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| "Dog Park Danger?" KNBC Channel 4 - May 25, 2006 (This takes about 1 minute to load.) Copyright 2006 NBC Universal, Inc. |
| VA Nuclear Dump Investigation |
| For previous coverage, go to Page 2 |
“Syringe with no needle found in southern touchdown
area of football field," says November 2000 Brentwood
School soil report. "It appears that rain has caused
debris just below surface to rise to surface." (Syringe
above found in eastern arroyo south of school fields)
area of football field," says November 2000 Brentwood
School soil report. "It appears that rain has caused
debris just below surface to rise to surface." (Syringe
above found in eastern arroyo south of school fields)
West Los Angeles
Schooled for Scandal
Reports of radioactive and chemical pollution
at the Brentwood VA go from bad to worse
Reports of radioactive and chemical pollution
at the Brentwood VA go from bad to worse
- Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl leads tough talks with
VA to secure $1 million for comprehensive Phase 2 tests of
West LA VA's forgotten biomedical nuclear dump
- Controversial and incomplete Phase 1 test results released
and show heightened radiation under two arroyos skirting
Barrington Dog Park and Brentwood School football field
- KCET's "Life & Times" covers nuke dump issue and VA says of
Phase II tests, "From our perspective, there's nothing to get out."
- Documents reveal astronomical levels of heavy metal
contamination at Brentwood School's 'shared' VA property
- Arsenic found at 32 times natural level while poisonous
thallium at readings government calls 'chronic' for disease
- Athletic fields built for school in area used for dumping from
three hospitals over decades until the early 1970s
- Government says that $1 million Phase II testing will finally put
issue to rest when boring commences in Spring 2008
- School insists property free of waste even as documents show
complicity in building football field over used syringes
- VA/Brentwood School contract appears to indemnify the
government from liability over Cold War pollution under fields
- Head of Brentwood School tells parents government withdrew
report of contamination -- documents say otherwise
- VA's historic nuclear area still active with research
- 1983 boring of nuke dump heart with over 80 samples taken
revealed nothing yet government insists on duplicating tests
- "Million Dollar Maybe" documents VA admission that dump
"complicated" the issue of possible VA land development, now
shelved as new legislation to protect property advances
The Bush Administration's attempt to develop the West Los Angeles
campus of the Department of Veterans Affairs was dealt a fatal blow Dec.
19, 2007 as both the House and Senate passed legislation by Sen. Diane
Feinstein (D-California) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Los
Angeles) that prohibits commercial development of the 387-acre property.
As part of a larger bill, there seems little chance that President Bush will
veto the legislation even though the Administration bemoans the loss of
$4 billion in potential revenue.
One major roadblock that the Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced
Services (CARES) initiative faced began with the May 18, 2006 publication
of "Real Hot Property" in EnviroReporter.com and Los Angeles CityBeat,
which exposed the biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on the
northern part of this valuable underdeveloped land. The investigation
broke the news of radioactive contamination being under exclusive and
private Brentwood School's athletic fields that it leases from the VA. The
last CARES meeting was held in September 2005, right as this reporter
began asking the VA questions about the dump being under the school.
“Why has it been two years? It is two years later because, quite frankly, the
complexities of the issues on this campus were more than perhaps were
expected and understood," said Jay Halpern, Special Assistant to the
Secretary of the VA Sept. 6. “And finally there were other issues that we
ran into that were much more complicated; certainly the issue around the
radiation of Barrington Park which we have addressed in the Phase One
report coming out. Now enter the Phase Two study to insure that there is
absolutely nothing there underneath there, [so that there isn’t] any
indication that there is a danger before we move forward with that.”
"[The VA] said that they were going to spend a million bucks and they
already knew they were going to find nothing," an exasperated City of Los
Angeles official said at the Sept. 6 meeting. "Can you believe that
attitude?"
That attitude was repeated on KCET's "Life & Times" program aired Dec.
19, 2007 when the VA's Ralph Tillman dismissed the idea of digging out
the known dump without going through a more expensive boring process
that the VA has planned for Phase II scheduled to begin this Spring.
