. Cancer from chromic acid can make you very weak and frail very fast and so it's better to set things in motion, assuming the worst, so that your loved ones can benefit from an approved claim in the event you don't have much time.

Also, while it is not now possible to attribute most cancers to a specific cause. In the future this will certainly become routine. If you should contact lung, sinus or any other cancer, and you believe you've been exposed to even the most tiny amount of chromic acid, make absolutely certain to file a protective claim NOW and to make sure that tissue samples of the cancer and other critical organs of your body are collected and preserved for at least 50 years after your death should cancer kill you. In the event your cancer can be attributed to chromic acid, even 25 or more years after your death, your survivors can progress a valid claim and collect benefits worth millions of dollars.

The beauty of a preventative claim is that there is nothing anyone can do. You are not claiming any money, you are not making any statement of injury, you are not accusing anyone of anything; all you are doing is asking for a professional evaluation of the situation for the purpose of preserving your rights for the rest of your life. Of course the local claims office will hate this, but there's nothing anyone can do. All you are doing is voicing a suspicion and asking the Department of Labor to sort it out and they will do this by sending you to the best doctor they can find. If it should happen that the doctor finds a work related injury then everything that should happen will happen. But if not then, your rights are preserved for the future if symptoms should develop at which time you ask the Department of Labor to provide a reevaluation, which they will do at no expense to you and you will have another talk with a very fine doctor at no cost to you.

An Example of A Preventative Claim

I was shortly to leave federal employment and was at the end of my exit physical examination at the hands of a U.S. Navy doctor. Right at the end she turned to me and said,"You have pleural thickening caused by exposure to asbestos". Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a little piece of paper and a pen and she said, "You need to sign this acknowledgement that I told you this". I took the pen and signed the form and with that she put the paper and pen in her pocket and said that the examination was over.

Upon my return to Mare Island I went directly to the FECA claims office and got a claim form. On this form I put my name, signed it and wrote the following statement, "I have been informed that I have pleural thickening caused by exposure to asbestos by a U.S. Navy doctor and consider this to be an official notification by the employer that I have been exposed to asbestos at work and that there are signs of this exposure in my body. I understand that pleural thickening has no outward signs and is diagnosable only by x-ray but that asbestos exposure can result in very serious delayed health effects such as asbestosis and cancer. I request the Department of Labor to conduct an independent investigation of this matter so that if, in the future, I should develop a disabling asbestos exposure related disease my rights to compensation will be fully protected. I will fully cooperate with anything the Department of Labor may require me to do."

A week after filing this I was recalled to the same doctor and she could barely restrain her anger. She said, "I don't know what you told the Department of Labor but I never told you that you had any kind of asbestos problem". These words did not surprise me. My opinion is you just cannot trust a U.S. Navy doctor. My opinion is they all have prostitute hearts and are well rewarded for cheating the injured of their rights and entitlements

The Department of Labor paid for my trip to a hospital in San Francisco where I spent an entire day being examined by highly qualified independent certified medical experts not in the pay or under the influence of the corrupt U.S. Navy FECA claims system. About two months later I got a letter from the Department of Labor stating that at this time there is no evidence of asbestos related disability. This is exactly what I expected them to say. But if, in the future, I should develop asbestosis or any other incurable asbestos related disease such as cancer, all I will have to do is have this claim reevaluated by the Department of Labor and will not have to fill out the papers or deal with the criminals at the local FECA claims office.

Paying the Doctor

The Department of Labor FECA Office will pay the doctor you select. You don't have to pay a penny. When you first contact the doctor you've selected just tell the receptionist that the matter is a job related injury under FECA and that as soon as you have a claim number you will give it to them. Once she knows this an appointment will be made for you. DO DON'T GO CHEAP AND FAST. FIND THE BEST HIGHEST PRICED DOCTOR WITH THE MOST CREDENTIALS YOU CAN GET YOUR HANDS ON. The Department of Labor will pay all the examination costs.

If you cannot find a doctor you can trust then the best thing to do is to trust the Department of Labor. The Department of Labor will find a price is no object highly qualified very well credentialed doctor for you and will make an appointment for you to be examined. They will even pay your transportation expenses. The way to do this is simple:

1. Go to your local FECA Claims office and tell them you SUSPECT you have a job related injury and ask for a claim form.

2. Put your name on the form then sign and date it.

3. On the claim form, in the statement block, just put down the words, "I WANT AN INDEPENDENT MEDICAL EVALUATION BY A SPECIALIST SELECTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR".

4. Make a photocopy of the form.

5. Turn it into your local FECA claims office.

The Department of Labor will find a doctor, make an appointment, and will send a letter to you notifying you of everything you need to know to be there on time. They will pay all the bills.

If you need special transportation or assistance to get to your doctor appointment let the Department of Labor FECA Office know and they will make arrangements for it or will pay for it. All you will need is your claim number to get all you need.

Get A Lawyer

I highly recommend that you try to find a lawyer who will help you at a reasonable cost. The first question most lawyers will ask is if your doctor has told you your injuries are work related. So you are going to need to see your doctor first. Don't talk to anyone and I do mean ANYONE until you have seen your doctor and received his diagnosis.

Before seeing your doctor line up your exposure evidence and get it all in line. His main concerns are three things only. He wants to know the name of the chemical(s) you were exposed to, the concentration of the chemical, and how long you were exposed. Once he has this information he will do a little research on his own, will compare the symptoms the chemical(s) are known to cause to your symptoms, and will tell you one of two things. He will either tell you he believes your injuries are work related or he will say they are not.

Your doctor is going to contact your local FECA Claims office and ask them what happened. They are likely going to tell them nothing and strongly imply that you are just a malingerer looking for a free ride. Don't worry about this, if you've chosen a very good doctor he's going to do his job well no matter what your enemies in the local claims office tell him.

