Rocketdyne Panels Face Termination

Once again, bureaucratic wrangling is threatening to terminate a citizens’ group overseeing a study of the health effects of working at Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Lab--and a second panel monitoring the cleanup of that contaminated site.

The developments have steamed state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) and Assemblywoman Sheila James Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), who fired off several letters to state and federal agencies calling the actions “reprehensible and duplicitous.”

The first development involves a change in funding for a citizens’ panel overseeing UCLA studies of Rocketdyne workers. Recently, it appeared the group would lose all its funding, but $125,000 of funding was found.

However, that money has been earmarked for analyzing the UCLA study only, rather than taking the first steps toward studying the health of Rocketdyne neighbors--long a rallying call among some Simi and San Fernando residents and local legislators.

One of two UCLA studies has already been released, showing higher than expected cancer death rates among some Rocketdyne workers; a second study is due to be released in January.

The funding--the last of $1.6 million allocated for the UCLA studies--will also only last through March, said Dr. Robert Harrison of the state Department of Health Services.

However, committee co-chairman Dan Hirsch said Harrison led other panelists to believe the money could be used for a feasibility study to see whether an epidemiological study of neighbors was possible.

“The purpose of that money was to fulfill the commitment made to the community for a review of the feasibility of a follow-up study of the community,” Hirsch said. “Behind our backs, the panel will now be terminated in March and we’ll be prevented from doing what the community expects us to do.”

However, Harrison said the money paying for the panel--funneled from the federal Department of Energy through the California health department--covers only worker studies. Harrison said he would work with the panel to find other funding.

Kuehl and Wright are calling on the Energy Department to keep the oversight panel alive for two years--rather than the current six months--and to eliminate the provision barring “new work,” such as a feasibility study.

The second panel--monitoring the multimillion dollar cleanup of the field lab, where decades of nuclear and rocket-engine research took place--will likely be reconfigured, said the Environmental Protection Agency’s Vicky Semones, who conducts the often-rancorous Santa Susana Field Lab Work Group quarterly meetings.

It is possible that more people could join the group, which brings Rocketdyne, regulatory agencies and the public together to share cleanup information, she said. Or the sometimes disjointed quarterly meetings could be augmented with more focused topic meetings.

“If we have gone three years without building a modicum of trust with these entities . . . we say, lets take a look at this. Can we continue to do this?” she said. “We cannot have the quarterly meetings stall the progress of the cleanup.”

That kind of talk worries Kuehl and Wright, who said in letters to federal officials that “it seems difficult to believe that concurrent threats to both panels’ future existence are somehow coincidental.”

“We urge you to personally take immediate action to prevent the killing off or the gutting of the . . . work group,” the legislators wrote in a letter Tuesday to Felicia Marcus, administrator of the EPA region that covers the field lab.

Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck said he and many epidemiologists believe it would be very difficult and expensive to study Rocketdyne’s neighbors and that such a study would likely not yield good results.

Nonetheless, he said the aerospace giant is willing to work with regulators to look for off-site contamination for the study. So far, remnants of Rocketdyne’s toxic legacy have only been found in a small area just abutting the 2,668-acre open-air field lab.

Beck said Rocketdyne was not trying to remake the Santa Susana Field Lab Work Group overseeing the $55-million cleanup more friendly to the company’s interests. However, he would like to see better community representation.

“People may feel that way, but it’s not true,” he said. “Any effort to reconfigure the work group has been purely initiated by EPA. We have nothing to do with it.”