ROCKETDYNE CLEANUP WON’T HELP RUNKLE CANYON
Historic Fix Doesn’t Extend to Tainted Adjacent Land Where KB Home Plans to Build 461 Condos and Homes
By Michael Collins
LA Weekly – September 23, 2010
Elation over a historic deal to clean the sprawling Santa Susana Field Laboratory earlier this month garnered significant media coverage for good reason: The California Environmental Protection Agency division overseeing cleanup of the long-closed Rocketdyne rocket-testing and nuclear-research site convinced two federal agencies to agree on a plan for ridding the polluted acreage of toxins. Cal-EPA’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) persuaded the Department of Energy and NASA to clean up their polluted portions of the 2,850-acre site, leaving behind only normal, or background, levels of radiation, heavy metals, dioxins and other chemicals.
Built among rocky bowls and stunning canyons between Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley, the testing site suffered a partial nuclear meltdown in July 1959 that was the worst in U.S. history, releasing far more radiation than the better-known Three Mile Island disaster in 1979.
But lost in the glow of good news, L.A. Weekly has learned, is the fact that the cleanup will stop at the property line.
In a July 22 letter, California’s toxic-substances control department had already quietly approved KB Home’s cleanup plans for an adjacent property in pretty, but toxin-tainted, Runkle Canyon. KB Home plans to erect 461 condos and homes.
The department is not requiring that the tainted soils be returned to normal in Runkle Canyon. In fact, its plan appears to be to back off.
Yet according to an October 25, 1999, report by Foster Wheeler Environmental Company of Costa Mesa, the soil contains radioactive Strontium-90 readings averaging nearly 27 times normal levels. The state also will stop testing surface water in Runkle Canyon for heavy metals, according to the July 22 letter, although the state’s own data, supplied to the Weekly, shows that it detected metals including nickel and barium in the single water sample it tested.
In an e-mailed response to questions from the Weekly several days ago regarding heavy metals found in the water, Rick Brausch, the state’s project director for the Rocketdyne and Runkle Canyon cleanups, assured: “DTSC has not yet concluded this evaluation, and will make no final decisions or interpretations of the data until this issue is satisfactorily resolved.”
Activists living in nearby Simi Valley enclaves, some of whom got involved years ago after family members fell ill, previously sought their own studies of Runkle Canyon, which found high levels of arsenic, nickel, vanadium, barium, cadmium, lead and chromium.
The first study, in May 2007, was commissioned by the group Radiation Rangers. Another sampling two months later in the same area, conducted by the City of Simi Valley, yielded high levels of heavy metals.
One Radiation Rangers member, Patty Coryell, calls herself “meltdown mad” over the fact that California’s toxics department is taking credit for hammering out the recent federal agreements while ignoring problems that remain at Runkle Canyon.
“The DTSC doesn’t care,” Coryell tells the Weekly. “They’ve shown in the best, biggest and flashiest way possible that they just don’t care. They ask for comments; they pay no attention to comments. They say they are going to clean it; they have no intention of cleaning it up. … It’s beyond the pale.”
Excitement had greeted the news that Cal-EPA Secretary Linda Adams and California Sen. Barbara Boxer had finessed the deal with Energy Secretary Steven Chu to clean up the federally controlled areas of Rocketdyne. Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, proposed an approach that bypasses lengthy and expensive risk assessments.
