When Bert Bowers heard that a radioactive “deck marker” had been found near newly built homes at San Francisco’s former Navy shipyard, he knew immediately what the object was and why it mattered.

After the Sept. 7 discovery, government officials told the public not to worry. The deck marker, they said, wasn’t a big deal. It emitted a “relatively low level of radiation,” according to a California Department of Public Health statement. The Navy echoed that assurance, describing it as “a historical, low-level deck marker.” Multiple agencies said it posed no health risk to people in the homes, and Lennar Corp., the developer of the homes, said it trusted the agencies.

But Bowers, who spent eight years working at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard as a radiation safety technician and supervisor, had a different reaction. Part of his job was to find and dispose of archaic radioactive devices like the deck marker — decades-old glass and metal objects filled with glow-in-the-dark paint that contains radium.

“That’s a screaming-hot source,” he said in a recent interview.

And to find one in a developed area — a neighborhood populated by new homes, families and pets?

“Outrageous and crazy,” Bowers said. “That’s just insane.”

Between the 1940s and ’60s, the Navy used thousands of small radioactive devices to light up the shipyard at night. A deck marker looks a bit like a radioactive Oreo — a disc about the size of a silver dollar, less than an inch thick, with a circle of luminescent material sandwiched between a metal backing and a transparent cover. It would easily fit in a pocket or be hidden in a few inches of soil. It looks harmless, except for a warning stamped on the back: “Poison Inside.”

Each deck marker contained radium, a radioactive element that made them glow in the dark. Radium is highly toxic. It emits energy that can penetrate bodies, damage cells and cause cancer. When inhaled or ingested, it’s dangerous in extremely small amounts, seeking out and irradiating bones. Even decades ago, in a more lenient and careless era of radiation safety, the Navy required deck markers to be stored in a lead-lined box and cautioned workers not to carry the box for more than eight hours a day.

By then, radium was known to be deadly. It had probably killed the scientist who discovered it in 1898, Marie Curie. And it killed some of the “Radium Girls,” female factory workers in the early 20th century who painted the dials of watches and other instruments with brushes dipped in radium paint. The form of radium in deck markers, radium-226, remains radioactive for thousands of years, decaying along the way into radon gas, also a carcinogen. The Synchrotron particle physics laboratory at Stanford University considers radium-226 to have “very high radiotoxicity” and places it in the same risk category as nuclear-bomb components like uranium and plutonium.

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Cleaning up radium is one of the biggest challenges at the former shipyard, a 500-acre Superfund waste site that San Francisco has been trying to decontaminate and transform into a housing development for almost 30 years. Cold War radiation experiments left behind a Pandora’s box of radioactive substances, and one Navy report estimates that when the base was still active, shipyard workers dumped at least 6,000 pounds of radium devices — deck markers and instrument dials — into one landfill.

Since the 1990s, Navy contractors have dug up hundreds of these buried radium objects and measured plumes of radon gas rising from the ground above them. The Navy estimated in 1993 that one area in the southwestern portion of the site, next to the water, contained 148,000 cubic feet of soil tainted with radium devices — a quantity of toxic dirt that would nearly fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.

The small size of the devices makes it possible for them to migrate from place to place “as the result of erosion, animal activity or future work activities at the site,” according to a 2003 Navy fact sheet. The devices can also crack, leaking radium into surrounding soil and concrete.

Wherever radium devices are found, they have to be carefully logged and removed, something Bowers did many times when he worked at the shipyard from 2002 to 2011. Bowers, 60, said he and his colleagues would wear special protective gear and extract the objects, placing them into a 55-gallon drum with other radioactive waste destined for disposal in a special landfill off-site. The technicians would then search the area around the deck marker to see if any radium had leached from the object and spread. Tainted concrete might have to be broken apart with jackhammers.

“You chase the radium,” Bowers said. “You chase it until you get it off.”

But there wasn’t supposed to be any radium worth chasing in the portion of the shipyard known as Parcel A, a 75-acre swath of land on a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay where 300 housing units have been completed and an additional 150 are under construction.

Bowers and his colleagues were told by the Navy that Parcel A was free of any radioactive contamination. The public was told this too, repeatedly, by every agency responsible for the safety of San Francisco residents at the shipyard: the city health department, the state health department, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy. The agencies declared the parcel clean and transferred it to the city in 2004, and today it’s a growing neighborhood of townhomes where children play in the grass and dogs chase tennis balls into the shrubs on the fringe of the development.

