Neighbors Air Doubts Over Rocketdyne Study
More than 50 concerned residents vented their long-standing frustrations with the nearby Rocketdyne facility Wednesday night and heard scientists detail a new health study sponsored by the federal government.
The Santa Susana Public Health Initiative is expected to start this month and be complete within three years, said officials with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
UCLA scientists and the Eastern Research Group Inc. will conduct the study, which seeks to assess whether accidents or long-term operations at the site have any correlation to cancer rates among area residents or any measurable effect on the surrounding environment.
But many of those at Wednesday’s meeting expressed skepticism about the seriousness of the new study. It comes a year after the federal agency’s preliminary report found no evidence that decades of rocket testing at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory near Chatsworth had harmed neighbors in Simi Valley or the northwest San Fernando Valley.
“For me this is just more money being spent and we’re not going to know anything,” said Marie Mason, who has lived in nearby Santa Susana Knolls since 1972. “I’ve been coming to these meetings for 11 years. I still don’t know if it’s OK to live in my home.”
Residents said they trusted some members of the UCLA research team, including professor Hal Morgenstern. He served as a principal investigator in a study in the 1990s that found a link between cancer rates in workers at the facility and low-level radiation and chemicals at the site.
But Morgenstern and his colleagues said it would be much harder to find links between the site and the broader community, because it’s hard to track which residents lived where at what time.
“The question on everyone’s mind is, does this facility cause cancer?” said UCLA researcher Beate Ritz. “We will probably not be able to answer this question. We may have to come back in a year and say, ‘Sorry, we cannot answer this very important question.’ ”
Meanwhile, longtime Rocketdyne critic Dan Hirsch said the $600,000 study is compromised by the fact it’s being funded by the federal government. In general, Hirsch said, “ATSDR simply puts a government stamp on the contractor’s claims immunizing the government . . . and the contractor.”
Although the UCLA researchers will use some new forms of tests and develop new information, they will have to use previously generated data provided by Rocketdyne and the government for most of their analysis. That, some residents said Wednesday, automatically limits or compromises the new study.
Rocketdyne, now a division of Boeing Corp., conducted nuclear and rocket-engine tests at the facility for decades during the height of the Cold War.
