Ventura County May Charge Rockwell Employees in Fatal Blast

The day after Rockwell International agreed to plead guilty to illegal hazardous waste storage and disposal in the explosion deaths of two scientists, federal investigators continued their probe Tuesday and Ventura County prosecutors also considered pursuing charges against company employees.

The U.S. attorney’s office announced a plea bargain Monday in the 21-month-old investigation, granting Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division immunity from further criminal charges.

In exchange, Rocketdyne agreed to plead guilty when it appears Thursday in U.S. District Court to three felony counts, pay a $6.5-million fine and give the FBI internal investigation reports on the blast that killed Otto K. Heiney and Larry A. Pugh in July 1994.

But the pact will not shield current and former Rockwell employees from federal criminal prosecution.

Nor will it protect Rockwell and Rocketdyne from civil charges if the firms are found to be lying about the explosion or the investigation, said Assistant U.S. Atty. William Carter.

And the guilty plea would not stop Ventura County from investigating Rockwell employees in Pugh and Heiney’s deaths, said Greg Brose, head of the Ventura County district attorney’s environmental unit.

Brose said that once the federal case is closed, his office will decide whether to pursue its own investigation against Rockwell workers for violations of state environmental and worker-safety laws.

He added, “I think we just wanted to keep all the options available.”

A Cal/OSHA investigation into the blast brought $202,500 in fines against Rocketdyne, which the firm has appealed.

But when Cal/OSHA brought the case to Ventura County prosecutors, they instead passed it on to the U.S. attorney’s office because federal jurisdiction was more appropriate at the time, Brose said.

Meanwhile, FBI agents and U.S. prosecutors plan to scrutinize three thick Rockwell reports on the explosion to determine whether to charge individual company employees for ordering the illegal burning of explosive chemicals that killed the two men.

Rocketdyne spokesman Paul Sewell declined to comment Tuesday on the contents of the reports, except to say that one was written by Rocketdyne, one by Rockwell and one by an independent panel of experts whom he refused to identify.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Nathan Hochman said he cannot tell yet how helpful the reports will be.

“Without seeing them, it’s impossible to figure out,” he said. “We anticipate that their full cooperation will assist the investigation.”

U.S. authorities also plan to look into how UXB, Rocketdyne’s cleanup contractor, handled the cleanup and removal of hundreds of pounds of explosive chemicals from the outdoor Santa Susana Field Lab in southeastern Ventura County after the accident.

Heiney, 53, and Pugh, 51, worked for Rocketdyne’s Chemical Technology Department, which researched gun propellants and flares designed to decoy heat-seeking missiles away from military targets. That wing of the company has since been shut down.

On July 21 and July 26, 1994, Rocketdyne admits, the two physicists were disposing of triaminoguanidine nitrate--or TAGN--a highly volatile chemical used in gun propellants.

Heiney, Pugh and three other Rocketdyne employees had already burned off two batches. They would spread some of the chemical in a metal tray atop layers of sawdust, nitrocellulose and glycidal azide polymer and a device called an “electric match,” then retreat to a blockhouse to ignite it.

One of the five then apparently returned to the still-hot test pans with a container of explosives, which then blew up in the men’s faces, instantly killing Pugh and Heiney and burning test engineer Lee Wells, who stood 10 to 15 feet away.

The day after the blast, Rocketdyne President Paul Smith told reporters that the men were conducting legitimate tests, using sonic probes to measure “overpressure” waves from the blasts and determine how the nitrocellulose and glycidal azide polymer should be handled.

But on Monday, Smith said that a Cal/OSHA investigation had found the truth: that the men were illegally burning 160 pounds of TAGN, a little bit at a time, to dispose of it.

Rockwell had no disposal permit, and had already been illegally storing the stuff without a permit for 55 days. And, Smith said, there was no evidence the men at the test stand had collected any data at all from the tests.

It would have cost only $15,000 to dispose of the TAGN legally, company officials said.