"On May 16, 1998, the federal government used 600 pounds of explosives to destroy Marie Harrison's home, Geneva Towers, the largest residential implosion in California history. It was one of three detonations that rattled her community and inspired her life's work. The second came on June 18, 2008, when her activism helped light the fuse to implode San Francisco's old Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power smokestacks, long decried as an environmental and health hazard."
"Yet those earthshaking episodes paled next to one decades earlier and thousands of miles away that would haunt Harrison and her Bayview-Hunters Point community for the better part of a century. On July 25, 1946, the United States detonated a nuclear bomb under a fleet of Navy target ships in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Those damaged vessels were towed across the Pacific Ocean to be "cleaned" at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where they left an environmental catastrophe that lingers."
""Even when she had her breathing machine, in the last months of her life, and her doctor told her not to drive from Stockton out to San Francisco for some protest, she would go anyway," said Arieann Harrison, who carries on her mother's legacy through a nonprofit called The Marie Harrison Community Foundation: Can We Live? The organization focuses on uplifting Bayview Hunters Point families to be "masters of their own destinies.""
Marie Harrison's home, Geneva Towers, was destroyed on May 16, 1998, by 600 pounds of explosives in California's largest residential implosion. Her activism helped prompt the June 18, 2008, implosion of San Francisco's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power smokestacks, long criticized as health and environmental hazards. Decades earlier, a July 25, 1946, U.S. nuclear detonation at Bikini Atoll damaged Navy ships that were towed to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, leaving a persistent environmental catastrophe. Those battles over housing, energy and pollution converted her into a committed environmental justice warrior and community leader.
Read at San Francisco Public Press
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