Responsibility for Field Lab Cleanup Assumed by Boeing

Rocketdyne’s new parent company will assume responsibility for cleaning up the toxic legacy of nuclear and chemical research at the firm’s Santa Susana Field Lab near Simi Valley, company officials said Friday.

Boeing North American Inc.--the new company formed by this week’s merger of Boeing and Rockwell International’s aerospace and defense businesses--has plans to take over the job of removing spilled radioactive isotopes and carcinogenic solvents from the rocky, 2,668-acre open-air field lab.

Boeing spokesman Milt Furness said, “At this point, we have assumed all of the liability with the exception of that which pertains to the explosion” that killed two Rocketdyne physicists at the field lab in July 1994.

Rockwell pleaded guilty this past spring to federal felony charges of illegal waste-disposal after the FBI learned that physicists Otto K. Heiney and Larry A. Pugh died as they were blowing up rocket fuel chemicals to get rid of them. The felonies cost Rockwell a record $6.5-million fine. That case remains open.

Federal investigators are nearing a decision on whether to seek additional charges against other Rockwell employees who may have played a role in the illegal chemical disposal, sources have told The Times.

Meanwhile, cleanup continues at the field lab.

Toxins and radioactive elements have leached into the ground since the lab was opened in the late 1940s, as Rocketdyne engineers tested rocket engines and nuclear reactors to help the United States in its quest to beat the former Soviet Union in the Cold War and space race.

Tests have found radioactive traces of tritium and cesium, and whiffs of carcinogenic chemicals such as trichloroethylene in ground water--not only under the field lab, but also off site.

The neighboring Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley has sued Rockwell, alleging that careless work by the company tainted ground water at the Jewish study center’s hillside campus.

Boeing will take over command of the massive job of cleaning up the field lab from Rockwell, and will assume any legal liability, Furness said.

But the Seattle-based company will leave the Rocketdyne division’s environmental staff in place to oversee the day-to-day work, Furness said.

Boeing environmental inspectors have visited the cleanup areas and examined soil samples and the former sites of Rocketdyne’s nuclear materials labs, he said.

“I understand right now we are satisfied with the cleanup that’s going on, and we don’t see any reason to change what’s happening,” Furness said. “We don’t anticipate inserting ourselves into a process that we’re satisfied is proceeding satisfactorily.”

Under Boeing’s supervision, Rocketdyne’s current environmental officials also will continue to meet with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Energy and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, as well as with Rocketdyne’s civilian neighbors, he said.

Rocketdyne spokesman Paul Sewell said, “We’ll continue what we have been doing here all along at Rocketdyne as far as the environmental cleanup, and Boeing will support us in that.”

Simi Valley neighbors of Rocketdyne, who have accused the company of doing a shoddy job ever since the cleanup began in 1989, remain skeptical that Boeing’s takeover will do anything to improve the work.

“It’s disappointing to learn that Boeing appears satisfied with the way the cleanup is going and does not anticipate major changes in the staff responsible for it,” said Daniel Hirsch, head of a watchdog group called the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition. “It sounds as though the name on the work caps may have changed, but the people wearing them will be the same, and that is a recipe for continued environmental problems.”

Added Hirsch: “The cleanup appears to be designed to declare vast areas of the property clean and releasable for public use, when the data indicate they are actually contaminated and unsafe.”