SOUR SATISFACTION
Boeing settles massive lawsuit over the Valley’s heavily polluted Rocketdyne site.
By Michael Collins
(Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat – October 6, 2005)
For years, the residents of Simi Valley and western San Fernando Valley towns adjacent to Boeing’s Santa Susana
Field Laboratory (SSFL) have claimed that the troubled site, polluted with myriad high-level toxins – including the
remains of two partial nuclear meltdowns – was responsible for a cluster of cancers and other deadly diseases in
scores of people. Two weeks ago, Boeing agreed not to fight them anymore, and settled a sprawling lawsuit that had
been churning away in the courts since 1997.
The confidential agreement includes no admission of responsibility on the part of Boeing or SSFL’s former parent
company, Rockwell International, but did keep the lawsuit from going to a jury trial. Jury selection was slated to begin
on the day of the settlement, September 21.
As last week’s enormous Chatsworth wildfire blazed through parts of the 2,668-acre facility, formerly known as
Rocketdyne, sending skyward enormous plumes of possibly radioactive smoke, the conclusion of eight years of
contentious litigation was just sinking in.
“Plaintiffs and defendants are both satisfied with the settlement, and settled these claims to avoid the high costs and
delays of litigation,” both sides said in a statement announced by Boeing spokesman Dan Beck, who pointed out
that the company admitted no wrongdoing. But that’s exactly what upsets some environmentalists, who complain that
the confidentiality of the settlement means that some evidence will never come to light.
Over 100 plaintiffs with 174 claims, represented by Cappello & Noël of Santa Barbara and Gancedo & Nieves of
Pasadena, agreed to a confidential settlement that will avoid the necessity of over 90 separate trials that could take
up to four years to complete. According to lead attorney Barry Cappello, who was quite pleased with the settlement,
many of the dozens of clients were gravely ill and dying, so it was time to act. “You know the song ‘(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction’?” he told CityBeat. “We got satisfaction.”
The lawsuit took shape in March 1997 with seven original plaintiffs. A fourth amended complaint was filed in March
1998 based on 21 causes of action that alleged injury related to Rockwell and Boeing’s activities. The lawsuit
contained two distinguishable elements consisting of a class action brought forth in part for property damages, and
another for personal injury and wrongful death on behalf of 59 individuals. The plaintiffs suffered a setback in 2000
when the class action part of the lawsuit was decertified, leaving their attorneys to prove the connection between
SSFL and the three other Rocketdyne facilities to the suffering of their clients.
The mountain of evidence produced by the attorneys, buttressed by expert testimony submitted into evidence, was
culled from 200,000 documents and 2 million pages of information. The lawsuit alleged that the 1959 meltdown of a
nuclear liquid sodium cooled reactor released enough radiological poisons to exceed 15 to 260 times the amount of
radiation released in the U.S.’s most infamous meltdown, at Three Mile Island, as CityBeat reported last year in a
cover story entitled “Two Mile Island.”
The plaintiffs alleged that for over 50 years the Rocketdyne facilities, which were involved in the testing and
manufacture of large rocket engines and experimental nuclear reactors, polluted the environment with huge
amounts of radiation, including strontium, cesium, and plutonium. The lawsuit contended that gross contamination
also occurred from poisonous chemicals including hexavalent chromium, trichloroethylene (TCE), arsenic,
hydrazine, formaldehyde, and the metal beryllium.
The lawsuit detailed one of the most contaminated sites at SSFL, the sodium burn pit: a three-acre expanse where
barrels of radioactive reactor waste were simply tossed into a cesspool of pollutants. Rocketdyne workers would
often draw lots to see who would get to shoot at the barrels, which would explode and sometimes go flying two
hundred yards, disgorging their poisons in the process. The pit operated from 1959 to 1975, but “there have been
no records of any kind kept by any department on the frequency of disposal, kind and amount of the material
disposed of, or ultimate fate of the material after leaching through the soil,” according to an internal Rocketdyne
document from 1966 introduced as evidence. The burn pit has since been excavated down to the bedrock.
