Watchdog Group Keeps Rocketdyne on Short Leash

For seven years now, the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition has prodded and pestered the big aerospace lab up on the hill.

Rocketdyne, these citizen watchdogs insist, is not their enemy, not quite.

But the dogged critics believe that without constant scrutiny the firm will do a shoddy job of cleaning up the toxic legacy of decades of nuclear and chemical research at its 2,668-acre Santa Susana Field Lab.

Rocketdyne officials and some employees call the coalition hypercritical, its chief spokesman annoying, and its stance overly distrustful of Rocketdyne’s strong efforts in recent years to eradicate pollution from the rugged hilltop site between Simi Valley and Canoga Park.

Yet the coalition--dozens of Rocketdyne neighbors gathered around a core group of ecologists, cancer survivors and anti-nuclear activists--keeps the pressure on.

“The real danger is that [Rocketdyne] will certify the area to be clean, they’ll sell the land and the new tenants will find out years later, when it’s too late, that the area’s still dirty,” said Daniel Hirsch, the coalition’s de facto spokesman. “We’re trying to prevent that.”

When federal bureaucrats overseeing the cleanup moved on to other jobs, the coalition patiently brought their replacements up to speed; members filled in the new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials on the decades of nuclear research and rocket tests that polluted Rocketdyne’s field lab with chemicals and radiation.

And with Rocketdyne preparing to give a clean bill of health next year to the former site of the company’s “hot lab” for handling nuclear fuel, the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition has turned up the heat under the EPA.

Hirsch and other coalition members are pressing the EPA to send in another independent inspector to make sure that Rocketdyne--already hit with several hefty fines for illegal waste disposal--is doing its best to ferret out and remove the toxins from the open-air lab.

Hirsch--a diehard activist with worn shoes, a battered Mazda subcompact and more than 20 years’ experience in nuclear politics--says, “My job is to try to keep Rocketdyne honest.”

But Rocketdyne sees the citizen activists as shrill and impossible to please.

“The last meeting we had of the Santa Susanna work group, I mean, it’s like they couldn’t believe anybody,” including government agencies monitoring the cleanup, said Rocketdyne’s Majelle Lee.

“We’re making our best effort for cleanup, and they say, ‘Well, tell us you’ve done enough sampling,’ and I say, ‘How do I convince you I’ve doing enough sampling?’ ” said Lee, program manager for cleanup of Rocketdyne’s nuclear activities. “I don’t know if they know what would satisfy them.”

The Santa Susana Knolls must have seemed the perfect place to test rockets and reactors when North American Aviation opened the field lab in 1946.

The site’s rocky canyons and natural amphitheaters were well-ventilated, somewhat fire-retardant and far from civilization.

But civilization crept in, setting the stage for conflict:

As the Cold War and the Space Race against the Soviets heated up top secret research at the field lab through the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, real estate agents began selling off dozens of hillside ranches around it.

Soon, Barbara Johnson’s family had moved into a house on Black Canyon Road on the Simi Valley side of the hill, as had Dawn Kowalski’s, Holly Huff’s and Marie Mason’s.

“I was raised around Rocketdyne,” Huff said. “During the 1950s, it was a very top secret place. . . . Nobody knew what was going on up there.”

At its height in the 1960s, the field lab employed 9,000 workers who used--and sometimes carelessly discarded--heavy metals, cancer-causing solvents and radioactive isotopes. And soon, the surrounding neighborhood was chockablock with homes.

“At the time, people didn’t understand the environmental impact of what they were doing,” Lee said.

In the spring of 1989, the U.S. Department of Energy--which oversaw nuclear research at the field lab--revealed that soil and water testing found radioactive pollution had leaked into ground water at the lab.

At first, Rocketdyne insisted that no radiation leakage had been found at the lab. The company also said no radiation had leaked off-site from the 16 nuclear reactors that ran there between the late 1940s and early 1980s or from the “hot lab” that processed nuclear fuel, the company said.

But Rocketdyne later admitted that radiation was found in water on-site and off-site.

The reports galvanized concerned San Fernando Valley residents such as Estelle Lit, Sheldon Plotkin and Jerome Raskin, who quickly gathered their neighbors into a coalition to call for an immediate investigation and cleanup.

