U.S. Agents Seize Records From Rockwell Facilities : Raid: Probe reportedly involves how firm disposed of hazardous waste and billed the government for it.

Federal agents swept through Rockwell International Corp. facilities in Canoga Park and Ventura County on Thursday, seizing environmental files in an investigation into how the firm disposed of hazardous waste--and how the firm billed the government for the cost.

About 20 agents from the FBI, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Departments of Defense, Energy, the Air Force and the Navy confiscated files from the Rocketdyne division’s Canoga Park headquarters and its Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Simi Valley.

Court records on the raid and the search warrant that the agents executed have been sealed, and none of the agencies involved would comment on the purpose of the raid.

However, a senior federal official said that a multi-agency criminal and civil investigation is looking into Rockwell’s disposal of hazardous materials and its billings for that disposal.

The sophisticated rocket engines and nuclear reactors developed at Rocketdyne’s 2,700-acre Santa Susana lab since 1947 have produced a legacy of toxic chemical and radioactive byproducts, which the firm has paid to clean up.

One official said the current investigation does not focus on the disposal of radioactive waste.

Rocketdyne officials refused to say much Thursday about the raid beyond confirming that agents dug through files at the Canoga Park headquarters for about six hours, then left with Rockwell records.

“The agents stated that they were investigating environmental issues, and Rockwell is cooperating fully with them,” said Janet McClintock, a Rocketdyne spokeswoman, reading from a statement. She added, “I just don’t know anything further.”

Gary Auer, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Ventura County office, confirmed that his agents executed a search warrant at Rockwell facilities.

FBI agents were joined by agents from NASA, the Department of Defense inspector general’s office, the EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Navy and Air Force, he said.

But Auer would not comment on the purpose for the search.

Under federal contracts, Rockwell would be reimbursed for the cost of disposing of hazardous or toxic material by whichever agency issued the contract that generated the waste.

Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana field lab was born 48 years ago as a rocket-testing facility.

Many of the rockets used in U.S. space missions were developed there--including the massive space shuttle engines--and the basso thunder of rocket tests still shakes surrounding neighborhoods in Simi Valley and the northwestern San Fernando Valley from time to time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, major nuclear research was done in the site’s rocky hills on behalf of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and, later, the U.S. Department of Energy.

Beginning in 1956, 16 nuclear reactors were built and operated there. But the last was shut down and dismantled in the 1980s.

In 1989, Rockwell began a cleanup of what it called mostly low-level chemical and radioactive contamination at the field lab--the residue of more than 30 years of research.

Rockwell officials have maintained for years that there was never a significant release of contaminants from the lab.

But test results in 1991 revealed that low levels of tritium--a form of radioactive hydrogen--had seeped into ground water 100 feet northwest of the lab’s property line.

Environmental officials said that the radioactivity levels were far below the state’s drinking water limits and posed no health risk to the public. Ground water in the area is not used for drinking.

A 1991 health study of Rocketdyne neighbors found higher rates of bladder cancer among residents of three housing tracts in Canoga Park and Chatsworth than among Los Angeles County residents as a whole.

But a two-year study by the California Department of Health Services in 1992 found that neighbors within five miles of the lab faced no increased cancer risk.

Now, UCLA researchers are nearly two years into an exhaustive health study of 5,069 past and present Rocketdyne workers, trying to learn if 235 cancer deaths among them can be linked to radiation and chemical exposure.

While Rocketdyne kept records of how much radiation its workers were absorbing, company officials say they lost their monitoring records on workplace levels of carcinogenic chemicals such as hydrazine and trichloroethylene.