This galaxy of goo has been cited as the source of a multitude of maladies. Using individually calculated risk
assessments, University of Illinois College of Medicine professor Marc Lappe, who has since passed away, analyzed
the causes of the bone, kidney, lung, and other cancers endured by the plaintiffs. One such case was that of John
Lallo, who was 14 in 1957 when his exposure to the carcinogens hexavalent chromium and TCE began. In 2002, he
was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In another, 46-year-old Scott Arend became afflicted with renal cell carcinoma in
2000 after being exposed to even higher doses of these two toxins used at SSFL. And Sharon Grandinetti, who was
first exposed to these substances in 1955, came down with bladder cancer in 1997.
One of the crucial moments during this legal battle came June 8 of last year when U.S. District Court Judge Dickran
Tevrizian, in the central California district, denied Boeing’s motion to dismiss radiation claims of the plaintiffs.
Tevrizian ruled that it sufficed to show that exposure to radiation was a “substantial factor” in contributing to a
plaintiff’s injury while acknowledging that each individual case would have to prove it was based on the “factual
circumstances.”
The decision was a green light for Cappello. “We have filed 11 expert reports including emissions on dioxins, hex
chrome, radiation, and TCE, risk-dose experts, medical-toxicity experts,” he wrote in a March 22 e-mail to CityBeat.
“Our medical expert has now opined, on over 90 individual cases, that their cancers/diseases are directly linked to
the three Rocketdyne facilities’ toxic air emissions (cooling towers for hex chrome, SRE [sodium reactor] meltdown
for radioactive iodine, and TCE usage).”
As the hearings edged toward the sealed settlement, both sides clashed over the use of experts. Cappello had to
replace Lappe, who died of brain cancer, with three experts that Boeing’s lawyers sought unsuccessfully to exclude
from trial. Cappello failed in an attempt to introduce evidence that milk consumed from local Simi Valley dairy cows
had caused his plaintiffs to ingest radioiodine, going so far as to produce an archival Russian spy satellite
photograph that showed the cows grazing in a Giacopuzzi Dairy pasture near SSFL. Judge Tevrizian dismissed that
as “too speculative” and strongly urged the parties to settle, which they did a month later.
“I only wish the rest of the community got satisfaction from this confidential settlement,” wrote longtime Rocketdyne
activist Marie Mason in an e-mail. “Cappello said his experts found links between exposures from toxics from the site
to illness, but the rest of us will never hear this information with a locked-and-sealed settlement. What else can we
expect from Rocketdyne – pay off and walk away saying they have done nothing wrong. What a cop-out for the
attorney and Rocketdyne. So much for satisfaction.”
Critics of the settlement insist that crucial information is now lost with the confidentiality of the agreement. “Our
organization is very concerned about the health of people exposed to toxins released by Rocketdyne,” said
Jonathan Parfrey of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “The settlement seals evidence, which may link Rocketdyne’
s contaminants to local health problems. Is this the best way to protect the public? I don’t think so.”
Not everything that takes place in litigation is filed with the court is the lawsuit doesn’t proceed to trial, including
deposition transcripts. But, according to Cappello, only the settlement is sealed and the evidence is available to the
public. When told by a reporter that the vast majority of this evidence, evidence even used in this article, is currently
online and just a walk away from his downtown Los Angeles office in the District Court, Parfrey seemed surprised.
“From what I understand, that material is not available,” he said.
LETTERS
10-6-05
Read It and Weep
Your recent article on the confidential settlement of the lawsuit over the chemical and radioactive releases from
Boeing’s contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) asserted that the vast majority of evidence
accumulated in that case is available to the public, indeed even online [re: “Sour Satisfaction,” Oct. 6]. That is not
the case. As Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, correctly said in the piece,
the vast majority of evidence about the site’s spills, releases, and accidents will never see the light of day.
