The U.S. Navy is drastically understating the severity of the ongoing environmental scandal at its former shipyard in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood, an official with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared in newly released documents.

The biggest redevelopment project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake, with 12,000 planned housing units as well as millions of square feet of office and retail space, transformation of the former warship repair base and nuclear weapons testing laboratory—an EPA Superfund site contaminated with industrial and radioactive pollution—has largely been on hold since 2016, when the EPA halted land transfers while a fraud scandal could be unraveled.

Workers with Tetra Tech, a Pasadena-based firm with a history of winning government contracts, first came forward beginning in 2012 with allegations that the cleanup had been faked on the orders of higher-ups at the company.

A review of Tetra Tech’s data, conducted last year by other contractors hired by the U.S. Navy and first published by Curbed SF, found that as much as 49 percent of the company’s work had signs of manipulation or outright falsification and could not be trusted.

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However, an independent review by the EPA found that the Navy dramatically understated the scope of the problem. According to the EPA, as much as 97 percent of the cleanup data is unreliable and must be retested, John Chestnutt, manager of the EPA’s local Superfund Division, wrote in a December 27 letter.

“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 [cleanup] requirements were met, or both,” Chestnutt wrote.

Chestnutt’s letter was obtained and published Monday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group based in the Washington, D.C., area.

The EPA’s current review only covered about 40 percent of the base. However, the EPA’s findings echo criticism of the Navy’s handling of the scandal from environmental watchdog groups and neighborhood advocates.

Tetra Tech first admitted to providing false soil samples in 2014, but was allowed to continue working after blaming the problem on low-level employees and submitting other workers to “ethics training,” excuses and solutions the Navy appeared ready to accept until more whistleblowers came forward alleging more widespread and systemic fraud—allegations that have now been sustained.

“What makes these findings so remarkable is that the Navy was on notice for years that it had a major data meltdown on its hands yet is still trying to cook the books,” said Jeff Ruch, PEER’s executive director. “The Navy created an environmental nightmare on this stretch of the San Francisco Bay but instead of cleaning it up has spent the past several years compounding it.”

The Navy created an environmental nightmare on this stretch of the San Francisco Bay but instead of cleaning it up has spent the past several years compounding it.

Derek Robinson, the Navy’s program manager for Hunters Point, did not respond to an email or a telephone message seeking comment.

Michele Huitric, a spokesperson at the local branch of the EPA, did not offer comment to Curbed SF. In a statement issued to the San Francisco Examiner Monday, Huitric said that the EPA, which is responsible for overseeing the Navy’s cleanup of the shipyard, is “pleased” that the Navy will be “resampling the impacted parcels.”

The Navy is supposed to begin retesting contaminated shipyard land sometime this summer. No timeline or start date for that work has been publicly released.

According to Ruch, the shipyard scandal is “unfolding into the biggest case of eco-fraud in U.S. history.” Only the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which the automaker sold 500,000 cars designed to cheat the Clean Air Act, can compare, Ruch told Curbed SF.

The shipyard is divided into alphanumeric parcels. In a review of the work on Parcel B, the Navy found issues with 15 percent of the data collected. On Parcel G, the Navy recommended 49 percent of the data be resampled.

But according to a “technical team including national experts in health physics, geology, and statistics” assembled by the EPA, 90 percent of the data on Parcel B is untrustworthy. On Parcel G, 97 percent of the data is “suspect,” according to the EPA.

Tetra Tech workers falsified data in a variety of ways. These include pulling soil samples from an area known to be clean—the site of a former movie theater—and passing them off as soil from areas known to be dirty; running scanners too quickly to detect contamination; faking chain-of-custody records; and faking results at on-site testing laboratories.

Together, those two parcels comprise about 40 percent of the base’s land area. According to plans filed by FivePoint, the developer of the SF Shipyard, those parcels are the planned future homes for the area’s densest residential development and the core of a retail area.

FivePoint is closely associated with Miami-based homebuilding giant Lennar Urban, which in turn has close ties to the local Democratic Party power structure in San Francisco.

The development behemoth’s regional vice president, Kofi Bonner, is a former aide to Willie Brown, San Francisco’s former mayor. And Brown is a principal in Golden Gate Global, an investment fund that’s luring overseas investors to sink capital in the shipyard project in exchange for visas.

California’s two U.S. senators are part of the same San Francisco-based power circle: former state attorney general Kamala Harris is a Brown associate who served as city district attorney. And senior U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is a former San Francisco mayor.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, “we’re not seeing California’s or even San Francisco’s delegation up in arms about this,” PEER’s Ruch noted. “San Francisco’s members of Congress are very well placed. They could enact revenge. They could force hearings.”

“You would think at the head of the line of aggrieved parties would be the U.S. Navy, but they don’t appear to be aggrieved,” he added. “There are no consequences.”

In a statement emailed to Curbed SF, Taylor Griffin, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents most of San Francisco in Congress, said Pelosi and her staff “continue to closely monitor” the situation, and has been in “close touch” with both the EPA and Navy.

“Public health and safety remains our top concern, while working to ensure the timely delivery of long-awaited housing and jobs when the cleanup is completed,” Griffin wrote.

Ironically, under embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, cleaning Superfund sites has been a stated priority—and a source of rare praise for the Trump Administration from environmental advocates, who have credited Pruitt with pushing private companies to perform “aggressive, accelerated cleanups,” as the Washington Post reported in January.

[M]uch of the $1 billion in taxpayer money spent on cleaning up the shipyard has gone to waste.

Meanwhile, the fraud means that much of the $1 billion in taxpayer money spent on cleaning up the shipyard has gone to waste—and Tetra Tech, the contractor responsible for the faked data, has largely escaped punishment.

The company, which posted profits in excess of $350 million last year, managed to escape paying a $7,000 fine levied on it by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on appeal.

Tetra Tech is also a subcontractor on a $1.4 billion work arrangement with the Department of Energy to clean up pollution at Los Alamos in New Mexico—the historic home of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb (which was shipped in secret to Hunters Point, where it was loaded onto a ship for delivery to the Pacific). Critiques of that arrangement have fallen on deaf ears at the Department of Energy, which stated that Tetra Tech would remain involved.

Tetra Tech has yet to comment publicly on the findings. However, the company appears to be preparing for a leadership shift—and to compensate departing leaders.

According to SEC filings, in March, company shareholders approved a severance plan for Tetra Tech executives. For the next two years, executives “terminated by the company without ‘cause’” are eligible for “lump sum cash severance payments,” including salary, bonuses, and “full vesting of outstanding unvested stock options.”