Judge’s Ruling Goes Against Neighbors of Rocketdyne Facilities
A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday shot down attempts by Rocketdyne’s neighbors to press a class-action lawsuit for property damage, but she left the door open for the plaintiffs to amend their complaint.
U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins ruled that the suit alleging that Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Lab and three San Fernando Valley facilities have contaminated nearby homes and businesses was too broadly focused and inadequately supported for the narrow legal constraints of class-action law.
But Collins also gave some weight to the plaintiffs’ claims that off-site ground water contains traces of hundreds of thousands of gallons of a cancer-causing solvent that Rocketdyne dumped onto the ground during decades of rocket testing.
And the judge gave lawyers another two months to persuade her that the suit should extend beyond the original eight plaintiffs.
If certified as a class action, the suit could include as many as half a million people living in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and the San Fernando Valley--as far as 10 miles from the field lab.
This is the latest in a series of lawsuits accusing Rocketdyne of polluting the communities around it with toxic and radioactive byproducts of its research into rocket engines and nuclear power.
John Reding, attorney for Boeing North American, the parent company of Rocketdyne, declined to comment after the hearing. He referred instead to his arguments made in court pleadings.
Reding argued that the plaintiffs’ attempts to win class certification for neighbors of the 2,668-acre open-air field lab near Simi Valley “are based upon unfounded generalizations, speculation and self-serving conclusions by plaintiffs’ trial counsel.”
Reding also argued in papers that the plaintiffs’ attorneys failed to show that the eight property owners suing Rocketdyne have suffered any actual property damage.
“None of them have had their properties tested, done any clean-up or taken any steps to find out whether their property values have been affected by [Rocketdyne’s] activities in any way,” he wrote.
And Reding argued that the plaintiffs failed to offer proof of any single release of chemicals or radiation that would have affected all the lab’s neighbors.
But plaintiffs’ attorney Barry Capello said he expects to file an amended complaint by the judge’s deadline of Dec. 22 to answer her criticisms of the plaintiffs’ most recent version of the suit. He will take another stab at winning class certification at a hearing set for Feb. 2, he said.
“We know what we can do to get what she needs into the complaint,” he said. “She gave us a road map of what it will take to meet the tests that the law says are necessary for certification.”
Collins took note of the fact that the plaintiffs established that the carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE) had traveled off-site.
According to court documents--Rocketdyne’s own answers to questions filed by the plaintiffs (known as interrogatories)--TCE was used to wash down equipment and flush engine thrust chambers during rocket engine test-firing at the test site.
“On at least 8,000 occasions, between 1951 and 1977, defendants admittedly used TCE to flush hardware and rocket engine thrust chambers during large rocket engine test firing at SSFL,” Capello wrote in court pleadings, quoting the interrogatories. “Each flushing took between 50 to 100 gallons. The TCE was discharged from the test stand onto a concrete spillway, drained into an unlined channel and deposited in unlined ponds at” the lab.
And plaintiffs cited internal Rocketdyne memos stating that since 1953, more than 230,000 gallons of TCE were absorbed into the ground at the field lab--most of that before 1961.
Water tests later found traces of TCE in ground water on the property of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley, a Jewish studies center, which recently reached an out-of-court settlement in its own property-damage suit against the aerospace firm.
The plaintiffs also allege that their property was polluted by nuclear research at Rocketdyne facilities, including the field lab, the Atomics International facilities on Van Owen and De Soto avenues in the San Fernando Valley and space that the firm occupied at the Hughes Aircraft building on Fallbrook Avenue.
The suit demands damages for property devaluation for all the members of the potential class. It asks the court to order Rocketdyne to set up a medical monitoring program that would track cancers and other illnesses among field lab neighbors.
And it asks for an injunction requiring Rocketdyne to reveal the public health risks associated with its research, to stop discharging hazardous substances into the environment and to clean up after any pollution.
But Collins issued a written ruling Monday saying that the class-action bid was overly broad and inadequately supported.
Collins wrote that plaintiffs’ attorneys had failed to offer proof that the contamination spread throughout the area targeted by the suit, which is bounded by the Santa Susana Mountains, the Moorpark Freeway, the Ventura Freeway and the San Diego Freeway and covers people who may have lived or worked there at any time since 1946.
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“Rather, Plaintiffs argue that it is ‘both plausible and probable that toxic or radioactive materials migrated off site, contaminating the adjoining populations,’ ” Collins wrote. “The majority of materials that Plaintiffs rely on to demonstrate the ‘possibility’ that hazardous substances have been released within the Contamination Area relate to the SSFL facility only, although Plaintiffs claim that activities from additional facilities contributed to Plaintiffs’ harm.”
Collins’ ruling said that the plaintiffs also failed to meet one crucial legal test in class-action law--that they had suffered at least one type of property damage that was common to all of them. “For example, one community may be experiencing a drop in the real estate market due to factors unrelated to the Defendants’ alleged activities.”
And, Collins wrote, they failed to offer proof that Rocketdyne’s activities “have placed the Class at a potentially increased risk of health problems [that] do not vary from class member to class member.”
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FYI
Rocketdyne will host community meetings tonight and Thursday night from 6 to 9 to provide information and answer questions on environmental cleanup and monitoring programs at the Santa Susana Field Lab, and on a UCLA health study that found a higher-than-expected rate of cancer deaths among Rocketdyne workers. Tonight’s meeting is at the Rancho Santa Susana Community Center, 5005-C Los Angeles Ave., Simi Valley. Thursday’s meeting will be at the Rocketdyne Recreation Center auditorium, 8500 Fallbrook Ave., West Hills.
