Health Study of Rockwell Workers Criticized : Simi Valley: Some say research on chemicals and radiation exposure is undermined by missing records.

Simi Valley residents who live near Rockwell’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory on Friday questioned the worth of an ongoing health study examining the effects of chemicals and radiation exposure on Rockwell workers.

At a meeting of the advisory committee appointed to monitor the mortality study, Santa Susana Knolls resident Marie Mason said she felt scientists will be forced to rely too heavily on educated guesses about exposures because decades worth of records from the research facility are missing.

“I live at the end of that road with my children,” Mason said. “I’m supposed to rely on their good guesses? I’m not comfortable relying on their guesses.”

The goal of the mortality study is to determine whether there was an unusual number of deaths among Rockwell employees over the years, and if so, to link those deaths to possible chemical or radiation exposures.

The Department of Energy commissioned the $840,000 study of the company’s Rocketdyne Division in 1991, and a team of scientists from UCLA began gathering research last fall. Final results are not expected for at least a year.

The advisory panel is composed of residents, government officials and independent scientists.

The UCLA scientists acknowledged they are encountering an unusual number of difficulties in gathering information on past Rockwell employees and their activities on the 2,700-acre site southeast of Simi Valley.

“This kind of study is actually the most difficult kind to do,” said John Froines, one of the study’s principal investigators. “Lots of times you can go into a factory and see where all the exposures might occur. Here it’s a crazy quilt of exposures, practices and changing technologies.”

Rockwell officials said they have released all the records they have on radiation and chemical exposures to the UCLA team. But very little in the way of records exists, he said.

“The innuendo is that we haven’t turned things over to them,” said John Rozas, director of health and safety at Rockwell. “But we’ve searched everything and given them everything likely to yield results. I can’t invent records.”

Rozas said records probably did exist at one time, but accident reports and other health and safety monitoring data probably were destroyed after a few years because there were no federal requirements to keep them.

“You have to keep tax records for seven years,” panel member Sheldon Plotkin said. “You don’t have to keep accident reports?”

But Beate Ritz, assistant researcher for the UCLA team, said she can work without the accident reports. What worries her, she said, is that very little information is available about who worked where. Location codes for workers should provide clues about what chemicals they were exposed to, she said.

“I only have 26 location codes,” Ritz said. “But there are what, 300-plus buildings up there?”

She said she will have to rely on job titles for employee records.

According to the UCLA team, research on worker records at Rockwell’s Canoga and De Soto facilities in the San Fernando Valley is scheduled to begin next week. Those records are crucial to the study because so many workers moved between those sites and the Santa Susana testing facility.

But Rozas said Rockwell may not allow researchers in, because those facilities were not included in the original DOE proposal for the study.

An angry Mason stood up to tell the panel she has serious reservations about the study.

“These people have very little to work with,” she said, referring to the UCLA team. “Everybody is guessing.”

But Froines said he has confidence in the results of the study.

“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “I think we’ll come out with a good finding. It won’t be perfect. But I think we’ll be able to determine if there was excess mortality.”

Money problems are also plaguing the study.

The UCLA team is asking for another $110,000 to finish the project. Scientists have already gathered death certificates for 3,402 vested employees who worked for Rockwell for more than 10 years, but expect to be tracking down up to 4,000 death certificates for non-vested employees, far more than they initially expected.

Rozas said Rockwell recently asked for $230,000 from the DOE to cover costs of employee time spent helping the researchers. The request was denied at the state level.