Aerojet Chino Hills Clean Up
What a difference a $46 million cleanup makes! The above panorama would be covered in upscale homes without our investigation that uncovered unexploded munitions, depleted uranium and toxic fuel oxidizer perchlorate problems at this former military industrial plant. The Aerojet Chino Hills facility is 29 miles (45 km) east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles and has been the subject of much heated debate due to the intense contamination left there from Cold War Era activities.
Click here to see Aerojet’s Chino Hills complex through Google Earth. Note that while development abuts the facility, Aerojet Chino Hills still looks much like it did during the go-go years of munitions and defense industry testing. Cleanup activities began in 2000 at the site seen here on WikiMapia. The site remains a stark reminder of past polluting.
The area became the focus of recent attention due to a magnitude 5.4 earthquake that occurred at 11:42:15 am PDT on July 29, 2008, which was felt for hundreds of miles around but caused relatively minor damage as noted on Wikipedia. The epicenter of the earthquake was less than a mile away from the Aerojet facility and occurred over eight miles underground.
This property was the subject of an investigation of EnviroReporter.com’s Michael Collins back in 2000 where he found “a clandestine 800-acre complex that operated for nearly 40 years before it was closed in 1995 by military-industrial giant Aerojet General. The site, surrounded by barbed wire and virtually inaccessible cliffs, is near the juncture of Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties. There, Aerojet detonated mustard- and tear-gas weapons, exploded depleted uranium-tipped projectiles, and produced a galaxy of bombs and munitions,” according to Collins’ first Aerojet article appeared in the May 3, 2000 edition of the LA Weekly and was called “Living Next to a War Factory.”
Two weeks later, Collins expanded the piece for a cover story in the Orange County Weekly where he found that polluted water from the Aerojet facility was suspected to be carrying the toxic rocket fuel oxidizer off-property via “a small creek that sluices runoff from the Aerojet site into the Soquel Canyon Creek in Chino Hills. Soquel Canyon feeds into Carbon Canyon Creek, moving south through Brea, Placentia and into Anaheim. It discharges into the Santa Ana River near the crossroads of the 91 freeway and Kraemer Boulevard. The Santa Ana is a major source of water for many in Orange County, flowing through Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa before dumping into the Pacific Ocean at the south end of environmentally troubled Huntington Beach.”
That May 18, 2000 Orange County Weekly cover story was called “Russians, Rockets, and the Santa Ana River.”
Before Collins’ coverage of Aerojet Chino Hills, the issue of this heavily-polluted site strewn with unexploded ordnance was only covered in a small local paper. Few folks, even government officials, even knew about the place. But Collins did and began to investigate the facility. The $46 million cleanup figure comes from Aerojet in September 2006, according to the local paper – the number now could top $50 million as remediation continues. This reporting, now partnered with EnviroReporter.com’s Denise Anne Duffield, has resulted in helping stop over $6 billion worth of proposed development of contaminated land as noted on our two-year anniversary.
