CLEANING UP ROCKETDYNE
Citizen-inspired remediation starts at lab-adjacent Sage Ranch
By Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – November 21, 2007
The Boeing workers in the otherworldly suits looked out of place trudging through the dry creek bed that separates Sage Ranch Park and the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Nov. 20. Outfitted in head-to-toe translucent plastic uniforms with air filter masks, goggles and gloves, they chain-sawed a swath through the brush and trees blocking the seasonal stream. As they worked, their quarry appeared: black and grey blocks of lung-destroying asbestos and broken pipes with the toxic heavy metal antimony.
All the while, a worker used a high pressure hose to spray down the area to keep the lung-destroying asbestos from becoming airborne.
Work began Nov. 9 on what will be a massive cleanup in the hills near Simi Valley in eastern Ventura County. The remediation began after the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) issued lab owners Boeing and the NASA an Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Order on Nov. 1 for the cleanup of asbestos-containing material strewn along the creek bed from 1965 to 1978 by lab workers working at the former NASA liquid oxygen plant (LOX) nearby. The order also requires cleanup of the Rocketdyne-Atomics International Rifle and Pistol Club shooting range where elevated concentrations of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been found in the soil near and down stream of the former shooting range.
The deadly debris stretches partway down the intermittent headwaters of the so-called Northern Drainage, which leads into the American Jewish University on Brandeis-Bardin’s sprawling campus in Simi Valley below. The 2005 Topanga Fire, which swept through the area and burned much of the 2,850-acre lab, also revealed the detritus of decades of Cold War work on “The Hill,” as it is called today by environmental activists whose aim to make sure the property is cleaned up is suddenly, and surprisingly, seeing fruition.
Christina Walsh, William Preston Bowling, and John Luker are three of those activists and have the distinction of being some of the most prolific on-site observers of the bucolic range of hills cursed by Rocketdyne’s chemical and radiological contamination. Last March, they were hiking along the Sage Ranch Loop Trail when they spotted the first blocks and layers of what turned out to be lethal asbestos insulation from where nearby the LOX was situated before being demolished.
“[The debris was] bigger than Bill,” Walsh said of the first asbestos find. “It was the entire wall of the creek, and when we scraped the wall, it was pure white underneath. Very unnatural, that was clear, but we really didn’t know what it could be.”
“It looked like a slice of three-layer cake, yet full of foam, pipes and powder,” said Bowling, who covers the contentious Rocketdyne issue for his website h2ohno.com. “We invited the DTSC on a hike of Sage Ranch to show them our concerns.”
To the amazement of the trio, after years of being at loggerheads with the government and Boeing over cleaning up the intensely polluted site, the DTSC responded.
“After studying the photographs we had, we went back and looked again,” said Walsh, whose website CleanUpRocketdyne.org is chronicling the Sage Ranch remediation. “We put together a PowerPoint and sent it to [DTSC’s] Norm Riley in an email. We offered to show him in person and he took us up on our offer. He showed up with his entire team.”
