REAL HOT PROPERTY
LA’s Recreation & Parks filed its California Environmental Quality Act Notice of Preparation on December 15, 1981. The draft Environmental Impact Report contained all the NRC findings and declared that the place was safe. It repeated the water findings with the high alpha reading but also didn’t require the mandated monitoring of the suspect well. Perhaps throwing a bone to the environmentalists, the draft EIR noted, “As an important note, major excavation activities will not occur during site preparation phase alleviating any concerns over unearthing buried materials.” A month later, CBG called the draft EIR “cavalier” for determining that there was no hazard at the site. It decried the report as “unsound, incomplete, and inconclusive.”
In early February 1982, the VA responded to a set of questions that CBG had submitted two weeks earlier. The response included three major fabrications that the VA’s own records bear out. The VA declared that it didn’t exchange any radioactive materials with UCLA when records show that it did under its joint AEC experiments. The VA falsely stated that there was no acceptance of radioactive waste from UCLA yet the records show that tritium and carbon-14 waste from UCLA were deep-sixed in the Brentwood dump. And, most incredulously, the VA avowed, “So little C-14 was utilized… (it was) not buried on VA property to the best of our knowledge.” This statement didn’t gel with the VA’s own documents that show C-14 as being the second most prevalent radionuclide in the dump.
The VA was also cagey as to the chemical contaminants in the waste site claiming that all chemical disposal records were destroyed after two years. “As to how chemical waste had been disposed of by the VA during various periods since its inception, it would be pure conjecture on our part.”
CBG’s Hirsch was at his wit’s end. “It’s not like you can go anywhere on the field to find contamination,” Hirsch said. “So a geologist told us that what needed to be done was to fly over this property and to take infrared photographs because vegetation will show up as red. If there were radioactive or chemical wastes buried beneath the surface, they would likely migrate upward and kill off the vegetation. So if we could plot where vegetation wasn’t growing, we would know where we could dig it and take a soil sample or do more detailed Geiger counter work.”
Hirsch pressured Braude to arrange for an LAPD helicopter flyover with a police photographer. It was a ride he would never forget.
“It was one of the most dramatic events, actually, of my life,” Hirsch said. “Way up with big open door. (I’m) hanging out of this door flying over West LA. Braude’s office, however, which was very reluctant to have this done, had informed the VA several days in advance that we were coming. So we flew over where the grasses grew and where the grasses didn’t, and where it didn’t, we’d be able to take radiation samples or soil samples. As we fly over, all of a sudden we get over the VA and my jaw just drops. We looked down below us and what had yesterday had been a huge field of grasses up to your waist was now completely plowed under. A tractor was down below plowing the last little bit of it under. Now the VA claims that this was all standard practice in terms of weed abatement and fire control. We can never prove (a cover-up). We did check and it was done weeks earlier than they usually do it. Literally, the evidence was plowed under. So we were not able to chart where the holes were.”
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