In discovery, Boeing provided to the plaintiffs’ attorneys large numbers of old documents about the facility’s troubled
history. (For example, there was a meltdown in 1959, and serious reactor accidents in 1964 and 1969.) But Boeing
insisted that much of that material be kept confidential, even though the documents were in fact paid for by
taxpayers and related to events decades ago for which any supposed trade secrets were long since irrelevant.
Indeed, declarations filed by experts for the plaintiffs were, at Boeing’s insistence, censored, with big portions
blocked out, simply because they gave as a citation some of these old accident reports Boeing had declared
confidential.
It is tragic that these records will not see the light of day. The public has a right to know what happened at this
dangerous and poorly managed federal nuclear and rocket-testing facility.
Daniel Hirsch
President, Committee to Bridge the Gap
Los Angeles
Michael Collins responds:
Hirsch mischaracterizes Parfrey’s comments, because he said no such thing – Parfrey simply stated that he was
under the impression that evidence I described to him was somehow “not available.” That public information, and
hundreds of pages of this year’s courtroom battles online at Cappellonoel.com/news, informed my article. It’s
disingenuous to claim that the information lost from data collected for the plaintiffs really changes the Rocketdyne
situation. Whatever archival information Boeing had blacked out is minuscule in relation to the totality of what we
know happened and is happening at Rocketdyne. Our comprehensive series of CityBeat articles on SSFL proves
this.
The confidential settlement is not “tragic.” To publicly air this syllogism amounts to no more than a griping attack on
the plaintiffs who agreed to the settlement – plaintiffs whose health tragedies helped provide the mountains of
information produced by this legal saga, information already used by Hirsch in his and the City of Los Angeles’s
lawsuit against the Department of Energy over its nuclear activities at SSFL. As noted in the article, no settlement
would mean many more years of trials and the inevitable appeals with no guaranteed recompense for the plaintiffs’
suffering. The inability of some Rocketdyne critics to see any good done those sick folks who finally got justice gives
one pause to wonder who these activists represent, other than themselves and their outsized egos.
Boeing settles massive lawsuit over the Valley’s heavily polluted Rocketdyne site.
By Michael Collins
(Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat – October 6, 2005)
For years, the residents of Simi Valley and western San Fernando Valley towns adjacent to Boeing’s Santa Susana
Field Laboratory (SSFL) have claimed that the troubled site, polluted with myriad high-level toxins – including the
remains of two partial nuclear meltdowns – was responsible for a cluster of cancers and other deadly diseases in
scores of people. Two weeks ago, Boeing agreed not to fight them anymore, and settled a sprawling lawsuit that had
been churning away in the courts since 1997.
The confidential agreement includes no admission of responsibility on the part of Boeing or SSFL’s former parent
company, Rockwell International, but did keep the lawsuit from going to a jury trial. Jury selection was slated to begin
on the day of the settlement, September 21.
As last week’s enormous Chatsworth wildfire blazed through parts of the 2,668-acre facility, formerly known as
Rocketdyne, sending skyward enormous plumes of possibly radioactive smoke, the conclusion of eight years of
contentious litigation was just sinking in.
“Plaintiffs and defendants are both satisfied with the settlement, and settled these claims to avoid the high costs and
delays of litigation,” both sides said in a statement announced by Boeing spokesman Dan Beck, who pointed out
that the company admitted no wrongdoing. But that’s exactly what upsets some environmentalists, who complain that
the confidentiality of the settlement means that some evidence will never come to light.
Over 100 plaintiffs with 174 claims, represented by Cappello & Noël of Santa Barbara and Gancedo & Nieves of
Pasadena, agreed to a confidential settlement that will avoid the necessity of over 90 separate trials that could take
up to four years to complete. According to lead attorney Barry Cappello, who was quite pleased with the settlement,
many of the dozens of clients were gravely ill and dying, so it was time to act. “You know the song ‘(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction’?” he told CityBeat. “We got satisfaction.”
