The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (25 page)

He put the rockfish meat into a cooler built into the whaler’s side, flipped the carcass over the side, and wiped his hands on his pants again. “You know, I was always a little uneasy about eating the bottom fish around here. But I think it’s okay. No way am I eating the mussels though, man.” I understood his concern. We were fishing in the middle of America’s first and largest undersea nuclear waste dump.

ONE OCTOBER EVENING IN 1980, PETER AND TWO OTHER BIOLOGISTS
were cooking up some freshly caught rockfish and watching the news. Walter Cronkite came on. “Plutonium has entered the food chain,” he announced, with even more gravitas than usual. As he said it, the camera cut to an aerial shot of Southeast Farallon Island, panning right in on the roof of the house they were sitting in. The story had just broken, Cronkite reported, that a UC Santa Cruz biologist had discovered elevated levels of radiation in fish swimming among some of the 47,500 barrels of nuclear waste that the navy had dumped in a 540-square-mile area around the Farallones between 1946 and 1970. One fish registered ninety times the normal levels of plutonium, and another had five thousand times the “allowable” amount of radioactivity in its liver.

Dinner preparations came to a halt. Peter took the rockfish outside and fed it to a gull named Pukey.

The radioactive debris came from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco, home of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, and Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb. Hunters Point, in particular, had been so sloppy with its toxic byproducts that, since 1989 when it was declared a Superfund site, $338 million has been spent trying to clean it up. And the work continues.

Although no records of the clandestine dumping were kept, the navy has claimed that the drums contain “low level” radioactive waste, things like the carcasses of test animals, paint scraps, old clothing, tainted lab equipment, gloves, and uniforms. Later, however, it was let slip that approximately six thousand barrels contained “special waste,” a euphemism for very bad news. Plutonium and uranium were most likely present in this high-potency batch, as was cesium, which is less toxic than the other two but still not something you’d want to sprinkle on your breakfast cereal. Even the “low level” stuff was known to contain phenols, cyanides, mercury, beryllium, tritium, strontium, thorium, and radioactive lead.

Back in the early, heady A-bomb building days, no one really understood what kind of poisons they were dealing with—it didn’t help that even lethal doses of radiation were quiet and invisible and undetected by human senses. Attitudes were heart-breakingly nonchalant. Also, much of the work at places like Los Alamos and Hunters Point was conducted beneath such a cloak of secrecy that most of the staff were unaware of what was underfoot. A woman named Janie Gale, who worked in the Hunters Point nuclear lab’s library in 1948, outlined her degree of awareness in a newspaper interview: “They’d say ‘Oh, we had a spill today.’ I didn’t know what a spill was. I had no idea there was anything toxic at the shipyard. I never heard the word ‘decontamination.’ It was a shipyard and they repaired the ships, I thought.”

They were repairing the ships, all right. In the late forties, at least sixty warships that had been used for atomic target practice in the South Pacific were towed back to Hunters Point for decontamination. After they were sandblasted and scoured with chlorinated lime, flushed with detergent, and doused with solvents, a dozen were still so hot they were deemed beyond hope, and plans were made to secretly sink them far out at sea. Present on this roster of lost causes was the USS
Independence,
a ten-thousand-ton aircraft carrier, one of the navy’s largest. In 1955 it was quietly scuttled in the Gulf of the Farallones.

Originally, the navy maintained that it was buried in a classified “safe” place four hundred miles offshore. But people claimed to have seen the ship going down right outside of San Francisco Bay, and sure enough, a precisely warship-sized and -shaped object was identified by sonar only twenty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. To make matters worse, before it was sunk it had been loaded up with
extra
nuclear waste, crammed from stem to stern with “mixed fission” products. Though no one can tell you exactly what “mixed fission” means, it’s likely to have included the most noxious remnants of the ship-cleaning operation. And some of the boats, including the
Independence,
had been so close to the mushroom clouds that their steel hulls had burst into flame.

