A 1994 report noted that “South of Building 1301, the Acid Bay was used for parts cleaning and included several above-grade cleaning tanks, a below-grade solvent pit, and waste ASTs [aboveground storage tanks].” The same survey found that toxic TCA was spilled from solvent ASTs and forced Rocketdyne to dig up 400 cubic yards of impacted soil and asphalt road base.
Twenty-seven oil/PCB chemical use areas were identified at the Instrument and Equipment Laboratories in four general areas near the Building 1301 structure cluster. Eleven metals and inorganic compounds chemical use areas were also identified in the vicinity. That would include “cleaning operations inside Building 1301, where dip tanks were used, and at the Acid Bay Area located south of Building 1301,” noted the 1994 report.
The amount of TCE and TCA found in the soil, that same soil Bowling captured blowing all over the place was staggering: 1,1-TCA up to 2,000 μg/kg in soil and 4,800 μg/Lv in soil vapor and TCE up to 11,200 μg/kg in soil and 2,800 μg/Lv in soil vapor.
Bowling blames Boeing’s demolition procedures as seen on the films on the company’s refusal to abide by the Agreements on Consent (AOCs) which require NASA and the DOE to clean up their parts of the lab to background levels. Boeing wants to bulldoze and be done with it, Bowling says. After all, that does fall in line the Boeing Makeover Earth plan to declare the place already safe and ready for primetime as parkland.
Bowling contrasts Wind with the other video embedded to the left, in which is seen a very carefully done cleanup of Outfall 8 which was ordered by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (LARWQCB) because of continuing Boeing exceedances of goo flowing off its property. It involved excavating polluted dirt from the outfall and packaging it up burrito-style and loading into trucks which were carefully cleaned of any toxic dirt on their wheels and undercarriages before leaving SSFL to haul their sullied loads to a licensed dump.
“Here is what is going on,” Bowling says explaining the two films. “Careful and lovely work in the foreground is the Outfall 8 cleanup from the RWQCB. The other outrageous crap in the background is the stuff that makes my blood boil. I have complained that there has been no oversight or public comment periods or even that DTSC is looking the other way, but since Boeing challenged SB 990 [a state law ordering strict cleanup standards], they have been tearing down everything to a standard that who knows what.”
TOXIC TOLL
Debating levels of chemicals and radionuclides at Rocketdyne can make the issue of cleanup of the lab confusing. While the majority of the community understands and supports the AOCs that dictate remediating the land to background levels of radiation and chemicals, Boeing’s media campaign and sloppy demolition procedures literally bulldoze the point home that the company thinks otherwise.
Past studies of the health effects of SSFL goo on the lab’s workers and the surrounding communities suggest that ignoring what Boeing would leave in place might suggest serious safety issues for future users of the land as well as those downstream along what becomes the Los Angeles River.
The September 1997 study results weren’t good for the workers of Area IV where nuclear reactors, a hot lab and a radioactive sodium burn pit was used to incinerate hot goo. “All available evidence from this study indicates that occupational exposure to ionizing radiation among nuclear workers at Rocketdyne/AI has increased the risk of dying from cancers,” wrote Dr. Hal Morganstern, director of the UCLA study. “We found the effect of radiation exposure was six to eight times greater in our study than extrapolated from the results of the A-bomb survivors study.”
The other gooey shoe dropped two years later with a January 1999 UCLA’s School of Public Health of long-term study of Rocketdyne employees exposed to a soup of toxic chemicals while working on the company’s giant rocket test-stands. The results were again grim: Increased rates of cancer were found, especially among workers who handled hydrazine, a high-octane gel used as a rocket-engine propellant. Two million pounds of hydrazine were used at Rocketdyne during the ’50s and ’60s.
UCLA found that Rocketdyne workers who had high hydrazine exposures were about twice as likely as other Rocketdyne employees who worked at the site to die from lung and other cancers. The study shows that 44 in 1,053 workers who had frequent contact with the compound, had died from lung cancer. That rate was twice as high as for the employees who had minor or no contact with the chemical, which has been found to be carcinogenic in lab animals and a “possible carcinogen” to humans.