Keep in mind that at Mare Island the Local FECA Claims office took the precaution of establishing "special relationships" with every doctor in the vicinity they could get their hands on. They would secretly put these prostitute doctors on retainer, would pay for them to attend seminars and would otherwise attempt to bribe them. It's just safe for you to take the precaution of assuming your office has done much the same thing and to take the time to find a nice fine high ranking doctor outside of convenient automobile commuting range of your work place who has too much to loose by way of reputation to do anything wrong.

The day your doctor tells you that you have a work related chromic acid exposure injury, condition or disease you either have to get a lawyer or go to the local FECA claims office and get your claim form..

What Do You Do With The Claim Form?

If you are currently a Federal employee then you will have a local claims office from which you can get a FECA claim form. Don't tell the clerk anything other than that you want a form and once you have it get out of there and proceed to fill it in.

If you are not currently a Federal employee and are a retired federal worker, and your agency has a Local FECA claims office go there to get your claim form. If your agency does not have a local FECA claims office you can deal directly with the Department of Labor. They're in the phone book just give them a call and ask them what you should do. In most cases they'll mail you a claims form for you to submit to them directly.

If you were once were a federal worker, did not retire from federal employment, but are now either unemployed or working for a private company you can either go to a Local FECA claims office at the Federal agency you worked for or you can deal directly with the Department of Labor.

I strongly recommend that if you can deal with the Department of Labor you choose to do so and avoid the Local FECA claims office.

When you pick up or receive a FECA Claim form you are going to see that it is a very complicated and long form. It has been designed to intimidate you but don't worry, you don't have to fill it all out. ONCE YOU HAVE A DOCTOR'S DIAGNOSIS ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PUT YOUR NAME ON THE CLAIM FORM, then turn it in officially. Just take the form, put your name on it, sign and date it, go to a copier and make a copy, then return to the counter of the claims office and hand it to the clerk. THIS ACT STOPS THE 30 DAY CLOCK and guarantees you your rights FOREVER.

Force the clerk to help you to fill in the form. That's what he or she is there for, make them do their work. After all, they're the experts, according to the FECA Law they are there to help you, so just make them do it. They are going to take the form and go to everyone they can find, including your friends at work and your supervisors. They're going to take this information you provide and do everything they can to get these people to say you're faking it and so it's just best to give them the minimum to work with against you to begin with.

Your local FECA Claims office has to turn the form into the Department of Labor FECA Office within a few weeks. It's only when its there with the Department of Labor that anything important happens. And its normal for the DOL to write you a letter asking for more information. So don't sweat filling the thing in. You'll have plenty of time to fill in the blanks that the Department of Labor wants filled after you've turned the form into your local FECA claims office and stopped the 30 day clock.

If you manage to get a lawyer (highly recommended) go to him and get his advice directly after you see your doctor. Do not go to the claims office to get the form until your lawyer tells you to do so. Follow his advice exactly and don't change a thing.

What Happens After You File the Claim Form?

The Local FECA Claims office has to forward the completed form to the main FECA office which is under the Department of Labor. Shortly after they do this the main FECA office will mail you a postcard with your official claim number. NEVER EVER loose this claim number. It's yours for life. You can reopen the claim any time you are alive and ask for a reexamination. Suppose you are young when the claim is approved as a preventative claim and then later you develop cancer. With the claim number you can just reopen the old claim easily and this will save much trouble and you won't have to worry about the 30 day clock.

As soon as you have a claim number contact your Doctor's office and tell it to them. They need it in order to be able to forward the Doctor's letter to the Department of Labor FECA Claims Office and to submit their bill.

You are also likely going to get a letter from the Department of Labor FECA Claims office asking for more information. This is just a test to see if you will lie about something. THE ONE SURE AND CERTAIN WAY TO KILL AN INJURY CLAIM IS TO LIE ABOUT ANYTHING. JUST BE COMPLETELY HONEST, BUT DON'T VOLUNTEEER ANYTHING. The FECA people at the Department of Labor know what they need to know to make a claim go to completion and when they ask for something just give it to them to the best of your ability. IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE ANSWER TO A QUESTION JUST SAY "I DON'T KNOW, ASK MY SUPERVISOR". Do not ever make anything up.

Under Federal Safety Law your Supervisor is COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE to be COMPLETELY KNOWLEDGEABLE about the health and safety situation at work. If he's keeping secrets from you and the Department of Labor FECA office asks you about them, how can you possibly answer? If you don't know the answer to a question or don't know the answer just reply with "ASK MY SUPERVISOR".

The Department of Labor may ask you to prepare a statement. If they do just take the time and effort to print out every page of this web site along with all of its downloadable pages and then send them to that office as your statement.

You Are Going To Need Help

A FECA claim will move very very very slowly unless it has some help. YOU MUST HAVE HELP. You need the help of a lawyer or the help of your local Federal Congressional Representative. If you don't get a lawyer then you MUST get your Congressional Representative. But, while the Federal Government is paid by your taxes, and in reality the help of your local Congressional Representative should be free, in reality its not. The help of your Congressional Representative is just like anything else and costs money. It doesn't cost a lot, but about $100.00 is right and will get you what you need. Here is what you do:

1. Find out the contact information for your local Congressional Office. Then call them and tell them you like the work your elected representative is doing and you want to send him a campaign contribution. They will be more than happy to give you the mailing address to send your check.

2. Write out a check for $100.00 and send it to the address then wait one month.

3. Call the local Congressional Office and tell them you need help "TRACKING THE STATUS" of a FECA injury claim. Use the words "TRACK THE STATUS". A Congressman or Woman cannot progress, stimulate, process or help a claim, they can only TRACK THE STATUS. But if they do track the status you will have the result in the shortest possible time. Without their help it will take the longest possible time. This is all there is to it.

Notice that when you call the Congressional Office they will put you on hold for a couple of minutes. This is so they can check the donor list. YOU WANT TO BE SURE YOUR NAME IS ON IT AND IT'S FAIRLY HIGH UP. $100.00 will get your name in the right position and will ensure a prompt and courteous listening to your problems.

