Contaminated Grounds

The PRGC has been at Lake Merced since 1934, when the Works Progress Administration, under the New Deal, built the fields for a national trap and skeet shooting championship that the San Francisco mayor’s office and chamber of commerce would attend.

The club has become much quieter than before, cherished less by a society often opposed to guns, though its current membership is at an all-time high with 400 members ranging from young tech-workers to 90-year-old retirees, according to Emery.

Ray Brooks, whose family has been shooting at the PRGC since its creation, told SFBay:

“As far back as I can remember was 1937. … There were no buildings over here. You could look all over these hills here. With the exception of the top of the hill behind Parkmerced, there was one house up there. There was nothing from 25th Avenue and Sloat to the beach. Nothing.”

Ray Brooks inside the clubhouse nearby the many skeet and trap ranges at the Lake Merced Pacific Rod & Gun Club Wednesday, November 19, 2014 | Photo by Jessica Christian

Brooks comes from a family of shooters and remembers his mother, father and grandfather participating in tournaments at the Lake Merced club, where he learned to shoot and trained to become an All-American trap and skeet shooter, eventually breaking world records.

Brooks said:

“They had big time championships and people from all over would come. … It’s evolved since then to what it is today.”

Today, the gun club faces eviction because of, at least officially, the more than 70 years of lead shot and clay targets made of asphaltic material its members shot into the lake and onto its shores, according to the SFPUC.

Given until Jan. 1, 2016 by another state agency, the SFPUC will have the remainder of the year after the club vacates to complete an estimated $22 million remediation of the grounds. The project will include the excavation and off-site disposal of 46,500 cubic yards of contaminated soil.

Steven Ritchie, SFPUC assistant general manager for water, said:

“It compares to the cleanup of another gun club that’s roughly the same size down in the Peninsula that we owned as well. … That one ended up costing $25 million.”

The City made its first attempt to combat the soil’s toxicity in 1985, when 128 tons of lead pellets and other fragments were removed from the lake, with levels exceeding federal and state standards.

Tim Colen served on the Lake Merced Task Force, an organization he helped found in 1999 to restore the lake. Colen told SFBay:

“They got suction dredges and dredged out lake sediments. … Hundreds of tons of lake sediments had accumulated decades of lead buckshot, and they remediated some of the onshore soils that were contaminated with lead and some of the soils were contaminated with lead skeets.”

The gun club switched to steel or bismuth shot in 1994 and biodegradable targets in 2000, but the damage had already been done. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board’s San Francisco Bay Region estimated that the club had deposited 27 tons of lead into the lake every year they used the toxic shot.

Emery said:

“The steel shot that we shoot now doesn’t fall into the lake, it falls onto the property. It’s thought of as the green technology for the least harmful way to shoot trap and skeet.”

In 2012, an SFPUC study revealed from samples on a majority of the property that the potential health risks were acceptable for an infrequent or occasional visitor. But, the lead and “to a lesser extent” arsenic from shot — alongside a pollutant from clay targets known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — exceeded acceptable risk levels.

Ritchie said:

“The PUC did an investigation of the lead shot that was in Lake Merced around 2000. But it never investigated what was on the property.”

The study propelled the situation to where it is now, with remediation efforts planned for the soil above the shoreline. The lake water itself will be untouched, according to the SFPUC, since contaminants are not leaking into the lake.

Of course, the efforts will mean that the gun club will have to leave the property. The question for the group now stands as to whether they will be able to return.