Rocketdyne Neighbors’ Suit Charges Cancer Link
Neighbors of Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory sued the aerospace firm’s parent company in federal court Monday, alleging that decades of nuclear and chemical research at the mountaintop complex poisoned their land and water and caused them to contract cancer.
Ten plaintiffs from the San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley filed a class-action suit against Boeing North American, which in December bought the 2,668-acre research complex that its Rocketdyne division still runs.
Filed in Los Angeles, the suit demands that Boeing pay damages and set up a medical fund for future treatment of the cancer that the plaintiffs and their neighbors say they have suffered as a result of toxic and radioactive releases at the Rocketdyne lab over the past 51 years.
The suit also asks the court to order Rocketdyne to make public all past and present risks of contamination posed by the field lab’s research into rocket engines and atomic reactors.
And it cites a list of nuclear meltdowns, chemical explosions and toxic releases that Rocketdyne allegedly has allowed to foul the air, water and land around the field lab since it opened in 1946 to design the first U.S. rocket engines.
Attorney Tina Nieves, who represents the plaintiffs, said Monday that Rocketdyne neighbors contacted her firm, saying they believe that living near the lab caused extremely rare forms of cancer that are known to be brought on mainly by radiation exposure.
“They all live at opposite ends of the Santa Susana Pass,” she said, referring to the road that hugs the hill where Rocketdyne sits, midway between Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley.
“We thought that was pretty powerful evidence that there was some wrongdoing going on up at Rocketdyne, that a nuclear reactor facility was between these two cancer clusters we found,” Nieves said.
One plaintiff, a woman who saw cancer crop up in three generations of her family, lived for years in the shadow of the research lab. Another couple said that they found eight of 10 families on their block had suffered some form of cancer.
The suit does not address possible health risks for Rocketdyne employees, who are the subject of a sweeping epidemiological study being conducted by UCLA researchers.
Officials at Boeing’s Rocketdyne division in Canoga Park declined to comment Monday afternoon, saying they have not yet been served.
“Nobody has advised us there was a filing,” said Paul Sewell, a spokesman for Rocketdyne. “I don’t think we would comment on litigation of this nature anyway, at this stage, at least. We were taken completely by surprise. We weren’t expecting it.”
The suit lists several incidents from the 1950s on, when nuclear and chemical research allegedly spilled out of Rocketdyne’s classified, high-security facility and into the outside world.
Rocketdyne’s field lab, a sprawling complex of bunkers, buildings and open-air test stands, forged the machinery that the United States used in a high-stakes race for nuclear supremacy and mastery of the heavens.
It was the proving ground for the earliest missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. It produced nearly every rocket engine in the U.S. space program, from the Redstone that carried Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard aloft in 1961 as the first American in space to the massive main engines that shove the space shuttles into orbit today.
The field lab also carried a lethal array of chemicals and radioactive elements in its toolbox, from the highly carcinogenic solvents hexavalent chromium and trichloroethylene to radioactive plutonium, one of the deadliest substances known.