The lawsuit took shape in March 1997 with seven original plaintiffs. A fourth amended complaint was filed in March
1998 based on 21 causes of action that alleged injury related to Rockwell and Boeing’s activities. The lawsuit
contained two distinguishable elements consisting of a class action brought forth in part for property damages, and
another for personal injury and wrongful death on behalf of 59 individuals. The plaintiffs suffered a setback in 2000
when the class action part of the lawsuit was decertified, leaving their attorneys to prove the connection between
SSFL and the three other Rocketdyne facilities to the suffering of their clients.
The mountain of evidence produced by the attorneys, buttressed by expert testimony submitted into evidence, was
culled from 200,000 documents and 2 million pages of information. The lawsuit alleged that the 1959 meltdown of a
nuclear liquid sodium cooled reactor released enough radiological poisons to exceed 15 to 260 times the amount of
radiation released in the U.S.’s most infamous meltdown, at Three Mile Island, as CityBeat reported last year in a
cover story entitled “Two Mile Island.”
The plaintiffs alleged that for over 50 years the Rocketdyne facilities, which were involved in the testing and
manufacture of large rocket engines and experimental nuclear reactors, polluted the environment with huge
amounts of radiation, including strontium, cesium, and plutonium. The lawsuit contended that gross contamination
also occurred from poisonous chemicals including hexavalent chromium, trichloroethylene (TCE), arsenic,
hydrazine, formaldehyde, and the metal beryllium.
The lawsuit detailed one of the most contaminated sites at SSFL, the sodium burn pit: a three-acre expanse where
barrels of radioactive reactor waste were simply tossed into a cesspool of pollutants. Rocketdyne workers would
often draw lots to see who would get to shoot at the barrels, which would explode and sometimes go flying two
hundred yards, disgorging their poisons in the process. The pit operated from 1959 to 1975, but “there have been
no records of any kind kept by any department on the frequency of disposal, kind and amount of the material
disposed of, or ultimate fate of the material after leaching through the soil,” according to an internal Rocketdyne
document from 1966 introduced as evidence. The burn pit has since been excavated down to the bedrock.
This galaxy of goo has been cited as the source of a multitude of maladies. Using individually calculated risk
assessments, University of Illinois College of Medicine professor Marc Lappe, who has since passed away, analyzed
the causes of the bone, kidney, lung, and other cancers endured by the plaintiffs. One such case was that of John
Lallo, who was 14 in 1957 when his exposure to the carcinogens hexavalent chromium and TCE began. In 2002, he
was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In another, 46-year-old Scott Arend became afflicted with renal cell carcinoma in
2000 after being exposed to even higher doses of these two toxins used at SSFL. And Sharon Grandinetti, who was
first exposed to these substances in 1955, came down with bladder cancer in 1997.
One of the crucial moments during this legal battle came June 8 of last year when U.S. District Court Judge Dickran
Tevrizian, in the central California district, denied Boeing’s motion to dismiss radiation claims of the plaintiffs.
Tevrizian ruled that it sufficed to show that exposure to radiation was a “substantial factor” in contributing to a
plaintiff’s injury while acknowledging that each individual case would have to prove it was based on the “factual
circumstances.”
The decision was a green light for Cappello. “We have filed 11 expert reports including emissions on dioxins, hex
chrome, radiation, and TCE, risk-dose experts, medical-toxicity experts,” he wrote in a March 22 e-mail to CityBeat.
“Our medical expert has now opined, on over 90 individual cases, that their cancers/diseases are directly linked to
the three Rocketdyne facilities’ toxic air emissions (cooling towers for hex chrome, SRE [sodium reactor] meltdown
for radioactive iodine, and TCE usage).”
As the hearings edged toward the sealed settlement, both sides clashed over the use of experts. Cappello had to
replace Lappe, who died of brain cancer, with three experts that Boeing’s lawyers sought unsuccessfully to exclude
from trial. Cappello failed in an attempt to introduce evidence that milk consumed from local Simi Valley dairy cows
had caused his plaintiffs to ingest radioiodine, going so far as to produce an archival Russian spy satellite
photograph that showed the cows grazing in a Giacopuzzi Dairy pasture near SSFL. Judge Tevrizian dismissed that
as “too speculative” and strongly urged the parties to settle, which they did a month later.