4. It is possible that your local Congressional Office may want you to come down and talk with them about your claim. This is normal. They are cautious about getting drawn into a fraud and so will want to see you. Be sure to take a copy of your Doctor's letter along with exposure information with you when you go. These things will make it clear to them it is safe to assist you with TRACKING THE STATUS of your claim.

GETTNG HELP IS NOT OPTIONAL. DO IT ON YOUR OWN AND YOU WILL LEARN TO WAIT AND LEARN TO LIKE THE WORD "NO".

What Do You Get Paid?

If you obtain an approved FECA Injury Claim then you are entitled to:

1. All the top quality medical care you need without regard to where it is, how much it costs or how much paid transportation and lodging you need to get to it.

2. A one time "Schedule Award" which is a tax free lump sum having the purpose of compensating you for the injury. It's amount is based upon the degree of disability resulting from your injury and varies.

3. Lifetime monthly annuity payments depending upon the degree of disability and your pay at the time you were injured. This is free of State and Federal taxes.

4. Payments for support, medical care and education for dependents and children and survivor benefits for your spouse.

5. Payments for special equipment and modifications needed to your home or car needed to allow you to care for yourself.

The Department of Labor decides the Claim but it is your employer who pays these costs. This explains why it is best to assume that you will be surrounded by spies and that the Local FECA Claims office is staffed by dedicated enemies once you file your claim form.

In the U.S. Navy injury compensation costs are budget line item no. 1. This puts them ahead of aircraft carriers and this explains why if you do a little careful Internet searching you will find hundreds of pages, documents and memos from U.S. Navy FECA Offices talking in code about how to cut costs by screwing the victims. So watch out and DO NOT DO IT ALONE.

Watch Out for The Professional Thug Squad

At Mare Island Management had built for itself a nice little group of thugs with Nazi Death Camp Guard Consciences. These people were scattered in every code and department. Their job was to constantly call and harass anyone staying home under doctor's orders as part of an injury claim. Their job was to lie to the victims and tell them anything to scare them up and get them to drag themselves into work on their own. Of course, if a victim did make it in to work, they were demonstrating they could come to work. The problem with this little corrupt system was that in many cases injured persons who would have recovered if left to rest were permanently injured because fear caused them to ignore pain and come to work out of fear. DO NOT EVER VIOLATE DOCTOR'S ORDERS NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE TELLS YOU.

Another nice little trick Mare Island had was to rehire disabled workers as temporary employees. These people would then come into work and be hired as copier operators at a GS-5 rate and then put into a chair to just sit out the day for 5 years. The FECA injury compensation system has a little provision that if you can establish a "work history" for 5 years after you are injured, the average yearly salary will then be subtracted from any FECA annuity you will receive afterward. Now, while you are working this fake job you feel no financial pain. The victims of this plan would get paid the full FECA annuity minus the GS-5 and the GS-5 pay and so the total sum they would receive each month would be the same for 5 years. But Mare Island would lay off these "temporary" workers after 5 years and then the FECA annuity would be minus the GS-5 pay they were no getting and this is when the pain started.

The FECA rules require you to accept a job provided the employer is willing to make a "reasonable accommodation" to your disability so that you can perform the job. But they are not permitted to just manufacture jobs that do not ordinarily exist for the sole purpose of reducing a disabled person's annuity. If you are disabled, and you have a FECA annuity, and you are offered a job, then you have to do a little work and the first thing is to go you doctor before anything else and ask his permission to go to work. If what you have been offered is a make work job you feel has been manufactured for the sole purpose of robbing you of a big fraction of your annuity, tell your doctor. If he says No you've got no problem; just obey his orders and all will be fine. But if he says yes then before accepting the job write a little letter to the personnel office asking them to certify that the income from the job will not be used to reduce your annuity because you cannot participate in a fraudulent scheme designed to controvert the generous nature of the FECA system and see what they say. If all else fails just do what it takes to get fired before your five years are up.

How Far Will the U.S. Navy Go?

Here's a good example: There was a guy who worked in the Engineering Department. One day on his way out of the Shipyard, while still on the Shipyard, while riding his bicycle he was hit by a car and became brain damaged so he couldn't do engineering work any more and was 100% disabled and had a 100% FECA annuity. The Shipyard rehired him as an engineer and put him right back at his desk where he had always been and let him sit there for about 5 years. He just sat there because he couldn't do any useful work. When the Shipyard went on the closure list the Shipyard put together gangs of employees who they wanted to motivate to leave "voluntarily", so they assigned this guy to sweep parking lots and railroad tracks. The problem is he liked this job and didn't get the message. He had actually been living in fear while sitting at his desk and felt relieved to be doing something he was capable of doing. He didn't get the message. He was supposed to be so ashamed to be an engineer being made to be a street sweeper he should have quit, this was the intention of the scheme. But it didn't work.

Finally to get rid of him he was assigned to be a fire watch during welding in a confined space on board a submarine. This meant he would be holding a fire extinguisher while a welder worked and if a fire started he was supposed to put it out. But he was in an confined space which meant that by law he was supposed to provided with a gas mask, which he knew nothing about and was not provided. So the welder went to work welding, the welding generated enough smoke to make the victim pass out. When he woke up no one was there. He got out, got to the parking lot and drove home. What was done to him is officially known as "welding fume poisoning".

Later that night I was called in to meet with the Assistant Nuclear Engineering Manager who presented me with a letter written by the foreman of the welding shop asking that this poor victim be disciplined for sleeping on watch. When the victim was confronted with this he decided to retire and was allowed to do so. Later, after he retired, he told me he was very relieved to be out of his desk where he had lived in fear for so long. But the point is the U.S. Navy did all these things to him to get him to retire so the U.S. Navy didn't have to pay him the FECA annuity. Finally about five years later he died of prostrate cancer which is well known to be a side effect of weld fume poisoning. In my opinion this was just another example of Mare Island Murder.

