nuclear-news

Two former supervisors at Tetra Tech EC, the company at the center of a widening fraud scandal at the former Navy shipyard in San Francisco’s Hunters Point, have pleaded guilty to faking documents and were sentenced to federal prison terms, the Justice Department announced late Thursday.

Stephen Rolfe and Justin Hubbard will both serve terms of eight months in federal prison and pay fines of $2,000 and $10,000, respectively, according to a news release from Alex G. Tse, the acting United States attorney for Northern California.

It’s not clear if other Tetra Tech managers or employees are under investigation, or if other criminal indictments are forthcoming.

But their guilty pleas and subsequent sentences represent the first instance of criminal penalties stemming from malfeasance at the shipyard, a sprawling, decades-long, $1.1 billion toxic cleanup project that, within the last year, has devolved into an environmental fiasco and attracted national attention.

This is vindication for other former cleanup employees—co-workers and subordinates of Rolfe and Hubbard, whose detailed and repeated whistleblower allegations of fraud appear to have led to their convictions.

And if the rest of the whistleblowers’ allegations are correct, more indictments may be coming.

Sworn declarations from multiple former cleanup employees allege that other Tetra Tech managers and supervisors directed them to commit fraud on multiple occasions.

Tetra Tech EC, a subsidiary of Tetra Tech, Inc., a multi-billion-dollar firm with a history of winning government contracts, received a $300 million contract from the U.S. Navy to prepare the former shipyard—an EPA Superfund site rife with industrial and radioactive contamination stemming from its use as a warship repair base and nuclear warfare research lab—for redevelopment……….https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/4/17318768/arrests-hunters-point-shipyard-cleanup-workers-toxic-crime