Rocketdyne’s Most Enduring Legacy May Be Toxic
Rocketdyne’s founders could hardly have foreseen the very public future they were making at the top-secret Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
From the 1950s through the late 1980s, as Rocketdyne engineers burned exotic chemicals and coaxed raw power out of piles of uranium at the lab, urbanization and new laws crept in around it.
The lab that played a key role in the government’s efforts to beat the Soviets in the Cold War and the space race has become an environmental punching bag.
The announcement Thursday that UCLA researchers found an increased risk of cancer death among some Rocketdyne workers was only the latest blow in a seemingly endless barrage of criticism, lawsuits, environmental scrutiny and criminal investigation stemming from the lab’s toxic legacy.
Rocketdyne officials say they are dealing as best they can with the environmental damage caused back in the days when the company knew far less about the dangers of its top-secret work.
“People were doing their jobs, and doing their jobs in the manner that they believed was proper,” said Lori Circle, a Rocketdyne spokeswoman.
“The regulations changed; new knowledge came to bear,” Circle said. “We have better knowledge than we used to have. And as a company, we’ve moved in that direction.”
Rocketdyne has used measures such as these in handling the field lab’s toxic legacy:
* Since 1987, the firm has set up 240 wells to treat half a million gallons of solvent-tainted water per day, and removed tons of decommissioned nuclear reactors, irradiated buildings and radioactive debris.
* The aerospace firm employs a public-relations team full time to answer public criticism and concerns from its own workers and retirees.
* It has paid untold amounts of money in secret, out-of-court settlements to neighbors of the field lab who filed lawsuits blaming Rocketdyne for their illnesses and losses.
* And last year, it pleaded guilty and paid an unprecedented $6.5-million fine for illegally disposing of hazardous waste after two scientists were killed in 1994 when the rocket fuel chemicals they were burning blew up in their faces.
But the firm--which was bought in December by aerospace giant Boeing Inc.--also faces future challenges and potential blows to its reputation:
* The UCLA research team plans by year’s end to complete a study of cancer deaths among Rocketdyne workers who were exposed to hazardous solvents and rocket-fuel chemicals.
* Federal prosecutors are investigating possible criminal charges against a handful of Rocketdyne officials over the fatal 1994 explosion.
* Environmental law specialists are pushing a class-action lawsuit through the federal courts that could encompass hundreds of field lab neighbors, alleging Rocketdyne gave them cancer or poisoned their property. A U.S. District Court hearing on certification of the class is set for next month in Los Angeles.
* Members of the environmental group Save Open Space are citing the field lab’s pollution problems in an attempt to block development of the huge Ahmanson Ranch project next door to the lab.
* State-supervised soil testing is ongoing at sites scattered across the entire 2,668-acre field lab to determine the extent of chemical pollution and the cleanup that Rocketdyne must do.
* And the cleanup of radioactive material will continue until 2006, by which time Rocketdyne plans to have destroyed and removed a patch of irradiated earth, the concrete foundations of two reactor buildings and all trace of its “hot lab” for handling nuclear materials. Cleanup of radioactive elements from the ground water beneath the lab will take decades.
*
Rocketdyne’s cleanup of toxic solvents from ground water is going smoothly, said Tom Kelly, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup project manager for the field lab.
“I think they’re pretty well on their way to resolving the extent of the contamination,” he said. “They’re still looking for the outer edges of the contamination, but certainly, they have a lot of facilities in place to contain the contamination that’s there.”
Cleanup of tainted soil is going much more slowly, he said.
Rocketdyne’s testing plan was only finalized in 1994. And after one testing contractor was fired for allegedly falsifying records on other tests, the replacement contractor is still working out a plan for choosing soil-testing sites at the lab.
And while work is nearly done to decontaminate and decommission the last of 25 buildings that housed 10 nuclear reactors and other radioactive structures, the cleanup of radiation from ground water beneath and around the lab will continue for decades, Kelly said.
As for Rocketdyne neighbors who worry that the UCLA cancer-death results might apply to their own neighbors, friends and relatives, Kelly said, “I think they’re overly concerned . . . They seem to be a fairly conscientious company while I’ve been involved.”
But Kelly may be in a minority where public opinion is concerned.
*
Hundreds of neighbors of the field lab from Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley turned out at community meetings held Thursday and Friday by the UCLA research team.
Many wondered aloud whether they face the same risks as Rocketdyne employees who worked closely with uranium, plutonium, cesium and strontium, with toxins such as hydrazine, trichloroethylene, toluene and xylene.
And members of the oversight panel of scientists, activists and Rocketdyne neighbors said they look forward anxiously to the UCLA team’s study of chemical risks--which is already compromised by a shortage of data.
“We got nothing whatsoever from the company,” said John Froines, a professor of toxicology at the UCLA School of Public Health.
“We were told that there was quite a bit of information that had been collected, but that somebody threw it out--inadvertently or overtly,” he said. “We were told that all their records were lost, and we’ve been arguing with them for the last four years.”
Extensive radiation-exposure records helped the first phase of the UCLA cancer study, he said. “The problem with the chemical study is that we have zero, none, no quantitative data to estimate exposure.”
Rocketdyne provided limited records on workers who died of a fatal type of lung cancer known as mesothelioma--most often linked to exposure to asbestos, Froines said.
*
But the company appeared to keep no records on exposure to asbestos, despite a 1972 federal law requiring companies that used it to monitor its use and the health of workers who were exposed to it, Froines said. And, he said, it will be difficult to separate their exposure at Rocketdyne from exposure they had at other jobs.
There is also little usable data on carcinogenic solvents such as perchloroethylene, trichloroethane and methylene chloride, which Rocketdyne workers often used at the field lab to clean and degrease metal rocket engine parts.
“Organic solvents were everywhere. They were thrown out onto the soil and they were discarded everywhere as if [the lab] was a garbage dump,” Froines said. “We have enormous anecdotal information that the chemical exposure was very widespread. The problem is I have no information as to where those solvents were actually spread.”
Still, the UCLA team will press forward with studies on one key chemical: hydrazine
Hundreds of workers on the field lab’s rocket engine test stands were probably exposed to hydrazine, a rocket-fuel component that is a known carcinogen.
By cross-referencing their employment time records and job descriptions with medical records of cancer deaths, the researchers hope to file a draft report to the oversight committee by year’s end, Froines said.
“I would like to give a good report to the advisory panel,” he added. “But it’s not obvious we are going to be able to do that.”
Also questionable is whether any study can determine the cancer risk to communities around the field lab from radiation that leaked off site.
“There was an obvious approach for the workers; a portion of them were wandering around with film badges” that measured radioactivity, said Daniel Hirsch, a member of the study team oversight panel and a longtime Rocketdyne critic.
“But there’s not an obvious preferential approach” for civilians, Hirsch said. “We’ll do our very, very best to try to find a way to do this. It’s important, but it’s equally important to try to prevent any future cancers and to try to get that damned place cleaned up.”
Circle, the Rocketdyne spokeswoman, said last week, “We recognize that we have environmental problems and issues at the site.
“That’s why we have a very aggressive environmental cleanup program in place,” she said. “We have dedicated professionals in the various environmental fields--geologists and hydrogeologists, you name it . . . And we’re committed to finishing that job.”
