Firm accused of fraud in Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup fires back in defense

The company accused of fraud in the $1 billion environmental cleanup at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard aggressively defended itself Tuesday, its executives contending the work was done strictly by the book and saying the firm would pay for a retesting of the property.

In a letter to Laura Duchnak, the Navy’s director of base closures, Tetra Tech CEO Dan Batrack stated, “In light of a barrage of recent negative and misleading media reports, Tetra Tech is compelled to defend itself and its work at Hunters Point.

“Our company has sought to follow all the required standards and protocols and to operate in a thorough, honest and professional manner to provide testing and clean-up services as required by our contract,” Batrack said. “We are proud of our high standards and professionalism on this contract, and all the work we perform for clients. Equally important, we have worked to make this site, and all sites where Tetra Tech works, safe for community members and residents.”

Batrack said Tetra Tech would allow the Navy to select an independent contractor to retest the property for contaminants and would pay for the work. It said the testing would take “one to two months.”

“While there has been wild speculation regarding the data collected at the site, we believe that any concerns can be directly addressed by actually retesting and analyzing the areas in question,” he said. “We want the Hunters Point community and the Navy to know that Tetra Tech stands by its work at Hunters Point.”

Tetra Tech’s claim contradicts recent statements by both the Navy and the Environmental Protection Agency, which are responsible for overseeing the cleanup of the former shipyard, home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1946 to 1969.

On Jan. 30, the Navy issued a preliminary report compiled by five outside consultants that concluded nearly half of the data Tetra Tech had collected from the Superfund site was flawed. The data include samples collected mostly between 2006 and 2012 from 300,000 cubic yards of soil, 20 buildings, 30 former building sites and 28 miles of storm drains.

In April, an environmental watchdog group released a Dec. 27 letter written by John Chesnutt, manager of the EPA’s local Superfund Division, which stated that as much as 97 percent of Tetra Tech’s cleanup data from two parcels on the site was found to be suspect and should be retested.

“The data analyzed demonstrate a widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification, failure to perform the work in a manner required to ensure (the EPA’s approval) requirements were met, or both,” Chesnutt stated.

But on Tuesday, William Brownlie, chief engineer for Tetra Tech, said the Navy’s report on the data collection was flawed. He said Tetra Tech is “having a difficult time understanding the EPA’s comments because there is not a lot of information they provided to understand what they were looking at.”

As for the review conducted by the Navy’s five consultants, Tetra Tech “disagrees with the method they used.” He said the conditions at the shipyard are “non-homogenous and variable,” so that soil samples taken from the same area could have different chemical compositions. To conclude that inconsistency in soil samples represented “falsification” doesn’t make sense, he said.

The Navy mothballed the facility in 1974, and the city has been working ever since to redevelop it. Current plans call for over 10,500 housing units, 300 acres of open space, and a diverse collection of buildings housing everything from a hotel to schools to office space to retail to research-and-development facilities. So far, 309 homes have been completed and another 138 are under construction.

The is the first time Tetra Tech, an environmental engineering company with a market capitalization of $2.85 billion based in Pasadena, has responded to allegations from whistle-blowers, the Navy and the EPA.

San Francisco Supervisor Malia Cohen, who grew up near the shipyard in the Bayview neighborhood, said she is skeptical of Tetra Tech’s claims, but “we would absolutely accept payment for a third party to retest the soil.”

Cohen will hold a hearing on the matter on May 14 at the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee and said she hopes Tetra Tech will be there to answer questions.

“It’s curious that 30 years into the cleanup of the shipyard, and after years of allegations, whistle-blowing and public outrage, that Tetra Tech is now claiming that they did nothing wrong,” she said. “We will not accept a revisionist history of what has been established: Under Tetra Tech’s supervision, tests were falsified.”

Attorney David Anton, who represents some of the whistle-blowers, said “the idea that Tetra Tech did everything perfectly well has turned out to be dramatically untrue.”

He said Tetra Tech’s offer to retest the sample is something the company is legally obligated to do — not a generous offer. He also said that the retesting should include the entire property — including Parcel A, the hilltop area where hundreds of people have bought condominiums.

“It sounds like Tetra Tech is trying to ram through a hasty evaluation of Hunters Point, whereas it has to be done carefully and well,” he said. “We are looking at a decade of fraud — I find it hard to believe that a careful examination of that can be done in a couple of months.”