Moments after he landed in Los Angeles for his son’s wedding last year, Gilbert “Kip” Wyand said he vomited a gallon of blood in the airport parking lot. Two months later, in May, Wyand was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia — a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow that the National Cancer Institute says can be caused by radiation exposure.
But the next month, as his son tried to make sense of his illness, he stumbled upon a newly published Navy report, outlining efforts to address radioactive materials that have contaminated the now-closed Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California for decades. The Navy, along with the VA and California’s health and toxicity agencies, say the levels of contamination at the former shipyard are currently low and pose no public health hazards. The site now houses one of the world’s largest container terminals.
The Navy has made similar safety claims about the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. The fraud was made public in 2018 only after the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The group obtained EPA documents that flagged a “widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification.”