But in recent years, a scandal over faked radiation measurements has thrown the shipyard cleanup into turmoil and cast doubt on old assurances of safety. Starting in 2014, several people who had worked on the site, including Bowers, came forward as whistle-blowers, alleging fraud in the cleanup. They said the Navy’s main cleanup contractor, Tetra Tech, had cut corners to save money.

Bowers was once the chief radiation safety officer for Tetra Tech; the company fired him, he said, for pointing out violations and unsafe conditions. This year, two former Tetra Tech cleanup supervisors were sentenced to federal prison after admitting that they faked soil measurements to make the dirt appear clean, and an EPA review of Tetra Tech’s data found “a widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification, failure to perform the work” to specifications, or both.

Tetra Tech has denied wrongdoing, saying that Bowers and other whistle-blowers are lying and all problems were limited to a few “rogue” employees. But several investigations by federal agencies have confirmed some of the whistle-blowers’ claims, and the Navy has admitted that many of Tetra Tech’s measurements are unreliable and therefore none of the data can be trusted. This year the Navy agreed to retest all areas where Tetra Tech did work.

That plan excluded Parcel A, on the grounds that Tetra Tech was involved there in only a limited way, and it had long been declared clean. However, after Bowers and another whistle-blower said that problems might have extended to Parcel A, the state public health department agreed to rescan some portions of the parcel for radiation. This new survey, which began in July and is more than 90 percent complete, can detect only gamma radiation, ignoring non-gamma sources such as strontium-90, another bone-seeker, and plutonium-239, one of the most deadly elements on Earth. The state said it wasn’t going to scan the entire parcel, leaving out homes, businesses and other areas.

Public officials said last week that the discovery of the deck marker proves the rescanning process is working. They said the device didn’t pose a health risk, but released no detailed information. So The Chronicle asked for the state’s radiation readings of the device.

The data present a more complicated and troubling picture.

The risk from any radiation depends on the strength of the source, as well as distance and time: How far are you from the source, and how long are you exposed? This is why it’s particularly dangerous to ingest radioactive materials — once a particle is inside the body, there’s no distance or shielding, and it can remain there for a long time.

Agencies said the deck marker was far enough away from people to limit any exposure: about 50 yards from some homes, behind a fence and buried about 10 inches underground. After a Navy contractor removed the marker, the soil around it was scanned, and no additional contamination turned up.

For these reasons, experts told The Chronicle, it’s probably true that the object itself didn’t pose a risk to residents living up the hill from it.

But the state and the Navy went further, saying the deck marker was a “low-level” source, suggesting it couldn’t have produced a damaging dose of radiation. In fact, there’s enough radium in a single deck marker to substantially increase your cancer risk, if you ingest luminous material from a broken marker or get too close to an intact marker for too long a time.

“The risk to you is diminished by your distance from it, but the source is dangerous,” said Dan Hirsch, retired director of the nuclear policy program at UC Santa Cruz.

The state Department of Health statement said that when the deck marker was still buried about 10 inches underground, the dose to someone on the surface directly above it would have been .09 millirems per hour. That reading is 10 times above the natural “background” dose of radiation at the site.

For comparison’s sake, the statement said, a cross-country flight gives you a dose of 3.5 millirems, and a dental X-ray is 1.5 millirems.

These numbers, however, are misleading. While a flight and an X-ray are brief exposures, a radium deck marker emits radiation continually, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It means that if a home were built on top of a deck marker, the exposure could be more continuous, measured not in hours but in years.

The Parcel A deck marker, buried in 10 inches of soil, would give a dose of 788 millirems per year to someone directly atop it on the ground. That dose is the equivalent of 526 dental X-rays or 225 cross-country flights. The EPA safety limit for radiation at Superfund sites is just 12 millirems per year.

“What if there’s one of these (deck markers), or several of these, right underneath somebody’s bedroom?” Hirsch said. “And that’s what they haven’t even tested for.”

It turns out that 788 millirems per year isn’t even the maximum dose from the deck marker. Once the device was unearthed, the dose on contact with it was 3.4 millirems per hour. That hourly figure of 3.4 millirems translates into about 30,000 millirems annually — a level six times higher than what workers in nuclear power plants are legally allowed to receive in a year. So if a child had found the deck marker and taken it home, putting it on a nightstand or in a drawer, she could be getting a significant dose for hours, days, months, years.

