EnviroReporter.com’s Runkle Canyon Comments Analysis

A large amount of environmental data has been generated by multiple developers about Runkle Canyon, a 1,595 acre canyon and rolling hills where a 461-home KB Home/Lennar neighborhood is planned. This includes KB Home’s 41 reports supplied to the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) as part of their Voluntary Cleanup Agreement, information from two 2007 tests by the Radiation Rangers and the city of Simi Valley, and offsite contamination data from Boeing’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne) investigation.

The “Railroading Runkle Canyon?” series has examined public and media comments on the draft Runkle Canyon Response Plan that DTSC will approve once it is finalized. The point of this series was to explore the myriad of pollution problems on and under the property; problems that the comments indicate are not adequately addressed in the Response Plan.

Now that that a new project manager has been brought in for both the Runkle Canyon and Rocketdyne cleanups, perhaps these comments will be given attention. Certainly, that’s the DTSC’s pledge as we noted in “Coup de Goo.”

The extensive analyses included in this series seem to show that pollution problems in Runkle Canyon, which is in an eleven-acre drainage downhill from the nuclear area of Rocketdyne, are far more serious than both the developer and DTSC’s former project manager, Norman E. Riley, took them. The new project manager, Rick Brausch, has an unprecedented opportunity to re-examine Runkle Canyon’s environmental issues, issues that have shown to be of great importance to the surrounding communities, especially Simi Valley.

But these reports do not tell the whole tale. This story began when we exposed that the project’s 2004 Environmental Impact Report discounted high strontium-90 in the canyon in a March 2005 Ventura County Reporter cover story called “Which Way the Wind Blows.”

The Runkle Canyon Response Plan comments also don’t address how the developer and state secretly retested the canyon in 2006, getting drastically lower strontium-90 results, as we wrote about in “Hot Property.”

Nor do they include information about why a citizens group formed in response to our reporting and called themselves the Radiation Rangers who ended up having to do their own testing for heavy metals in Runkle Canyon that the developer had not done. Or that Simi Valley subsequently went and did its own tests and the city’s results were worse though the mayor and city council tried to spin it more favorably to a pliant media and unsuspecting community.

These comments don’t reflect the optimism of the community and city when Norm Riley took charge in 2007 or the disappointment many ended up feeling with Riley, especially the Rangers, to whom Riley had once said “I’m on your side.”

This series was also not able to reflect the reaction people had to our “Not the Norm” post that looked at Riley’s interview with Joan Trossman Bien for an article we wrote together for Miller-McCune called “50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown.” In that interview, Riley called State Senate Bill 990 a “hindrance’ in cleaning up the lab as well as saying that Boeing would sue over the legislation in the not-too-distant future.

All of these events are crucial to understanding the toxics issues affecting Runkle Canyon. The comments contain an analysis of the law, complex consideration of the environmental data, common sense suggestions, and an awareness of how they all fit together based on a sound science approach.

EnviroReporter.com is under no illusion that DTSC and policy-makers will take these comments seriously, or even look at them for that matter. We broke this story, however, and it has continued to grow in importance the more we learn about it. Indeed, these comments are about an impending residential development hard on the border with an area so contaminated that it has cost a quarter of a billion dollars to remediate so far with no real end in site.

The Radiation Rangers say the lives of current and future residents are at stake. They want their voices heard. EnviroReporter.com wants to insure that what we have discovered through nearly five years of investigation isn’t simply ignored or dismissed for political and economic expediency or due to institutional ineptness. The value of this work should be invaluable to the department charged with making sure Runkle Canyon is truly assessed and cleaned up before any development of the land is allowed.

« 1 2 3View All»