Judge Rejects Suit Over Rocketdyne Pollution

A federal judge shot down attempts by Rocketdyne’s neighbors to press a class-action lawsuit for property damage Monday, but 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 other facilities in the San Fernando Valley have contaminated nearby homes and businesses was too broad and inadequately supported for the narrow legal constraints of class-action law.

But Collins also gave some weight to the plaintiffs’ charges that off-site ground water contains traces of a cancer-causing solvent that Rocketdyne dumped onto the ground during three of the lab’s five decades of rocket testing.

And the judge gave lawyers two months to convince 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 the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County--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 arguments he presented to the court.

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.”

He also argued in court papers that the plaintiffs’ attorneys failed to show that the eight property owners suing Rocketdyne have suffered any actual property damage.

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 Dec. 22 deadline to answer her criticisms of the plaintiffs’ most recent version of the suit. He will make another attempt at winning class certification at a hearing set for Feb. 2, 1998, he said.

Collins took note of the fact that the plaintiffs established that the carcinogen trichloroethylene (TCE) had traveled off the site.

According to court documents-- which contain Rocketdyne’s answers to questions filed by the plaintiffs--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,” Capello wrote in court documents, quoting the interrogatories. “ . . . 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.

Plaintiffs cited internal Rocketdyne memos stating that since 1953, more than 230,000 gallons of TCE was 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 that 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 Vanowen Street and De Soto Avenue in the Valley and space that the firm occupied at the Hughes Aircraft facility 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 described in the complaint, which is bounded by the Santa Susana Mountains, the Moorpark Freeway, the Ventura Freeway and the San Diego Freeway. The complaint covers people who may have lived or worked there at any time since 1946.

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.