Hirsch, who had already established himself as a Rocketdyne watchdog, joined the group soon after.

While he was teaching at UCLA in 1979, his students discovered film of a 1959 accident in which 13 of the 43 uranium fuel rods in a Rocketdyne reactor ruptured or suffered partial meltdown. Hirsch’s tiny activist group, the Committee to Bridge the Gap--funded by grants and donations and located above a church in West Los Angeles--pressed for legislative hearings that ultimately bore no fruit, but the 1989 revelations breathed new fire into the issue.

The Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition set three goals: shut down nuclear work at the lab, ensure a complete cleanup of radiation there and launch a health study of Rocketdyne workers.

The coalition pushed its agenda and grew more vehement with each new turn of events.

It won a court decision in 1991 thwarting Rocketdyne’s attempts to obtain a new Department of Energy license for its “hot lab” to strip plutonium from spent fuel rods.

It won funding from the California Department of Health Services for UCLA to study the health records of 5,000 Rocketdyne workers, and the department’s permission to sit as an oversight panel to make sure Rocketdyne does not compromise the accuracy of the final report. The study, by a team of UCLA epidemiologists, is due out in December.

And it pushed for permission to take part in monitoring the ongoing cleanup activities at the field lab.

As the group found its feet, new events fed its distrust of Rocketdyne:

* Rocketdyne’s parent company, Rockwell International, paid a $42,000 fine to the U.S. Department of Transportation for trucking an excessively radioactive container off-site from the field lab in 1991.

* Rockwell paid $625,000 in 1992 to settle a federal lawsuit over 46 alleged waste-handling violations at the Rocketdyne lab and other Rockwell sites.

* The firm pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a record $6.5-million fine last spring for felony waste disposal violations after a 1994 explosion killed two Rocketdyne physicists who were blowing up rocket fuel chemicals to get rid of them.

* And two of the Cleanup Coalition’s members were diagnosed with breast cancer--Barbara Johnson in 1990 and Dawn Kowalski in 1994.

Both women say heavy radiation treatment put their cancers into remission, and they cannot prove Rocketdyne caused their illnesses.

But they remain vigilant, and wary about Rocketdyne’s promises to clean up.

“I don’t want to say they lied to us, but they were not forthright,” Johnson said last week. “They obviously were protecting themselves and were trying to downplay the danger. We were told early on that nothing got off-site, then we found not only did [radioactive] tritium get off-site, but dioxin [a carcinogenic chemical] as well.”

The coalition has extended its distrust of Rocketdyne to the government agencies that are overseeing the years-long cleanup of the site.

While the federal EPA is monitoring the ongoing cleanup, the California EPA is overseeing Rocketdyne’s efforts to renew its operating license.

When Cal/EPA officials last Thursday trotted out Rocketdyne’s new plans to test for pollution around the lab before getting that license, coalition members barraged them with questions and accusations.

They charged that Cal/EPA let Rocketdyne take control of the public review process, draft inadequate test plans and handpick its own testing contractor.

At one point, Hirsch stalked to the front of the room, grabbed Cal/EPA’s copy of the test plans and flipped through it, grilling agency geologist Craig Christmann about testing methods.

Christmann assured the group that Cal/EPA will keep watch over the testing process, but by meeting’s end he began to look weary.

“They’re entitled to say or do anything they like at a public meeting, if that’s the way they want to approach it,” Christmann said the next day. “I think there’s been a long history of mistrust between the public and Rockwell, long before our agency was involved.”

Cal/EPA believes Rocketdyne is working hard to clean up the lab, “and they’ve given us no indication they’re trying to hide anything from us,” Christmann said.

Rocketdyne officials say that while they admire Hirsch’s perceptivity and articulateness, he and the coalition members are overly critical.

“What I see here working with the company over the last seven years is a real commitment to clean up the site,” said Lee, who has overseen many of Rocketdyne’s cleanup programs in the past seven years.

“I don’t know how helpful it is to sit in public meetings and tell Rocketdyne and the EPA and the DOE and the Department of Health, ‘We don’t trust you,’ ” she said. “I think one of the things that would help us is if there are constructive comments, on maybe how to get it done faster, quicker, cheaper, better.”