Toxic Chemical Found in Water Near Rockwell Lab

Rockwell International announced Thursday that traces of a toxic chemical have been found in ground water near its Santa Susana Field Laboratory--the first evidence of contamination off the sprawling research site west of Chatsworth.

Rockwell executives said the tainted water discovered 100 feet northwest of their property poses no hazard to humans or the environment. “It’s a totally undeveloped area, and the water is not used by anyone for drinking,” said Steve Lafflam, director of environmental affairs for Rocketdyne, a division of Rockwell.

However, Dan Hirsch, a member of the community-based Rocketdyne Clean-up Coalition, said the discovery “reinforces concern that the decades of sloppy practices may have impacted the public that work or live nearby.”

Hirsch said that although the water was not used for drinking, it was impossible to know whether it has been used for agriculture.

Samples taken from a well about 400 feet deep showed levels of trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, higher than the amount allowed by California drinking water standards. Scientists found seven to 19 p.p.b. of TCE in the ground water, which exceeds the state limit of five p.p.b.

The well, one of six to be bored for the first official monitoring of off-site chemical contamination, is about 400 feet downhill from a heavily contaminated well on the Rockwell property. It is on land owned by the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, which runs a children’s summer camp about a mile from the boundary.

Institute officials said Thursday’s announcement caused concern but would not affect their operations. “We’re carefully monitoring the situation,” said Helen Eisenstein, a member of the board of directors.

“We don’t believe this poses any health risk to anyone on our property,” she said. “We aren’t irrigating with it, we aren’t using it for our livestock and we certainly don’t drink it.”

Wells about 1,000 feet farther into Brandeis-Bardin property have routinely produced water free of TCE, Lafflam said, but he acknowledged that those were private wells not officially sanctioned by regulatory agencies that monitor contamination levels.

Results from the five other monitoring wells will be available by the end of next month. Two of those wells are near the Brandeis-Bardin property and the other three are clustered about 100 feet west of the Rockwell site.

Lafflam said Rockwell will then decide how to deal with the tainted water--possibly by adding it to the cleanup operation that began seven years ago when tests showed TCE concentration in ground water beneath the site to be hundreds of times above acceptable levels. The company also will test water farther away from Rockwell’s property if the pending test results warrant it. But Lafflam said he thinks the tests found “the very end of the migration. . . . It shows that it’s hardly left the site.”

But Hirsch said the one result could not indicate with any certainty whether further spread was possible.

“You can’t tell much of anything from one data point,” he said. “The ground water is very complex, and we don’t yet know what the concentrations are. We don’t know the concentration of different elevations at the same location, and we don’t know the concentrations at other locations.

“It certainly will spread, but the question is whether it will spread in a serious way or whether it will be fast or slow. It certainly won’t be uniform.”

TCE is a chemical found in many industrial solvents, including those used to clean rocket engines tested at the laboratory. Lafflam said Thursday’s results pointed to contamination from TCE spillage back in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Over the past year, Rockwell has been criticized by regulatory agencies for failing to meet health and safety goals accepted throughout the industry. In April, a team of U.S. Department of Energy experts found 155 violations of federal job-safety rules at the Santa Susana site and urged the company to improve ground-water and air-quality monitoring.

Rockwell is also cleaning up the nuclear research section of the site--a project expected to last through 1993. The company ceased work at the Santa Susana “hot lab” in December, 1989, and is spending an estimated $37 million to clean it up.