REAL HOT PROPERTY
The heart of the dump lies in a ravine below the dog park surrounded by chain link fence with fading paper warning signs. The abyss is accessible from adjacent VA athletic grounds, MacArthur Field, used by hundreds of young soccer players who often have to retrieve errant balls in the arroyo through unsecured gates. A central dirt mound of plant-covered debris sits in the middle of the dump emitting high ambient radiation readings. This reporter, using a nuclear radiation monitor, detected shards of radioactive glass that registered over four times normal.
Despite a spirited campaign to get the dump properly addressed in the early 1980s, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog, the Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG) lost the battle after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the VA convinced a concerned public, media and key politicians that building a park on the site would be perfectly fine. Since 1985, a leased City of Los Angeles park has sat on twelve acres of this VA land. A section of the Barrington Recreation Center was carved out in the fall of 2003 for the present day dog park. The southern field of the off leash area lies over a known chunk of the nuke dump.
“We thought a nuclear dump in Brentwood was impossible,” said CBG founder Dan Hirsch in a series of interviews begun in 2001. “They generally put them near poor people. Then weresearched and discovered that indeed the VA had been dumping radioactive waste from their research program on their own property in an open field just off of Barrington.”
The same kind of biomedical radiation research done at UCLA and the VA that resulted in this waste disposal site was also done at UC Davis. There, residual radiation from experiments on over a thousand irradiated beagles resulted in its dump being declared an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site in the early 1990s. The cost of cleaning up the Davis dump was $33 million. No comprehensive analysis of the West LA VA dump has ever been done, nor any remediation of the nuclear and chemical hazards that remain buried there.
The VA and UCLA also dumped radioactive garbage off the coast in prime fishing grounds near the Channel Islands. The university incinerated mixed fission products from the heart of a UCLA nuclear reactor, radioactive animal carcasses and other lab waste, in an outside-venting crematorium that operated on the campus itself from 1954 to 1994 when it was shut due to concerns over “improper controls.”
According to environmentalists, digging and grading the Brentwood dump to build future projects could unleash poisons aboveground if the waste isn’t properly characterized and mitigated beforehand – a very expensive proposition. Even left alone, the ground under the location will remain dangerous for thousands of years. There is also evidence that years ago when the controversy over the dump first erupted, unusually high levels of alpha radiation had spread into one of five wells tested around the dump. This should have triggered a government investigation, but didn’t, and the nature and source of the well’s radiation remain unknown.
“The Committee to Bridge the Gap tried to make everyone aware of the potential dangers of the dump a quarter century ago,” said former CBG research director Dr. Bennett Ramberg,now a national and international columnist on nuclear issues. “In the singular drive of local politicians to have their park, and in the interests of the Veterans Administration and Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cover their sloppy handling of poisonous radioactive waste, they didn’t listen and painted CBG as anti-nuke loonies. What they didn’t count on was any kind of in-depth investigation of the site and what went in it and what could’ve gone in it.”
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