The thing to keep in mind is that this man had been severely brain damaged. He was living in fear every minute he sat at his desk. If even one single person in management had just taken a moment to suggest to him it was time to retire he would have done it then and there. But there was no one in the entire management structure who had even the tiniest shred of a human heart. They spent months torturing him to get him to retire when only a kind word or two would have done the job. Let this bet a lesson to you. The U.S. Navy management structure is filled entirely from top to bottom with well selected sociopath's who secretly take great joy in cruelty and the pain of others. It has taken me a long time to come to this conclusion because it is very difficult to come to such a conclusion about one's fellow men. But I remember the night my Department Head had a good laugh at me when I was having a particularly hard time breathing. Back then I wondered at this, but now I know it is because the way the system works is that in order to become a U.S. Navy supervisor you must first be an exceedingly cruel person.

When you enter into the FECA claim process as a U.S. Navy employee you have to know that there is absolutely NOTHING these monsters will not do if you are not on your guard.

DONT' DO IT ON YOUR OWN GET A LAWYER OR GET YOUR CONGRESSMAN. IT'S ONE OR THE OTHER. The U.S. Navy is very careful in being able to find and assign sociopath's who will love to torture anyone at any time to help the U.S. Navy get out from under a valid FECA claim and there is virtually nothing they will not do. If you have a Lawyer or a powerful friend they will be restrained but if you are on your own you better be real good at watching your back.

2. The Unions

Unless you are dealing with the America Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which has demonstrated itself to be honest and honorable, you've got to watch out for your Union. Many unions are staffed by malingerers who use Union Office to keep their job because they know they are incompetent at real work. Others are staffed by people whose only care is to move up in the Union power structure. If you are going to file an individual FECA Claim then stay away from the Union office unless it's an AFGE office. Typically most unions don't know anything about the FECA claims process and its pitfalls anyway. In the worst case they will give you bad advice and then go and tell the Local FECA Claims Office about you and start the 30 day clock without you knowing about it. Many Unions have been bribed with gifts of official time, office space, free phone lines, use of Government Internet connections, training time, office furniture, special parking spaces and the like. My advice is that with the exception of the AFGE a Union is like an anvil. You will get as much from it as much as you pound it and there's no substitute for a lawyer.

In my opinion it would be best for the Unions today to prosecute a general and universal grievance on their own to obtain the payment of back pay with interest, medical surveillance of all exposed employees, payment of entitlements to those who have died and their widows and orphans, and to ensure that current working conditions are actually safe. If you do not intend to file a FECA claim you should strongly consider filing a grievance with your Local Union. Your local Union can represent you for contact violations that happened at Mare Island. Under federal law only they have the ability to represent you for a Union Contract Violation. If a Union should refuse to vigorously prosecute such a grievance then you have a right to sue the Union for the refusal to represent. My personal opinion is that if you belong to the International Federation of Profession Technicians and Engineers you should sue them because up until the present time the only thing that they have done is to betray you and your interests.

Documents show the Unions at Mare Island were not officially informed of the discharges, spills or the refusal to inform employees. I have read all of the Union contracts which were in effect at the time Mare Island closed and all of them contained language regarding the duty of the shipyard to maintain safe working conditions and to inform the Union of unsafe occupational health and safety conditions. I am sure that if the Unions had been informed this matter some of them would have properly taken it to a grievance which they would have won.

Just prior to shipyard closure the local Union, IFPTE 25 found out that there had been severe problems with the metal plating shop scrubbers and prosecuted a grievance which was later argued before an arbitrator after shipyard closure. This grievance asked for back pay of hazard differential pay with interest arising from the fact the metal plating shop was a danger and was not operated safety. Because management refused, in violation of the Contract and federal law, to provide the damming evidence which was only recently found, to demonstrate the plating shop horrors, the Union did not win this grievance. But to protect their rights and yours the Union membership, at a formal meeting of the membership, formally assigned for life these matters to a responsible person. My feeling is that because the Navy held secret substantive and material documents in its possession, for this reason the grievance is defective and invalid and that the I.F.P.T.E. International Union could, if it wanted to, reopen the issue and pursue a new grievance on your behalf and win it. If, after reading this site you decide for yourself that this would be something you would like to see happen then the best thing to do is to write directly to the Legal Representative of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees. These people have a habit of not responding and so its best to write them hard and often. There's no need to be polite with these scum who have already sold you out:

1. Here's a link to the IFPTE Web Site:

IFPTE Web site

2. Here's a link to send email to the IFPTE Legal Representative Julia Clark:

I.F.P.T.E. Legal Representative J. Clark

jclark@ifpte.org

In 1995 she committed the I.F.P.T.E. to prosecute the Mare Island Plating shop grievance and perhaps if she was to be reminded of this she might decide to do something about it today.

 

3. Currently the President of the IFPTE is Mr. G. Juneman. You might want to write to him also.

I.F.P.T.E. President Juneman

gjuneman@ifpte.org

Prior to shipyard closure The International Union was asked to join the Local Union 25 in the grievance and they agreed. Their only actions afterward was to send their West Coast Representative to the Shipyard. He, along with Shipyard Managers, broke the window of the IFPTE Local 25 Union office and looted it of all its papers. It is possible today the I.F.P.T.E. leaders may be reluctant to turn and bite the hand of their U.S. Navy masters. But it would be very good if they did and you can help change their minds about this situation by writing to them as often as you think would be good.

If you are or were represented by the Metal Trades Council or other Union consider contacting them so that they can consider filing a grievance on your behalf. They knew nothing about it and so their situation with regard to it is pure and clean.

