Hunters Point Naval Shipyard sits on the southeast shoreline of San Francisco. The Navy operated it as a ship repair yard from 1945 to 1974, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund site profile. Before and after Navy ownership, the same waterfront hosted commercial and Navy-adjacent ship repair going back to the 1860s. Ship repair and overhaul work of this kind routinely involved cutting, ripping out, and replacing asbestos insulation, and the site today carries a documented environmental record of asbestos contamination.
What work happened at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard
Hunters Point was primarily a repair and overhaul yard, not a shipbuilding yard. A Forbes analysis of the yard’s Second World War record found that the yard built only four ships during the war while servicing roughly 209 others, including battle-damage repair on six aircraft carriers, seventeen destroyers, three submarines, and one landing craft (Forbes). The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the yard’s Dry Dock No. 4 describes the facility’s post-war role as providing “repair, overhaul, maintenance, and conversion services” for Navy capital ships and foreign vessels, citing work on the carrier USS Kitty Hawk among later examples (National Register nomination, Dry Dock No. 4).
This distinction matters for asbestos exposure. New construction installs insulation once, under controlled conditions. Repair and overhaul work means opening up machinery spaces, boiler rooms, and piping runs that are already in service, often on a tight turnaround, and tearing out old insulation to replace damaged sections or install new equipment. That kind of rip-out-and-replace work generates more airborne asbestos dust than first-time installation, and it exposed a wider range of trades to loose fiber, not just the pipefitters and insulators who installed the material originally.
Dry Dock No. 4, excavated beginning in early 1942 and commissioned June 19, 1943, was at the time the largest graving dry dock on the West Coast. It is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places (reference number 12000424) and remained in continuous use for docking Navy capital ships for repair and conversion work well after the Second World War (National Register nomination, Dry Dock No. 4).
The yard also carried out one unusual, specialized assignment. After the 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic tests at Bikini Atoll, the Navy towed contaminated target vessels, including the aircraft carrier USS Independence, to Hunters Point for decontamination and study (Naval History and Heritage Command / Naval Historical Foundation). Submarines and other support vessels from the same test series were processed at the yard as well, using wet sandblasting on hulls and acid-solution treatment on internal piping (Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory briefing book). That work led the Navy to establish the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at Hunters Point in 1946, formally chartered April 21, 1948, which operated on the site until 1969 (Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory briefing book).
Documented asbestos use at this yard
Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is not in our roster of ships tracked across fourteen Navy ship classes, because it was overwhelmingly a repair and overhaul yard rather than a construction yard for the classes in that dataset. Its asbestos record instead comes from the site’s environmental history rather than shipbuilding records.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s September 1994 Public Health Assessment for the site, then known as Treasure Island Naval Station, Hunters Point Annex, lists asbestos among the contaminants documented across the site’s soil, groundwater, surface water, air, and sediment, alongside metals, pesticides, radium-226, PCBs, PAHs, VOCs, and petroleum products (ATSDR Public Health Assessment, September 1994).
The EPA’s current Superfund site profile for Hunters Point states that native soil at the site contains naturally occurring asbestos, in addition to petroleum fuels, pesticides, heavy metals, PCBs, VOCs, and radionuclides left by decades of Navy industrial operations (EPA Superfund Site Profile, Hunters Point Naval Shipyard). That is a statement about contamination in the ground today. It does not by itself describe how asbestos insulation was used inside the shipyard’s buildings and dry docks during active ship repair work, and no primary source we could verify covers that building-by-building detail specifically for this yard. Where a source does not exist, we have left the claim out rather than estimate it.
Trades and ratings with documented exposure
No source specific to Hunters Point names individual job titles, trades, or Navy ratings assigned to asbestos-related work at this yard. What is documented is the type of work performed there: repair, overhaul, conversion, and battle-damage repair on ships already in service, work that in shipyards generally required removing and replacing thermal insulation around boilers, steam lines, and piping. If you worked in a repair trade, such as pipefitting, boiler work, insulation, sheet metal, or machinist work, at this yard, your own service or employment record is the most reliable way to document your specific role and shop.
Environmental record
Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was added to the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List in 1989 (EPA Site ID 0902722, CERCLIS number CA1170090087) (EPA Superfund site information). The site covers 866 acres and is divided into multiple cleanup parcels that the Navy is remediating under EPA oversight (EPA Superfund Site Profile). Both the EPA’s current site profile and the ATSDR’s 1994 Public Health Assessment name asbestos among the contaminants documented at the site, alongside metals, petroleum products, pesticides, PCBs, and radionuclides (EPA Superfund Site Profile, ATSDR Public Health Assessment, 1994).
The Navy’s cleanup work at Hunters Point has also faced scrutiny. A University of California, Berkeley School of Law environmental clinic page describes allegations, first raised by whistleblowers around 2012, that a Navy remediation contractor’s radiological soil sampling and reporting could not be relied upon, and that the Navy had committed to retesting the contractor’s work (UC Berkeley Law Environmental Law Clinic). That case concerns radiological testing, not asbestos specifically, and we have not found a primary Department of Justice or court record confirming the outcome, so we are not stating one here.
The base itself was selected for closure in the 1991 Base Realignment and Closure round, and closed on April 1, 1994 (California State Military Museum). Environmental cleanup has continued for decades since and is still active today.
If you worked at this yard
If you or a family member worked at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, in Navy service or as a civilian employee, the documentation that matters most is whatever shows where and when the work happened. For Navy service, that usually means a DD-214 or service record showing an assignment to the yard or to a ship undergoing repair there. For civilian shipyard work, employment records, pay stubs, union records, or Navy civilian personnel files can serve the same purpose.
You do not need to reconstruct the yard’s history yourself. Start by gathering whatever paperwork you already have that shows dates and location, then compare it against what a trust or benefits process is asking for.
- See other shipyards in this directory at /veterans/shipyards/.
- For background on how asbestos trusts work generally, see /trusts/.
- For VA paperwork related to a mesothelioma claim, see /va-forms-for-mesothelioma/.
- To have your specific service history reviewed, see /veteran-case-review/.