"From our perspective, there's nothing to get out," Tillman said. "In other
words, it's a safe environment. The land is safe, the surface is safe."
But as our upcoming article, "Schooled for Scandal," will show, the land
may be even more dangerous than previously known. And it shows that in
1983, sub-surface soil boring of the kind proposed by the VA for 2008
testing, found nothing in the heart of the dump despite dozens of drilled
holes, some up to nine feet deep.
New information reveals that the dump operated longer and was more
vast, covering all of what is now Brentwood School's upper and lower
athletic fields.
Shocking reports analyzed herein, show that Brentwood School's athletic
fields are contaminated with high levels of arsenic and "chronic" levels of
the cancer-causing heavy metal thallium, found in amounts five times
those typically found in hazardous wastes sites. This is doubly surprising
since the places chosen to test were far away from areas suspected of
radiological and chemical contamination yet were off the charts for the two
poisons. More concerning is that they were called representative of the
soil sampling of the entire athletic fields by other tests.
This suspect methodology, repeated throughout environmental tests of
the Brentwood School since 1999, is made all the more troublesome in
that the school's contract with the VA says all decisions about hazardous
waste on the "shared property" were to be made jointly, yet the Head of
School, Michael Pratt, told "Life & Times" differently.
"But we had known before that there were burial sites on the VA property
including several solid waste burial sites on our campus," Pratt said.
"When the excavation for the fields had been initially done, any debris that
was uncovered was removed."
That statement doesn't seem to jibe with this one from a January 2000
environmental site assessment. “The syringes were often in plastic
bags,” the report said. “The foreman indicated that there was so much
unsuitable material (refuse) that the project was temporarily shut down
until directed by a federal official (name unknown) not to excavate further
and continue with a modified installation plan. The modified plan provided
for the use of 3 to 4 feet of crushed asphalt to be placed over those areas
with remaining unsuitable material to support the drain pipe.”
The syringes remained a problem according to another report completed
later that year that stated, in handwritten notes, that syringes were found
in the southern end zone of the football field and that "DEBRIS – SYRINGE
W/O NEEDLE… IT APPEARS THAT RAIN HAS CAUSED DEBRIS JUST
BELOW SURFACE TO RISE TO SURFACE”
Our upcoming coverage, based on our just-published analysis of
thousands of pages of VA documents on EnviroReporter.com and other
new information, will show that the VA nuclear dump in Brentwood is far
more polluted, far vaster and potentially more dangerous than previously
imagined.
"Schooled for Scandal" will also explore just how the VA and Brentwood
School have tried to literally bury the dump's potential dangers by
characterizing as harmless to the public and media. But, in the process,
they may have been derailed by their own documentation that shows
evidence of their extraordinary incompetence or possibly deliberate cover-
up of Brentwood's forgotten biomedical nuclear and chemical dump.
campus of the Department of Veterans Affairs was dealt a fatal blow Dec.
19, 2007 as both the House and Senate passed legislation by Sen. Diane
Feinstein (D-California) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Los
Angeles) that prohibits commercial development of the 387-acre property.
As part of a larger bill, there seems little chance that President Bush will
veto the legislation even though the Administration bemoans the loss of
$4 billion in potential revenue.
One major roadblock that the Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced
Services (CARES) initiative faced began with the May 18, 2006 publication
of "Real Hot Property" in EnviroReporter.com and Los Angeles CityBeat,
which exposed the biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on the
northern part of this valuable underdeveloped land. The investigation
broke the news of radioactive contamination being under exclusive and
private Brentwood School's athletic fields that it leases from the VA. The
last CARES meeting was held in September 2005, right as this reporter
began asking the VA questions about the dump being under the school.
“Why has it been two years? It is two years later because, quite frankly, the
complexities of the issues on this campus were more than perhaps were
expected and understood," said Jay Halpern, Special Assistant to the
Secretary of the VA Sept. 6. “And finally there were other issues that we
ran into that were much more complicated; certainly the issue around the
radiation of Barrington Park which we have addressed in the Phase One
report coming out. Now enter the Phase Two study to insure that there is
absolutely nothing there underneath there, [so that there isn’t] any
indication that there is a danger before we move forward with that.”