3. Sue the IFPTE or Other International Union

The I.F.P.T.E. International Union not only refused to help I.F.P.T.E. Local 25 prosecute the Plating Shop Grievance in 1996 they did everything they could to put the Union lights out. Here's the story in a nutshell. One day while taking a college class on air pollution being conducted by the University of Davis at the Shipyard a diagram on the chalkboard stimulated suspicions about the metal plating shop in the mind of the Union vice-president. After class he returned to the Union office and a telephone call came in from the International Legal Representative J. Clark. The purpose of this call was to inform I.F.P.T.E. Local 25 that the other I.F.P.T.E. local union on the Shipyard was filing a grievance against the Shipyard with respect to personnel being exposed to excessive levels of mercury being released during the demolition of a building. She asked us to join in that grievance and we agreed to do so. But after having done this the vice-president discussed his suspicions about the metal plating shop with J. Clark and concluded by asking her if he found anything significant to back up these suspicions would the International Union support I.F.P.T.E. Local 25 in the prosecution of a grievance against toxic emissions from the plating shop and she said, "Yes". This ended the call. After this we participated with the other union in meetings with the shipyard, the Department of Labor, and other unions regarding the mercury exposure issue, but it went no where and the other unions had everything well in hand and so we began to search for evidence about the metal plating shop. Documents began to be found which supported our original suspicions and so a formal written grievance was filed on the shipyard. At that point we notified the International Union about this and we proceeded to speak with management, labor relations and Shipyard OSH personnel about the issue of the metal plating shop. The next thing we heard from the International Union was a visit from the West Coast Representative. He informed us that the International wanted our union to merge with the other and we agreed to this providing that the combined union would continue to prosecute the metal plating shop grievance and that if this grievance was not prosecuted to the point of an arbitration hearing the merger would be null and void. He agreed to this and so did the other union and the merger agreement was signed. Shortly thereafter, during a meeting of the board of the combined union, a motion was raised to cancel the plating shop grievance at which point the merger was cancelled and I.F.P.T.E. Local 25 resumed operations as a separate union again. We then requested the shipyard to provide us with all documents relative to the metal plating shop and a war of words began. We were accused of being crazy and useless and of submitting useless, unnecessary and burdensome information requests that could not possibly be fulfilled. This went on and on and on and so we began to search the Shipyard OSH trash receptacles. The OSH offices were in the same building on the floor below the shipyard OSH office. It was from these trash baskets that most of the documents provided on this web site were found. Eventually, we were provided with some documents which turned out to be useless. In the meantime we heard nothing and received no support from the International. We requested the Shipyard to participate in the selection of an arbitrator, but nothing happened. We asked the International for help and heard nothing. Finally, the last day of shipyard operation came and on that day the International West Coast Representative along with Shipyard management officials smashed the window of the union office, entered and seized all of the documents and papers and office equipment and supplies. After the shipyard closed the local union president met with the Department of Labor and it was the Department of Labor who continued the issue and compelled the International to return a very small portion of what had been seized. The papers on this web site are duplicates of the originals. They had been put in a safe place long before shipyard closure because events had made it clear they were too valuable to risk.

It is important to note that just prior to the looting of the Union office the International Union Presidency had changed with the prior president being given a GS-13 Management position in the Washington D.C. Office of Personnel Management Human Relations Office. Prior to being International President he was an electrical technician at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. This was a very great reward for him and I cannot imagine the Navy gave him such an unprecedented promotion for doing nothing for them.

I believe The International I.F.P.T.E. Union in acting the way it did opened itself to a lawsuit for refusal to represent. I believe any person who was ever represented by an I.F.P.T.E. Local Union, and who has been damaged or injured from the emission of Chromium Acid from the Metal Plating Shop has the right to institute such a lawsuit.

4. Sue the U.S. Navy

Here is a link to a lawyer referral service specializing in damages caused by Chromium Acid exposure:

Weitz & Luxenburg

Navy Forced to Notify Those Exposed to Carcinogens at Camp Lejeune

I found this notice on the Trichloroetylene (TCE) BLOG Site. It appears that the Navy improperly disposed of this solvent for many years and the result was an increase in male breast cancer in the area. The result is that public concern resulted in this bit of law.

President Bush recently signed the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. In doing so, he approved a provision requiring notification to marines, families, and employees who may have been exposed to contamination at the base. The language of the bill provides:

SEC. 315. NOTIFICATION OF CERTAIN RESIDENTS AND CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES AT CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA, OF EXPOSURE TO DRINKING WATER CONTAMINATION.

(a) Notification of Individuals Served by Tarawa Terrace Water Distribution System, Including Knox Trailer Park- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Navy shall make reasonable efforts to identify and notify directly individuals who were served by the Tarawa Terrace Water Distribution System, including Knox Trailer Park, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, during the years 1958 through 1987 that they may have been exposed to drinking water contaminated with tetrachloroethylene (PCE).

(b) Notification of Individuals Served by Hadnot Point Water Distribution System- Not later than 1 year after the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) completes its water modeling study of the Hadnot Point water distribution system, the Secretary of the Navy shall make reasonable efforts to identify and notify directly individuals who were served by the system during the period identified in the study of the drinking water contamination to which they may have been exposed.

(c) Notification of Former Civilian Employees at Camp Lejeune- Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Navy shall make reasonable efforts to identify and notify directly civilian employees who worked at Camp Lejeune during the period identified in the ATSDR drinking water study of the drinking water contamination to which they may have been exposed.

(d) Circulation of Health Survey-

(1) FINDINGS- Congress makes the following findings:

(A) Notification and survey efforts related to the drinking water contamination described in this section are necessary due to the potential negative health impacts of these contaminants.

(B) The Secretary of the Navy will not be able to identify or contact all former residents and former employees due to the condition, non-existence, or accessibility of records.

(C) It is the intent of Congress that the Secretary of the Navy contact as many former residents and former employees as quickly as possible.

(2) ATSDR HEALTH SURVEY-

(A) DEVELOPMENT-

(i) IN GENERAL- Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the ATSDR, in consultation with a well-qualified contractor selected by the ATSDR, shall develop a health survey that would voluntarily request of individuals described in subsections (a), (b), and (c) personal health information that may lead to scientifically useful health information associated with exposure to trichloroethylene (TCE), PCE, vinyl chloride, and the other contaminants identified in the ATSDR studies that may provide a basis for further reliable scientific studies of potentially adverse health impacts of exposure to contaminated water at Camp Lejeune.