There has never been a thorough study of the effects this nightmarish payload might have on the neighboring marine life, which includes at least five commercial fisheries. The most commonly cited reason was lack of cash. Poking around among the barrels was a multimillion-dollar proposition and the money never seemed to be available. Nor were the expensive submersibles required to do the job. Locating the barrels posed another problem. They’d been dumped in water three hundred to six thousand feet deep along the edge of the continental shelf, an area threaded with submarine canyons and gullies, sheer drop-offs, and crennelated rock. Recently, new sonar technologies helped pinpoint the nooks and crannies where the barrels lay, and in 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent a million dollars to hire a deepwater submersible named
Sea Cliff.
Three people could make the dive. Ed Ueber, head of the marine sanctuary and himself a former navy man, was one of them.

When I’d first heard about the nuclear waste, I’d been stunned. Surely, I thought, even back in the clueless forties and fifties they’d known that there were better spots for atomic dumping than one of the world’s most fertile patches of ocean, a place that the government
itself
—going back to 1909 when Theodore Roosevelt had first declared the area a refuge—had designated worthy of extraspecial protection.

The mystery of what was percolating its twenty-four-thousand-year half-life on the ocean floor at the Farallones grabbed me, and I’d sought out Ed Ueber to ask him what he’d seen down there. We met for beers at San Francisco’s Cliff House, sitting by the window on a day so clear you could make out Great Arch rock. Ueber, in his sixties, looked dapper in shirtsleeves and suspenders, and he gave off the warm vibe of your favorite college professor. He was completely, charmingly frank. In part, this might have had something to do with timing: he’d just stepped down from his post. Yet a survey of every interview he’d given on the issue proved him to be a straight-talking antibureaucrat by nature. He explained that despite pressure from environmental groups clamoring for an investigation, the government had shown a lack of enthusiasm for examining the barrels or the hot warship in any great detail. It was much easier to ignore them. (Anyway, it wasn’t like the fish were
glowing.
) Given how difficult it was to study the dump, there wasn’t enough data to prove that the marine life was dangerous to eat, or that the decaying barrels were anything to get alarmed about—and many parties preferred it that way. “We don’t know the basis of the situation, so we can’t say there’s a problem,” he said. “That’s like saying we don’t have mad cow disease because we haven’t tested for it.”

The
Sea Cliff
’s dive concentrated on a nine-hundred-square-meter area that was estimated to be the resting place for 3,600 of the barrels. As expected, the underwater terrain was rugged, and as Ueber and the others dropped down 2,900 feet, the sinister-looking barrels loomed into view, fringed with barnacles, sponges, sea cucumbers, and anemones, and colonized by rockfish, bursting with all the reclaimed glory of an artificial reef. The report later stated that the drums ranged from intact to “completely deteriorated,” imploded by the pressure of the depths. A photograph on the adjacent page showed a sablefish, a commercial species, nestled up against one of the barrels. When the picture became public, suddenly the Japanese market no longer wanted these fish. Damage to the sablefish industry was estimated at ten million dollars.

So it was not the biggest surprise to discover that since then, no large-scale studies had been undertaken. It didn’t help that the
Sea Cliff
had come up from one barrel site hot with radiation and had to go through decontamination itself. While there are no patently disastrous results in what’s been measured so far, only 15 percent of the dumping region has been examined. In some of the bottom-dwelling creatures that were sampled, background radiation levels were hundreds of times higher than normal. Furthermore, Ueber told me, the EPA had averaged those samples, combining readings from animals that lived closer to the barrels with those that didn’t, diluting much of the data.

Maybe dropping atomic waste at sea will prove to have no obvious or devastating effects; maybe the ocean manages to just gulp it all down like a sour-tasting pill. More likely, though, the underwater radiation has been trickling up through the food chain. “No one knows what’s in those barrels,” Ueber had reminded me. “
No one
.” The U.S. Geological Survey report on what is now known as the Farallon Islands Radioactive Waste Dump spells it out chillingly: “The potential hazard the containers pose to the environment is unknown.”

AS THE WEATHER TURNED, THE PERFECT WAVE BEGAN TO CURL ACROSS
Shark Alley in a way that caught Peter’s eye. “I’ve seen my wave,” he told me. “I’ve seen it five or six times.” I’d heard him discussing plans over the radio with Brown, who, unlike Scot, was also itching to tow into Mirounga Bay. We were experiencing the season’s sweetest surf, and all over Northern California the big-name, big-wave surfers were out trolling around, looking for epic and undiscovered breaks. Mavericks, the surf mecca just south of here, near Half Moon Bay, was “kind of like old school now,” Peter had concluded. “It’s done. It’s crowded. Let’s make sure we get our rides in before those guys get here.”