Excessive deaths from cancers of the kidney, bladder, blood and lymphatic system were also observed, although the lung-cancer numbers were the most startling. “While we believe that something is going on with this group of workers, we don’t know for certain what caused the excessive cancer deaths,” said Beate Ritz, a UCLA epidemiologist and co-investigator on the study, in LA Weekly. “Our best information is that it was hydrazine, but it could be something else related to rocket-engine testing. We do know there is an excessive number of cancer deaths among workers in the high-exposure category.”
A five-year study commissioned by the state legislature announced its results in October 2006 detailing the probable cancers caused by the partial meltdown of just one of the experimental reactors that had serious accidents in Area IV, the Sodium Reactor Experiment. The 1959 meltdown likely caused cancer in 260 to 1,800 people within a 62-mile radius of the eastern Ventura County lab hard on the border with Los Angeles County. The $200,000 report released figures for escaping radionuclides that show that the disaster released 459 times more of the deadly radionuclides iodine-131 and cesium-137 than Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island meltdown did in 1979, according to a Los Angeles CityBeat article.
News of offsite illnesses appears to be worse with the release of the November 2012 Public Health Institute’s California Breast Cancer Mapping Project (7.95 MB) which showed that women in east Ventura County have the highest rate of breast cancer than almost all other areas of California. Western Los Angeles County and Simi Valley are one of four California regions that have a 10 to 20 percent higher invasive breast cancer rate than the rest of the state.
Though the study makes no mention of SSFL as a possible cause, the rate of breast cancers in this region, with Rocketdyne right in the center of it, has been consistently higher than the rest of California for the last nine years. Non-Hispanic white women are affected the most with 73 percent of the cases. Hispanic women accounted for 12 percent of the total and 8 percent Asian females. The American Cancer Society says that ionizing radiation causes breast cancer.
These numbers are easier to understand than complicated calculations for contaminants that cause a world of hurt in only the way the Pandora’s Box of pollutants used at the lab can do. Cleaning up to background and trying to right the situation, and not a blizzard of Boeing baloney about why it shouldn’t have to, is also a fairly simple and straight-foward concept.
RELATED – Rocketdyne Video
The longtime residents fighting for cleanup, and the hundreds of community members who support them, know through their own battles with cancer what it means to live next to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. For over two decades, they fought to clean the place up so it couldn’t harm future generations. They thought that the government and responsible parties had finally delivered them from this nightmare in 2010.
They were dead wrong.
Related Material: “A Trail of Flames” & “A Keen Observer“
NEXT PART THREE – OPERATION ASTROTURF
25 Years of Award-Winning SSFL/Rocketdyne Reporting
1998 – 2023
I played in these hills ALL my life, and lived not far from there, my family today has rashes, and leukemia. WTF? Why weren’t we informed about this disaster? We the people need a class action lawsuit.
There is a company (based in Nevada) that is still searching for former employees. This company helps them file lawsuits. Even as recently as five years ago, this company was watching and, out in Simi Valley.
I wish I could remember their name as they are probably a wealth of information.
Hopefully, one of your readers will know their name. And, wouldn’t it be helpful to be able to talk to former employees.
On a personal level, I would love to yell and scream at the employee who dumped toxic waste in a little stream where children played. I think this was in the area now called West Hills or near there. And, it was at a time when he knew darn well what he was dumping. We even heard about it over in Woodland Hills.
I still think about those young children, and what might of happened to them. It is close to impossible to find anyone from the neighborhood anymore who actually witnessed it.
All I remember hearing is that people watched and DID NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!! SHAME ON THEM!
William,
Thanks for that additional information. I will check your website. Wow. I would imagine the Center for Land Use Interpretation would have an interest in an exhibit on this?
Many thanks,
SBL
Hi SBLOCAL,
The Diversion Tunnel construction can be seen here, on a website I built…
http://www.chatsworthreservoir.com/1970s.html
It’s in use, and has been in use since late 1972, it’s a tunnel, yet, it’s intended purpose was “To improve the water quality of the Chatsworth Reservoir”
The water does go into the LA River and may reach the Tillman Reclamation Plant at Sepulveda Basin in certain Rain Events.