(ii) FUNDING- The Secretary of the Navy is authorized to provide from available funds the necessary funding for the ATSDR to develop the health survey.

(B) INCLUSION WITH NOTIFICATION- The survey developed under subparagraph (A) shall be distributed by the Secretary of the Navy concurrently with the direct notification required under subsections (a), (b), and (c).

(e) Use of Media To Supplement Notification- The Secretary of the Navy may use media notification as a supplement to direct notification of individuals described under subsections (a), (b), and (c). Media notification may reach those individuals not identifiable via remaining records. Once individuals respond to media notifications, the Secretary will add them to the contact list to be included in future information updates.

 

The Real Reason For Shipyard Closure

Mare Island was closed in 1996 because there was no place for it to put its sewage except into rail cars and this cost a lot of money. It was also being done under the cover of a BIG LIE and so it could not go on forever. Mare Island had a local sewage treatment plant called the Industrial Waste Treatment Plant (IWTP). All of the sewage generated on Mare Island from toilets, water fountains, sinks, cafeterias, and much industrial waste water along with hazardous waste flowed there and the total flow was about 2,000,000 gallons per day in 1988. This treatment plant consisted of approximately 2,225,000 gallons capacity of uncovered ponds in the ground and open treatment tanks. Mostly the capacity was in the form of unlined ponds or impoundments in the ground. At the IWTP the daily liquid shipyard sewage and waste was treated to change or dilute toxic metals or to dilute hazardous waste water so that everything could be pumped out of Mare Island to the City of Vallejo Public Waste Water Treatment Plant. This system worked well for a long time. But increasing regulatory stringency caught up with the Shipyard and the State of California began to make things difficult for Mare Island about the IWTP starting in 1985. Finally, in 1987 the State of California issued a Cease and Desist order against the IWTP forcing it to stop discharge to sewage to Vallejo. This left the Shipyard with no where to put its sewage. Railcars, a great many railway tank cars were resorted to. The total waste stream from Mare Island was put into emergency mode. The cafeterias were closed and other sources of wastewater discharge were turned off. Everything possible was done to reduce the total daily Mare Island sewage flow to lower the cost of disposal of Mare Island sewage. This was because the only way to get rid of the waste in the rail cars was to dispose of it to a company whose business was to dispose of hazardous waste. This meant that the Navy had to pay a per gallon charge, which even if it was $0.10 per gallon would amount to at least $10,000.00 per day plus processing and transportation costs. My estimate is that the total disposal costs were at least $50,000.00 per day if not more.

The main problem with Mare Island sewage which was the main concern of the State of California was the Chromium Acid, cyanide and other toxic metals and chemicals it contained. Chromium Acid is the second most powerful human carcinogen and it is widely used in chrome plating, aluminum anodizing and in precision cleaning of piping among other things. Mare Island put a lot of Chromium Acid into its sewage. Chromium Acid is also called chrome 6 and has the chemical symbol Cr6+. The federal limit on discharge of this material to a sewer is 5 Parts Per Million (PPM). This is an incredibly small amount and in everyday terms it is about one grain of salts worth of chromium Acid in a sink full of water. But, there is another form of chrome called chrome 3 or Cr3+. If the Chromium Acid Chrome six can be changed into Chrome 3 then the discharge limit becomes much greater being 5,000 PPM. And this is what was done at the IWTP. The IWTP had massive tanks of a gas which converts Chrome 6+ to Chrome 3+ and leaves only sulfur as a residue. Mare Island sewage was treated and diluted so that it could conveniently be sent to Vallejo. There is no discharge limit on sulfur so there should be no problem except that federal and state law mandate that a hazardous waste must be left as it is unless one has a permit to treat it and the Mare Island IWTP had no such permit. So when Mare Island converted its sewage with its in excess of 5 PPM Chrome 6 into Chrome 3 it was in violation of state and federal law and this is what tripped them up. The amount of chrome 3 being sent to the Vallejo treatment plant was simply too great to be reasonable. The simple reason for this is that at that time there were virtually no industrial processes that use chrome 3.

The Mare Island sewage flow was hazardous waste and it was also sewage. Mare Island secretly treated it so that it could be discharged to the Vallejo Public Sewage Treatment Plant and did this for years, but they got caught and then they had to ship all the sewage off the Shipyard in railroad cars at great cost in money and effort. This is the real reason the shipyard was closed.

Here are some links to the original source documents in PDF format concerning operation and closure of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard IWTP:

1. State of California Letter to Shipyard of December 1987 (See paragraphs 2.b and 3.c.). This letter effectively mandates a shutdown of the IWTP. Note that page 2 is missing. This page describes the IWTP and was not present on the site where the document was found.

California Letter of 12/1987

2. State of California Letter to Shipyard of May, 1989, "Cease and Desist IWTP Operations".

California Letter of 5/1989

3. Description of connection between the IWTP and the City of Vallejo Public Sewage Treatment System: (See Paragraph "Industrial Wastewater" on page 3.11.-3.

IWTP Connection to Vallejo

4. Mare Island Naval Shipyard Final Remediation Plan. Contains the history of the IWTP and the history of Mare Island Pollution Discharge. (See Page 2-11)

IWTP History and Pollution Discharge

5. IWTP Discharge Table showing the IWTP was in operation as early as 1972 and the types of Hazardous Wastes that were mixed with sewage there:

IWTP Discharge Table

6. This is a State of California Letter to the Shipyard from 1970. It demonstrates there was no IWTP as late as 1970 and that an IWTP was planned:

