Report Downplays Rocketdyne Link to Cancer in Area
Federal health officials released a preliminary report Tuesday saying they have found no evidence to substantiate claims that decades of rocket testing at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory harmed the health of its neighbors in the San Fernando and Simi valleys.
Investigators for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cautioned that more research needs to be done before exonerating Boeing Co.’s Rocketdyne Division. But analysis of “available data” failed to identify any link between Rocketdyne’s Cold War-era operations and cancers reported by people living nearby, investigators said.
“Based upon our initial review . . . we have not seen that people in local communities have been exposed to substances from the site at levels that would result in adverse health effects,” agency scientists said in a one-page memo presented Tuesday to congressional staffers.
An index of data used in the review is not expected to be made public until a full report is issued next month. But agency officials said earlier that material from Rocketdyne would be reviewed, as well as data from federal and state agencies, interviews with individuals and a cancer registry.
The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, was brought in to assess health threats at the site at the request of Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) and U. S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).
Rocketdyne spokesman Dan Beck said the agency’s preliminary report “offers further reassurance to residents that there doesn’t appear to be a health threat.”
“We will do whatever is necessary for the appropriate agencies to fill any data gaps,” he added.
The memo was presented during a two-hour briefing in Washington with congressional staffers, who have been seeking $300,000 in federal funds for an ambitious health study in the area. Such a study has long been sought by environmentalists and residents.
The memo appears to indicate that the agency would support some type of study. But it gives no explicit promise to support or fund the proposed assessment--to be conducted by an independent panel of scientists known as the Epidemiological Oversight Panel.
Representatives for Boxer, Feinstein and Gallegly called the agency’s preliminary findings positive and said they believe that the agency is genuinely committed to securing the kind of research that could definitively address public concerns.
“It’s a positive development,” Feinstein spokesman Howard Gantman said. “They didn’t come in and say, ‘There’s not a health problem.’ ”
But Daniel Hirsch, co-chairman of the Epidemiological Oversight Panel, was not satisfied with the agency’s response.
A nuclear energy expert and longtime Rocketdyne critic, Hirsch has been among those pushing for further studies on health effects for more than a decade.
He said the primary question before the agency was whether it would approve a request for $300,000 to supplement $150,000 offered by the state to support a full-blown health study in the area. Instead, he said, the agency has spent two months and an undisclosed amount of money merely to conclude what Hirsch already knew: that without more research, health dangers cannot adequately be assessed.
“The question was simple,” Hirsch said of the funding request. “We still don’t have an answer. It would seem as if there’s almost a concerted effort to prevent [the study] from occurring.”
In lieu of any specific commitment, the memo did say that the agency would recommend further study of airborne chemical releases from the laboratory, more in-depth analysis of water quality, more sensitive analysis of area radiation and further analysis of cancer data.
“You have to understand, Rocketdyne does not want our panel to do this work,” Hirsch said. “They have a big economic incentive to make sure these studies either never get done or don’t get done by an independent entity.”
Agency spokeswoman Gwen Eng dismissed Hirsch’s concerns.
“We don’t just give money out to anybody without going through the process we’re going through,” she said.
She added that she could not speculate to what extent Hirsch’s group, or any group, would be approved for federal funding down the line.
“For right now, there is no money,” she said.
Hirsch said he wants an independent review because if a federal agency or related group were to conduct the feasibility assessment, its credibility would be suspect.
Before he saw the agency’s preliminary recommendations, Hirsch wrote a four-page letter to a high-ranking agency official in which he said he was troubled by what he viewed as an “extremely cursory” review of facts by agency investigators.
He contended that the agency relied too much on information from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and NASA, and not enough on outside sources.
He also contended that investigators made no effort to meet with members of his panel during their information-gathering process and never contacted members after the panel forwarded 1,500 pages of Rocketdyne-related documents that might have been useful in the survey of published material.
“There is a great deal of skepticism on the part of the community toward your agency--doubts about whether you were coming to do a thorough, dispassionate review or to perform a cursory review to provide support to a beleaguered company and associated agencies,” he wrote.
Gallegly spokesman Tom Pfeifer said he is confident that the agency will consider all factors carefully as it fleshes out its preliminary recommendations over the next several months.
“Basically, what it boils down to is they are not concerned at this point that there is immediate danger to the community but they are not satisfied that they have all the information they need, so they are recommending further models and data collection,” Pfeifer said.
“What they are recommending is basically the feasibility study we were talking about.
“From our perspective, they did exactly what we’ve asked them to do,” he said.