In the 1954 SRE Preliminary Safety Evaluation document, it includes a contingency plan if the reservoir would be tainted from the Sodium Reactor Activities…
http://www.acmela.org/images/Prelim_Safety_Evaluation_SRE_Feb_19_of_1954.PDF
In addition to the IEL Fault, the Burro Flats Fault, connects AREA IV of Santa Susana to the Chatsworth Reservoir.
William Preston Bowling
Founder ACME
Aerospace Contamination Museum of Education
@William Preston Bowling can you clarify what happened with the diversion tunnel? Do you mean that the diversion tunnel was never used because of the detected contamination in 1969?
So where, subsequent to that discovery, DID the contaminated water from the lab go if not into the LA River? Into the local sewage treatment plant?
This is incredible stuff. Thank you so much for sharing it.
The SAGA Continues,
Today, the Department of Toxic Substances Control released their monthly status report regarding activities related to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and I noticed something, well, two somethings…
ONE, The Boeing Co. had Demolished more buildings in AREA IV, Violating the Administrative Orders on Consent (AOC) and the Judge Conti Order (City of LA, NRDC and CBG vs. The Boeing Co.) and have submitted plans to DTSC for the Demo of Buildings 4009, 4100 and 4055, yes, radiological buildings.
If that does not get your blood to boil…
TWO, The video in this article (Above) that shows the Santa Susana Dustbowl is none other than the Instrument and Equipment Lab (IEL) in AREA I, as we are told, a non-radiological area, yet after the fact, or after demolition, according to the DTSC Monthly Status Report, Jan 2013, confirmation sampling found Uranium that exceeds the Radiological Trigger Levels, one more tidbit, the EIL has a geological fault named after it, THE IEL FAULT, that heads down Woolsey Canyon into the Chatsworth Reservoir, any thoughts why it’s is still dry after 40 years, DWP, who owns the Reservoir will tell you it was because of the 1972 Earthquake, yet it was drained in 1969 to build a 12 million dollar (1969 Money) diversion tunnel to divert runoff from the lab to a tunnel under the Hidden Lake community into the Los Angeles River. But the joke was on them, cause, after the tunnel was built, contaminated groundwater was found seeping into the main areas beyond the tunnel, so, as they say… “So much for that”
We need a proper cleanup to BACKGROUND for the Entire Site.
William Preston Bowling
Founder ACME
Aerospace Contamination Museum of Education
@Joan; Who EXACTLY are these guys? Scumbags pure and simple. Unless they get a spiritual awakening, don’t hold your breath for change.
The revelation of Boeing’s PR plan is absolutely stunning in its diabolical implications. That a former LA Times environmental reporter was so damaged by the sudden fall of the titan he used to write for that he has chosen to engineer a (highly paid) campaign that will lead innocent people into harm’s way and induce parents to expose their vulnerable children to terrible toxins is incredible.
The levels of corruption and greed and indifference to human suffering by the individuals making these decisions fits squarely in the psychotic category of personality disorders.
Or do they just hate us? Thank goodness for Michael Collins who refuses to allow these beasts to operate under the cover of anonymous darkness. An enemy of the state could do no more harm if they were to secretly leak chemical weapons in our midst.
Which begs the question: who exactly are these guys?
Being unwilling to clean up the Santa Susana Field Lab is one thing, but using school kids to do their dirty work is not only the ABSOLUTE WORST OF THE WORST….but gives new meaning to the concept of kids being “at risk”. Boeing not only deserves public censure for not providing protective outfits for these young workers, but they also deserve some effective legal prosecution,hopefully leading to an incredibly huge fine and/or some significant and lesson learning jail time!
Boeing has learned from Karl Rove and the current political environment: don’t DO a clean-up, just SAY you’ve done one to “vastly higher standards” than the public deserves.
Then foist the toxic site on the public. When future citizens start getting cancer from this open space that Boeing’s so kindly provided — who will pick up the tab? I’m going to go out on a limb here and forecast that Boeing will NEVER pick up the tab for the SSFL site.