KQED’s recent article “State Regulators Scrutinize Climate Plan for Controversial Richmond Housing Development” explores many of the issues that environmental and community activists have been raising for years around the heavily contaminated AstraZeneca site on the Richmond shoreline. The Sierra Club is one of several groups suing based on the inadequacy and injustice of the current cleanup plan for the site, which doesn’t sufficiently account for sea-level and ground-water rise. KQED reports that the site’s new project manager for the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has asked for greater analysis of the cleanup plan, based on up-to-date sea level rise projections. This is promising news, but we will be watching closely to make sure that revisions to the plan are based on the best available science and the strictest protections for the health of residents in this city already overburdened by environmental injustice.
January 25, 2023