Decision on Lab Wastewater Delayed

Declaring it needed more time to address public safety concerns, a state regulatory agency postponed a decision Thursday to renew Boeing’s permit to discharge wastewater from its rocket-testing lab near Simi Valley.

After listening to more than an hour of emotional testimony from residents living near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board said it wanted to determine what more could be done to ensure pollutants from the rocket-testing center did not spread to creeks and streams below.

In addition to the public testimony, several public agencies and officials lodged concerns with the panel, including the Los Angeles city attorney’s office and the office of state Rep. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara).

“We listen very, very seriously to the public,” board Chairman Francine Diamond said after the hearing. “We are supposed to be protecting water quality, and they have a right to be heard when they think their health is being compromised. Our number one concern is public health.”

Although the discharge permit is limited to regulating surface water runoff, Diamond said she wanted to explore whether the board could take more aggressive steps to control groundwater contamination as well.

“We want it to be pushed to be as strong as possible and see if we have any more authority to deal with this problem,” Diamond said. “This is a potentially serious public health issue.”

The postponement was viewed as a victory by a core group of community members who for years have urged public officials and regulators to take a more proactive approach in dealing with cleanup of the field lab, the site of rocket-engine testing for decades and once home to a government nuclear-research center. A partial nuclear meltdown occurred in 1958 at a reactor operated there by the U.S. Department of Energy.

“I guess we had an impact,” said Dawn Kowalski, who has lived in the shadow of the hilltop lab for 25 years.

“I raised two children there, who played in the streams,” Kowalski told the panelists, who listened attentively. “What price do we put on a child’s life that’s innocently looking for tadpoles in a stream?

“These guys contaminated and my children played in those creeks. What good are you if you aren’t willing to stand up and enforce the rules that these agencies clean up to the highest standards?”

Rocketdyne director Steve Lafflam said Boeing was doing everything possible to clean up the site to state and federal standards, and he objected to a requirement under the new permit that the company add 11 new testing sites on the premises to monitor water contamination.

“The permit should complement not complicate the cleanup,” Lafflam told the board.

Among the numerous toxic substances found in the soil and in groundwater trapped in the bedrock at Rocketdyne are trichloroethylene and perchlorate, which has been detected in non-drinking wells in Simi Valley. No one has been able to prove Rocketdyne was the source of perchlorate in those wells.

Diamond said the permit issue would return to the board in two or three months.