The state said the deck marker contained 5.1 microcuries of radium. This is equal to a tiny, tiny amount — about five-millionths of a gram of radium. Because radium is so potent, this is still enough radioactivity to contaminate about 3,000 tons of soil above the EPA’s standard cleanup goal. That’s about 250 dump trucks of soil.

In the end, though, the properties of this one deck marker are less significant than the questions raised by its discovery. Its mere existence points to unknowns at a place that was supposed to be fully known. Government agencies said repeatedly that there weren’t any radiation concerns on Parcel A. But they missed a highly radioactive object. What else did they miss?

“There is a general feeling by the homeowners that we have been lied to,” said Linda Parker Pennington, who moved into a three-bedroom town house with her family in June 2015. “They need to regain our trust and that means more testing.”

Pennington, 63, has said she worries about her teenage son and the other neighborhood children who played in the grass and dirt on the parcel. Pennington and another Parcel A homeowner are now suing Tetra Tech and Lennar, saying they were kept in the dark about the allegations against Tetra Tech and that their property values have dropped due to the cleanup problems. Tetra Tech and Lennar have said the claims are baseless.

Even though the deck marker was found behind a fence, the area was still accessible, said Eileen David, 66, a painter who has rented studio space at the shipyard for more than a decade. Until two weeks ago, she said, the fence near the deck marker had a break in it, and she would regularly slip through the gap to feed a colony of feral cats. This month, she saw workers digging in the ground nearby, she said. Days later, when she returned to the spot, a new chain link fence had been erected, blocking the passage.

“When I read about the deck marker, I said, ‘Oh, my god, that’s where I’ve been feeding the cats,’” David said.

Asked to respond to David’s claim about the fence, Lennar said it doesn’t own the property where the deck marker was found, referring questions to the city’s development agency, the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, which still owns some pieces of Parcel A. The office couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

In written responses to questions, Lennar said it “has confidence that the California Department of Public Health is conducting thorough and exhaustive testing that is scientifically sound. None of the recent testing by CDPH has discovered anything that it has determined poses a health or safety risk.”

At least one agency has acknowledged that the discovery of the radioactive deck marker has wider implications. Dr. Tomás J. Aragón, the city’s Health Officer, wrote in an email to a lawyer representing some of the shipyard whistle-blowers: “We agree that the radioluminescent deck marker is a hazardous item.” Aragón said the city is going to hire “an independent health physicist” to assess the exposure risk from the deck marker. The city, he said, wants to know how the radioactive object got there, how it should affect future testing plans, and “what it means (are there more)?”

The EPA and Navy suggested in statements that more areas of Parcel A might need to be scanned now, though neither agency provided details. The EPA said it’s working with the state and the Navy “to determine how the site cleanup needs to be adjusted,” and the Navy is waiting for the state to “determine if additional tests could provide meaningful results.”

The extent of the problem on Parcel A may depend on how the deck marker got there in the first place. There are a few plausible scenarios. One is that the object was brought relatively recently from another section of the shipyard. Soil judged to be clean on one part of the site is sometimes used to backfill excavated areas in another part. If some of the backfill on Parcel A instead came from a dirty area, the deck marker, and possibly other kinds of contamination, could have become commingled with clean soil. Various site controls are supposed to prevent this from happening, but the data-faking scandal raises the possibility that these controls could have failed.

If the area where the deck marker was found hasn’t been backfilled, however, the object may have been there for 60 or 70 years, undisturbed until now. The Navy seemed to support this theory in a Q&A posted on its Hunters Point website, writing, “The deck marker was located at the bottom of the hill near the former entrance to the base, near an elevation similar to the historic surface during Navy use, and may have been lost or discarded.”

In the past few decades, according to cleanup reports, radium devices have sometimes been found scattered on the ground, by the waterline.

Bowers said he thinks it’s possible the deck marker has been there a long time. He heard a story about deck markers once, from a man who had worked at the shipyard during its Navy days. According to Bowers, the worker told him that the Navy would replace deck markers when they stopped glowing so brightly, when the high energy from the radium damaged compounds in the paint.

Something had to be done with the spent markers. So, the worker said, when he and others drove home at the end of a shift on the site’s perimeter roads, they would take some of the spent markers in their cars. The roads in those days would have gone into Parcel A, among other places. One by one, the workers would chuck the deck markers out the car window, like cigarette butts, Bowers said.

Jason Fagone and Cynthia Dizikes are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com, cdizikes@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@jfagone, @cdizikes