“I only wish the rest of the community got satisfaction from this confidential settlement,” wrote longtime Rocketdyne
activist Marie Mason in an e-mail. “Cappello said his experts found links between exposures from toxics from the site
to illness, but the rest of us will never hear this information with a locked-and-sealed settlement. What else can we
expect from Rocketdyne – pay off and walk away saying they have done nothing wrong. What a cop-out for the
attorney and Rocketdyne. So much for satisfaction.”
Critics of the settlement insist that crucial information is now lost with the confidentiality of the agreement. “Our
organization is very concerned about the health of people exposed to toxins released by Rocketdyne,” said
Jonathan Parfrey of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “The settlement seals evidence, which may link Rocketdyne’
s contaminants to local health problems. Is this the best way to protect the public? I don’t think so.”
Not everything that takes place in litigation is filed with the court is the lawsuit doesn’t proceed to trial, including
deposition transcripts. But, according to Cappello, only the settlement is sealed and the evidence is available to the
public. When told by a reporter that the vast majority of this evidence, evidence even used in this article, is currently
online and just a walk away from his downtown Los Angeles office in the District Court, Parfrey seemed surprised.
“From what I understand, that material is not available,” he said.
LETTERS
10-6-05
Read It and Weep
Your recent article on the confidential settlement of the lawsuit over the chemical and radioactive releases from
Boeing’s contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) asserted that the vast majority of evidence
accumulated in that case is available to the public, indeed even online [re: “Sour Satisfaction,” Oct. 6]. That is not
the case. As Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, correctly said in the piece,
the vast majority of evidence about the site’s spills, releases, and accidents will never see the light of day.
In discovery, Boeing provided to the plaintiffs’ attorneys large numbers of old documents about the facility’s troubled
history. (For example, there was a meltdown in 1959, and serious reactor accidents in 1964 and 1969.) But Boeing
insisted that much of that material be kept confidential, even though the documents were in fact paid for by
taxpayers and related to events decades ago for which any supposed trade secrets were long since irrelevant.
Indeed, declarations filed by experts for the plaintiffs were, at Boeing’s insistence, censored, with big portions
blocked out, simply because they gave as a citation some of these old accident reports Boeing had declared
confidential.
It is tragic that these records will not see the light of day. The public has a right to know what happened at this
dangerous and poorly managed federal nuclear and rocket-testing facility.
Daniel Hirsch
President, Committee to Bridge the Gap
Los Angeles
Michael Collins responds:
Hirsch mischaracterizes Parfrey’s comments, because he said no such thing – Parfrey simply stated that he was
under the impression that evidence I described to him was somehow “not available.” That public information, and
hundreds of pages of this year’s courtroom battles online at Cappellonoel.com/news, informed my article. It’s
disingenuous to claim that the information lost from data collected for the plaintiffs really changes the Rocketdyne
situation. Whatever archival information Boeing had blacked out is minuscule in relation to the totality of what we
know happened and is happening at Rocketdyne. Our comprehensive series of CityBeat articles on SSFL proves
this.
The confidential settlement is not “tragic.” To publicly air this syllogism amounts to no more than a griping attack on
the plaintiffs who agreed to the settlement – plaintiffs whose health tragedies helped provide the mountains of
information produced by this legal saga, information already used by Hirsch in his and the City of Los Angeles’s
lawsuit against the Department of Energy over its nuclear activities at SSFL. As noted in the article, no settlement
would mean many more years of trials and the inevitable appeals with no guaranteed recompense for the plaintiffs’
suffering. The inability of some Rocketdyne critics to see any good done those sick folks who finally got justice gives
one pause to wonder who these activists represent, other than themselves and their outsized egos.
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