"[The VA] said that they were going to spend a million bucks and they
already knew they were going to find nothing," an exasperated City of Los
Angeles official said at the Sept. 6 meeting. "Can you believe that
attitude?"
That attitude was repeated on KCET's "Life & Times" program aired Dec.
19, 2007 when the VA's Ralph Tillman dismissed the idea of digging out
the known dump without going through a more expensive boring process
that the VA has planned for Phase II scheduled to begin this Spring.
"From our perspective, there's nothing to get out," Tillman said. "In other
words, it's a safe environment. The land is safe, the surface is safe."
But as our upcoming article, "Schooled for Scandal," will show, the land
may be even more dangerous than previously known. And it shows that in
1983, sub-surface soil boring of the kind proposed by the VA for 2008
testing, found nothing in the heart of the dump despite dozens of drilled
holes, some up to nine feet deep.
New information reveals that the dump operated longer and was more
vast, covering all of what is now Brentwood School's upper and lower
athletic fields.
Shocking reports analyzed herein, show that Brentwood School's athletic
fields are contaminated with high levels of arsenic and "chronic" levels of
the cancer-causing heavy metal thallium, found in amounts five times
those typically found in hazardous wastes sites. This is doubly surprising
since the places chosen to test were far away from areas suspected of
radiological and chemical contamination yet were off the charts for the two
poisons. More concerning is that they were called representative of the
soil sampling of the entire athletic fields by other tests.
This suspect methodology, repeated throughout environmental tests of
the Brentwood School since 1999, is made all the more troublesome in
that the school's contract with the VA says all decisions about hazardous
waste on the "shared property" were to be made jointly, yet the Head of
School, Michael Pratt, told "Life & Times" differently.
"But we had known before that there were burial sites on the VA property
including several solid waste burial sites on our campus," Pratt said.
"When the excavation for the fields had been initially done, any debris that
was uncovered was removed."
That statement doesn't seem to jibe with this one from a January 2000
environmental site assessment. “The syringes were often in plastic
bags,” the report said. “The foreman indicated that there was so much
unsuitable material (refuse) that the project was temporarily shut down
until directed by a federal official (name unknown) not to excavate further
and continue with a modified installation plan. The modified plan provided
for the use of 3 to 4 feet of crushed asphalt to be placed over those areas
with remaining unsuitable material to support the drain pipe.”
The syringes remained a problem according to another report completed
later that year that stated, in handwritten notes, that syringes were found
in the southern end zone of the football field and that "DEBRIS – SYRINGE
W/O NEEDLE… IT APPEARS THAT RAIN HAS CAUSED DEBRIS JUST
BELOW SURFACE TO RISE TO SURFACE”
Our upcoming coverage, based on our just-published analysis of
thousands of pages of VA documents on EnviroReporter.com and other
new information, will show that the VA nuclear dump in Brentwood is far
more polluted, far vaster and potentially more dangerous than previously
imagined.
"Schooled for Scandal" will also explore just how the VA and Brentwood
School have tried to literally bury the dump's potential dangers by
characterizing as harmless to the public and media. But, in the process,
they may have been derailed by their own documentation that shows
evidence of their extraordinary incompetence or possibly deliberate cover-
up of Brentwood's forgotten biomedical nuclear and chemical dump.
Dog days in the Barrington Dog Park which partly lies over the nuclear dump
The "Human Radiation Counting Room" was where humans were
tested for radiation deliberately injected or inhaled during Cold War
experiments later condemned by the U.S. government as "a violation
of the Hippocratic principle." Building 340 still stands today at the VA.
tested for radiation deliberately injected or inhaled during Cold War
experiments later condemned by the U.S. government as "a violation
of the Hippocratic principle." Building 340 still stands today at the VA.
| KCET's multi-award-winning program takes a look at Brentwood's biomedical nuke dump! December 19, 2007 broadcast here! |
Read EnviroReporter.com's VA Nuclear Dump
investigation articles here
investigation articles here