Vegetation fire near Hunters Point Naval Shipyard sends smoke over San Francisco

A vegetation fire near Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard sent plumes of smoke over San Francisco on Thursday afternoon, and workers at nearby businesses used coolers, cups and bottles of water to hold back the flames before San Francisco Fire Department crews arrived. Firefighters later determined the cause was likely burning weeds.

The fire landed in a part of the city where fire response and environmental risk are always watched closely. Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard is an 866-acre Superfund site in San Francisco, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the agency says the land was home to a shipyard from 1945 to 1974 and to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1948 to 1960.

The EPA says contamination at the site affected soil, dust, sediments, surface water and groundwater. City and County of San Francisco cleanup pages for Hunter’s Point, along with health, dust and air-quality information, reflect the long-running concern over what residents in Bayview-Hunters Point have lived with for decades: an industrial landscape where smoke, dust and hazardous exposure are not abstract worries.

That history also runs through the city’s environmental justice record. A 2003 San Francisco Human Rights Commission report focused on Bayview and Hunters Point as a community long affected by pollution, a finding that still shapes how residents read new incidents near the shipyard and surrounding blocks.

The Thursday fire also fit a pattern of recurring fire activity in the neighborhood. On Aug. 12, 2024, San Francisco Fire Department crews responded to two vegetation fires in Hunter’s Point, including a 10-acre wildland fire in the 1200 block of Armstrong Avenue. That fire was away from residential buildings, and no injuries or damage were reported. On Dec. 15, 2024, crews knocked down a separate fire at a building in Hunter’s Point.

For a neighborhood already tied to cleanup work, air-quality monitoring and questions about industrial safety, even a small vegetation fire can quickly feel bigger than the flames themselves. Smoke over Bayview and the shipyard shoreline lands in a place where residents know how fast a routine brush fire can turn into another reminder of the area’s layered hazards.