Discharge to the Strait in 1970

The question is, "What happened to all that waste in the rail cars?" It was sewage and it was hazardous waste. Under federal and state law pertaining to hazardous waste it had to be described on a legal document called the Uniform Manifest. All hazardous waste that is shipped anywhere has to have a manifest. There were many thousands of manifests for all the sewage shipped off of the shipyard after the IWTP was closed. All hazardous waste must be analyzed and accurately described on the manifest. But there is a small exemption in California environmental law which was THE BIG LIE used to describe all these railroad tank cars and this is "bilge water". Bilge water is water that comes from the bilges of ships. It must be manifested, but under federal law its not considered to be a federal hazardous waste. It's a waste under California law and must be manifested for shipment inside the state, but if its disposed of outside the state its not considered to be hazardous waste once its outside the state. It's also about the cheapest waste there is to get rid of. But then it wasn't bilge water. It was raw sewage mixed with hazardous waste that had been improperly treated and diluted. When it got to its final destination it was not treated as it should have been treated. Bilge water is easy and so it was treated easy. It was poured into massive evaporation ponds in the Utah desert. There it did what sewage does when its left to sit. It began to rot and give off highly poisonous hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg) gas. Eventually things got so bad the entire facility had to be evacuated. Then the Navy was sued. What exactly happened as the result of this lawsuit I don't know. It would be very interesting to find out. The story I heard is that the waste was attributed to the bilges of the top secret submarine U.S.S. Parche and the liquid supposedly contained the urine of the sailors. Because this submarine was covered by a Presidential Executive Secrecy Order at that time it was not possible to dispute this false claim.

What happened to all the rail cars? One of the main jobs of the post shipyard closure environmental cleanup detachment (SSPORTS) was to clean the rail cars and certify them to be clean. I don't know how many there were but I know it took over two years to clean them all.

The Building 101 Radium Nightmare

One of the little lingering secrets of the Shipyard that was finally cleaned up immediately after closure in 1996 was the fact that the long lost Radium Dial painting shop had been the upper floor of building 101. This means that building 101 was actually a source of two hazards, one from the plating shop, and the other from all of the radium paint that had been splashed around the place and absorbed into the old wood. Building 101 was taken care of first thing after the Shipyard closed. The upper floor was completely stripped of all of its flooring, walls and floors. Electrical wood routers were then used to carve out all of the places in the window sills that had been used by painters to take advantage of the good sunlight. Today the upper floor of building 101 is an empty shell from one end to the other. The original flooring was replaced with the most extraordinary redwood planks salvaged from the Oakland Supply Depot, but only partially because the supply of wood was not sufficient to cover the vast square footage. But the carved out sections of the window sills are still there giving their mute testimony to all of the shipyard workers, engineers and the Westinghouse contractors and Naval Reactors representatives who were there to breathe in all that radium and radon for all those years.

There is regular email update about things in general about old Mare Islanders sent to persons who worked at Mare Island by Mr. Allen Green. If you want to get on this list here is his email address:

aalgreen@napanet.net

A Picture of the Shipyard Commander's Entrance to His Office As it is Today:

This is a Close up of the Doors:

No one on the Shipyard was Immune, Protected or Unaffected. Some were Poisoned more and some less. Some were poisoned with one cancer causer and some with another; but all were well dosed from the highest to the lowest.

Website Author Communication and Comments

If you are interested in making comments or suggestions for improvements about this web site, or if you want to submit a statement or evidence you can direct them to me using this link:

Email to The Author

I have not named myself because who I am or what I am does not matter. The issues are what happened and how much of it can be proved. Knowing who I am, what I am, or what I was way back when matter nothing to the issues of this web site. All of the available evidence has been provided for download here and there is nothing else. It's your job now to download it, to consider everything, to educate yourself where necessary and to do all the research required so that you can make up your mind about what happened and what, if anything, you should do about it. As for me, I've done my part and this site is it. To the maximum extent humanly possible I've avoided the naming of persons and the use of opinion or speculation. If you find some error or have some point of strong disagreement please write to me about it. I'll look into what you say and if you are right the matter will be promptly corrected.

Before writing to me please consider these things:

1. It is unlikely I will be able to respond to you and provide you with a reply email or an acknowledgement.. If your suggestion is one that will further the understanding of the contents of this site it will be incorporated as time and its importance permits.

2. Before writing please take the time to download the source documents provided and study them. Don't just take my word for anything. Trust your own good judgment. These valuable documents have been obtained a very great cost and so you should take the few minutes required to download and then study them. Then, if you have a question whose answer will benefit others, please submit it and the answer will be incorporated into the web site as time permits.

3. If you do nothing you will likely get nothing. The purpose of this web site is to provide you with sufficient evidence and argument to allow you to make an intelligent decision about these matters for yourself. If you believe you have been injured then you must do something about it and take action on your own behalf. If you think a letter needs to be written then write it and send it. Just assume that no one else is going to do anything to help you.

4. The Author of this web site has no responsibility to report anything to anyone except as his personal conscience directs him to do. If you want to know about any forthcoming developments that may occur keep coming back here. If anything important changes it will be prominently posted. If you want things to move faster then you should write more letters to your Congressman, Senators, I.F.P.T.E. International Union Representatives, and anyone else you think can help you get your legal rights. Try to get the media involved and do anything you can to get this site noticed for your own good.

5. I believe that Navy officials at the highest level of authority know all about the Mare Island Plating Shop and what it did. It seems to me they were content for you to know nothing about it. If you think I'm wrong about this please email me the documents that show me wrong and they will be promptly posted.

6. If you think I believe there has been some kind of evil web of conspiracy you are unproven and it doesn't matter much given the horrendous damage done. What I believe happened is that the a lot of smart people made a lot of stupid decisions while they were under a lot of pressure to produce results. They were distracted by a relatively small amount of money and did not see the little people who were actually paying the price. This happens all the time. The decision makers became hardened and cruel, and over time got in too deep to get out. The point is that YOU ARE EMPTY HANDED. Whatever reason you want to apply to this cannot change the fact that many decisions were made by many people having the final result that you knew nothing about these things until now. If you want to call this a conspiracy you are welcome to do so, and if you want to think otherwise go ahead and do it. The point is that right now you are empty handed and you must take action on your own behalf if you want things to be otherwise.

