Activists Told to Pressure Rockwell for Cleanup

Representatives of more than 35 homeowner and environmental groups were urged Wednesday to pressure Rockwell International to speed the cleanup of radioactive and chemical pollution at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory west of Chatsworth.

Contamination of a portion of the 2,668-acre complex was described in a preliminary report released last month by the U.S. Department of Energy, which has contracted with Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division for nuclear work.

The report found that while the pollution poses no immediate threat to nearby residents, more environmental tests are necessary to determine the extent of the contamination because of inadequacies in the company’s ground-water monitoring system.

Rocketdyne and DOE officials have since announced that 18 additional ground-water monitoring wells will be drilled by the end of the year on a portion of the site where nuclear research was conducted for nearly 40 years.

Health Effects

But the 45 homeowners and activists at Wednesday’s meeting at a Northridge home said they are still concerned about the health effects of the pollution.

“I am shocked and dismayed that people in the San Fernando and Simi valleys have been kept in the dark so long,” said Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein, who is seeking reelection in her West Valley district.

In the early 1980s, Korenstein was a member of the National Council of Jewish Women, which met with Rocketdyne officials at the time and expressed concern about environmental dangers from the site.

“We knew something was stinking up there, and we were right all along,” she said.

The meeting drew representatives from such groups as the Coalition of Valley Communities, a federation of about 20 homeowner groups; the local chapters of the Sierra Club and the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Southern California Federation of Scientists, an environmental group.

James Werner, a former consultant who worked on the DOE report and is now an environmental scientist with the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, attended the meeting. He and Dan Reicher, an attorney for the council, urged the group to become politically active and to use all avenues open to them, such as the federal Freedom of Information Act, to educate themselves about Rocketdyne’s activities.

Reicher said that at other DOE sites across the nation, the contractors provide public reading rooms stocked with documents and reference reports on the facilities.

“You can get action if you can get local congressmen involved,” Reicher said.

Monitor Cleanup

Werner said the council plans to open an office in Los Angeles and will monitor cleanup at the lab.

Milena Miller, president of the Reseda Community Assn., said Rocketdyne is “making billions and billions of dollars up there, and don’t tell me they don’t have the money or time to clean it up.”

DOE officials estimated in a December report that cleaning up a 290-acre portion of the site where nuclear work occurred will cost about $55 million and take about 20 years. However, a new report estimating the cost and duration of the cleanup will be released in August, DOE officials said.

Pat Coulter, a Rocketdyne spokesman, said earlier Wednesday that a draft of the still-unpublished report “substantially cuts” the amount of time estimated for the cleanup. Coulter declined to say how long the report estimates that the cleanup will take. DOE officials have also declined to discuss the report until August.

But Scott Samuelson, acting director of the nuclear energy division of the DOE’s San Francisco office, said last week that the lab is one of about 35 polluted DOE sites in the nation. “It may be some time before the department has the resources to put” into work on the Rocketdyne site, he said.