There had been a Farallon reconnaissance mission by a group of surfers in November 2000, during a week when Peter was off the island. It so happened that the perfect wave was showing off when they arrived, and as they were watching it, growing excited, Groth had approached and warned them against trying anything, mentioning that he’d seen sharks on that spot only an hour before. As a test, a surfboard was placed in the water. Almost instantly the board was hammered—and not gently. The surfers had left abruptly, the story had made the rounds, and, according to Peter, “Nobody from the outside has thought about it since.”

But the first-ride honors wouldn’t go unclaimed forever. As a sport, surfing was ever more competitive, the pressure to one-up the last guy was excruciating, and, furthermore, there were always the insiders to worry about. “Don’t scoop me on it man,” I’d heard Peter say to Brown, with a bit of an edge to his voice. After all, Brown and Nat were now spending more time out here during the fall than anyone. And they were both expert surfers.

“No man, you’re the first guy.”

But for the time being, Peter had his hands full on shore. An attempt to plug in a power washer had blown out the island’s electricity. And earlier, some bricks that were piled upstairs in the coast guard house had fallen through the floor to the kitchen below. Peter radioed in a cranky mood, grumbling about the sudden spate of emergency repairs. To be fair, lately things had been running more smoothly than usual, thanks to recent upgrades to the power system and the house, and a strict maintenance regime. Even in its finest shape, however, the island produced a laundry list of fix-it headaches: faulty valves, panels blown off by storms, sudden disasters involving plumbing, leaks, clogged filters, flashing warning lights on balky generators, contaminated fuel, corroded paint, busted pumps, snapped cables, endlessly malfunctioning batteries. There was propane to hook up and solar panels to be scraped of gull droppings and ozonator filters to be cleaned and a gravity tank, whatever that was, to be pumped. The houses got coated with a green algae that had to be blasted off with a high-pressure hose. After a day or two, the algae returned.

The breakdowns weren’t happening only on land. As the weather turned testier so did
Just Imagine,
and we were on each other’s nerves in a big way, locked in a battle of wills: I wanted to be here, and the yacht didn’t.

The list of busted and haywire systems grew daily. For about a week now, for instance, the battery voltage—the power source for running everything from the lights to the radio to the water heater—had been falling steadily for no apparent reason. Peter and I had spent time with various manuals trying to fix it, but we had failed. Whenever the voltage dipped below a certain level, a jarring alarm buzzer would erupt, usually in the middle of the night, at which point I had to start the engine immediately and run it until the battery had recharged. This always made me nervous, as if by powering up I might cause the boat to lunge forward, rip from its moorings, and plow into Tower Point, or thunder into the open water. So I tried to conserve power. I kept the internal lights off and wore my headlamp at all times. The only light that resolutely stayed on at night was the mast light, which would—in theory—prevent any vessel (squid fishing or otherwise) that had the notion to anchor in Fisherman’s Bay from ramming into the bulky, parked object blocking its entrance.

Meanwhile, the plumbing was still dishing up surprises. The red ooze had crept up through the kitchen sink while I was washing dishes, and the toilet malfunctioned at a clip that manners prevent me from describing in full detail. In an attempt to fix it, we had gone so far as to pry up one of the panels in the floor to get a better look at the septic system. Down in the gaping hole lay a snarl of rubber pipes in a nasty broth of greasy gray water—I supposed this was the bilge. I’d heard the word used in reference to marine waste products, and this qualified, to say the least. There was a dull film on the water’s surface, and it smelled like it had been sloshing around down there since approximately the era when the naked lady had been carved. Thankfully, Peter seemed to know his way around a septic system. I stood back as he reached purposefully into the maw. “Hmm. I think this is the blackwater line that isn’t pumping…,” he said, fingering an ominous-looking pipe. BBLLAMM! A valve exploded, sending a hose clamp shooting straight up into the air like a champagne cork and then clinking down into the murk. A violent hissing noise issued from the hose. “Oops,” he said. “Hope that wasn’t something we needed.” I looked in the bathroom and noticed that the toilet had flushed. But the victory was short-lived. Within the hour the head had vacuum-sealed itself shut, and when the seat cover was forced open, it spat up blackwater with
Exorcist
-like vigor.