7. If you were one of the decision makers responsible for this outrage and crime against humanity of mass robbery and mass murder and you have grown a real human conscience between then and now and you want to make things right before you meet your Creator and Judge I invite you to write a statement whose contents will assist the injured in obtaining their legal rights and entitlements. Just have it notarized and then send it by email and it will be promptly posted. Just keep on thing in mind if you decide not to write: You cannot be an accessory to murder, even murder hidden by corporate secrecy and the bankrupt belief in the diffusion of responsibility, and not expect to receive the full and complete final Reward given to a murderer when your day of Judgment comes. It is this Principle that has made this web site necessary because for me to remain silent about the things I know would be to put me into your company and then I would share your indescribably horrible eternal fate.

8. With the exception of the official documents and other papers provided here by illustration and for download the contents of this site are entirely the personal opinions of the Author. If you believe that you have been personally injured by any statement of opinion please make this known as promptly as possible and any necessary changes will be made. Do not rely upon this site for medical or legal advice. It is not the intention of this site to offer medical or legal advice. The Author makes claim to any and all federal and state laws, rules and regulations protecting whistle blowers and for participating in protected union activity. You use this web site at your sole risk and responsibility. In visiting this web site you agree to hold me harmless and that I am not liable for any damages, physical or emotional, or of any other kind or type which may be the outcome or result from your visiting this site.

9. If you think this site needs some editing, some simplification, some deletion of repetitive material or spell checking you are right. Nothing is perfect least of all me. If you are an experienced web site designer and you want to fix this place up for free please let me know as soon as you can.

10. If you examine this site, and you download and examine the documents; and then after considering everything you believe the main premise of this web site is valid, and willful deliberate mass murder, victimization, and maiming has been done by the United States Navy, you cannot in good conscience, do nothing about it and remain innocent. You are under a moral obligation to help your injured brothers and sisters become informed and obtain their legal rights. This site is not a form of entertainment. It's purpose is to confer a moral obligation onto everyone who visits it..

The Absolutely Phony NAVY CORE VALUES Confidence Swindle

Thank you for having gotten this far. To end this site for now I'm sure you realize that the documents on this site are a irrefutable and direct contradiction, by the United States Navy of its so-called "Navy Core Values". The U.S. Navy promotes that it is a courageous pure organization that can be trusted because it is governed by a set of rock solid immutable core values that have always been and will never change. The Navy has an office whose sole job is to promote the lie that the Navy has core values including, honesty, integrity, courage and honor. There are publicity releases, posters, pamphlets; briefings are given and speeches by high ranking officers are made to public groups. It's all just a big confidence swindle promoted to deflect just criticism away from the Navy and to deflect people from critically observing that the Navy does one thing and says another.

The Navy resorts to a form of "human sacrifice" internally in order to put the fear of God into the ranks of the working people about its phony core values. I once had the opportunity to actually see this done. It was done with incredible craft. A young engineer was selected out and sent on assignment off of the shipyard to work odd hours at other various bases in the Bay Area. He was kept constantly busy. He was in a class of new engineers who were being trained for examinations to allow them to be promoted into a higher pay grade. He was kept busy working but the others in his class were sent to the classroom to prepare for the examination. Finally, one week before the examination, after his classmates had been provided with about three months of classroom training, he was brought back to the shipyard. I overheard his direct Supervisor counseling him privately. In these counseling sessions he was told that even though he had received no classroom training he was expected to take the examination and that if he did not pass it he would not be promoted. The day of the examination came and two independent witnesses discovered this poor guy had been cheating and was found to be in possession of a note card. He was terminated for "violating Navy Core Values".

I have no doubt that the Navy practices Core Values Human Sacrifice even today and will continue to do it.

My opinion, based on my experiences is that the documents on this web site demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that the very clever Navy Core Values program is nothing more than a confidence swindle that is a pure lie perpetrated for the purpose to allow the U.S. Navy to poison, lie, cheat and steal from those who have no defenses.

The simple fact of the matter is that if the Navy truly believed in its phony core values then every person who ever worked at Mare Island, his or her successors and/or heirs would have received an official Navy letter by now telling them of the exposure to hexavalent chromium discharged from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard Metal Plating shop. Their continued refusal to do this, as is required by Federal Law, is a perfect demonstration that they themselves believe their core values are manufactured merely for the consumption and manipulation of people they believe to be dumb suckers.

If you would like to view some of the Navy Core Values Propaganda Lies for yourself you can use these links:

"Conduct ourselves in the highest ethical manner in all relationships with peers, superiors and subordinates; Be honest and truthful in our dealings with each other, and with those outside the Navy"

The Official U.S. Navy Core Values Website

The U.S. Navy Core Values Survey and Plan for Future Action

Even More Core Values With Psychology

If you want to know even more about the tremendous depth and breadth of this BIG LIE just do a Google search on Navy Core Values.

THE MURDERER UNTIED STATES NAVY IS CORDIALLY INVITED TO PUT SOME FLESH ON THE DEAD ROTTING BONES OF ITS CONFIDENCE SWINDLE CORE VALUES SYSTEM. DO THE RIGHT THING, IDENTIFY THE PLATING SHOP VICTIMS, WIDOWS AND ORPHANS, CARE FOR THEM AND COMPENSATE THEM IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE FEDERAL LAW.

 

Reader Help Section

You can help get the message of this site out and help it get more dispersed on the Internet. The following list is a set of pages that contain links to this page. If you take a few minutes to randomly click on some of these pages you will increase their rating so that they get posted onto the Internet by the search engine robots faster. My plan is to have a page to match each and every U.S. Navy self-promotional propaganda page for people to see and examine before they make the (possibly fatal) decision to either join or become employed by the U.S. Navy. These are short low byte sites that load quickly and if you cannot do anything else please just click on a few of these pages when you find the time. You may save someone's life or their health with a few easy clicks. Thank you.

U.S. Navy Environmental Awards

America's Navy: It Murders Its Employees

Why Join The U.S. Navy?

U.S. Navy Perjury

Careers and Jobs - Nuclear Engineering - The Navy Will Poison You

 

A Note To People of Faith

A Note to People of Faith

End - Thank you for Visiting