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The Brentwood nuclear dump is clearly seen in exclusive aerial
photos taken sometime between 1999-2003. Mounds associated
with Brentwood School are in foreground of arroyo that shows
the evidence of being filled with 5,000 truck loads of dirt.
photos taken sometime between 1999-2003. Mounds associated
with Brentwood School are in foreground of arroyo that shows
the evidence of being filled with 5,000 truck loads of dirt.
'Hot' syringe found near crescent-shaped mound
in dump associated with Brentwood School
in dump associated with Brentwood School
ENVIRON bored six holes into the subsurface of the future
aquatic center, above, and found no high radiation readings.
That is not surprising since this is the wrong place to bore.
aquatic center, above, and found no high radiation readings.
That is not surprising since this is the wrong place to bore.
The Phase One part of Millennium Consulting's plan included a much larger
area to test, above, than was actually tested. Concerns about the efficacy of
this testing, as well as ENVIRON's Brentwood School survey, have surfaced.
area to test, above, than was actually tested. Concerns about the efficacy of
this testing, as well as ENVIRON's Brentwood School survey, have surfaced.
Nuke 'Em High
Unearthing the VA dump’s dirty secrets
raises more questions than answers
Unearthing the VA dump’s dirty secrets
raises more questions than answers
Holy Hypo! Countless syringes were
unearthed building Brentwood School's
athletic complex. Untold numbers still
remain buried under rubble says report.
unearthed building Brentwood School's
athletic complex. Untold numbers still
remain buried under rubble says report.
- Congressman Waxman releases 5,539 pages West LA VA
Brentwood nuke dump documents and land use reports
- VA Secretary Nicholson claims no rad waste ever at
Brentwood School in letter to Waxman
- Dump operated from 1948 to 1968, four years longer than
previously reported by Los Angeles CityBeat and
EnviroReporter.com
- Newly discovered map suggests dump even larger and
stretching down the arroyo near Brentwood Theatre
- Syringes and "medical waste including low-level radioactive
materials ... covered by fill material to depths of twenty to
thirty feet or more" at prestigious private school
- Extensive ash trenches discovered excavating Brentwood
School both upper and lower fields
- UCLA "Burn-All" nuclear crematorium may be source of ash
- Nuke crematorium operated for 40 years at UCLA with little
control and no air filters violating current law
- Excavators find countless syringes & trash cans of needles
- Brentwood School lower athletic field construction of drain
used asphalt to bury hospital syringes and refuse
- VA contractor MicroTech, LLC flip-flops on rad waste under
Brentwood School fields but finally says there is dumping
- VA creates "Issue Paper" to deal with reporter Michael Collins
- Heart of nuclear and chemical dump in arroyo is filled by
50,000 cubic feet of dirt -- the equivalent of 5,000 truck loads
- Congressman Waxman tells Los Angeles CityBeat he wants
answers from Secretary Nicholson
- CARES, a Bush Administration plan that could allow VA
development that could impact the dump, has its first
meeting of the Local Advisory Panel in nearly two years this
September 6, 2007 from 5 to 9 pm in the Wadsworth Theater
on the West LA VA. An August 21 VA press release suggests
that the department is backing off privatization aspirations
and will build new facilities for the health care of veterans
and homeless veterans.
Human radiation experimentation
contributed to waste in Brentwood dump
like this one with carbon-14 above
contributed to waste in Brentwood dump
like this one with carbon-14 above
As reported here and in Los Angeles CityBeat February 22, 2007,
Brentwood School conducted an environmental assessment of its
property in December 2006. Those $150,000 tests involved one
surface soil sample randomly chosen per each acre of the twenty
acres Brentwood School leases from the VA, and twelve 30-foot-
deep borings into the ground to look for radiation. As reported in
"Hide and Seek," the tests were criticized as "insufficient" and a
"waste" due to the limited nature of them.
The mystery of the Brentwood nuclear and chemical dump moved
that much closer to solving with the release of the 5,500+ pages of
VA documents by Congressman Henry Waxman (D - Los Angeles)
August 8, 2007. It is interesting the amount of effort that outgoing
Secretary Jim Nicholson put in trying to convince Waxman that no
radioactive materials were buried under what is now Brentwood
School athletic fields, far more effort than providing information
about other controversial aspects of this most valuable 387-acre
property such as enhanced use leases for film companies.
As reported in "Nuke 'Em High" for Los Angeles CityBeat August 16,
2007, VA contractor MicroTech billed the department $2,508 March
9, 2006 "to update the environmental baseline report" with new
information that would refute its own report that radioactive waste is
buried beneath Brentwood School's athletic fields. That report will
most likely be released around the September 6 CARES meeting.
With all the emphasis Secretary Nicholson put on discounting the
dump being under the school in his letter to Congressman
Waxman, and with all the effort that the VA and MicroTech put into
'updating' the explosive revelations contained in the
PricewaterhouseCoopers report, imagine our surprise when this
paltry amount is compared to what we found MicroTech was being
paid in total by the VA in documents released by Waxman: $413,669.
"0.6 percent?!" exclaimed EnviroReporter.com's Denise Anne
Duffield. "Keeping the truth away from us after a five-year
investigation is certainly worth at least one percent!"
Indeed, Nicholson might consider that, for all that money, he should
at least get the right information before passing it along to Waxman.
“I wish to bring to your specific attention information contained in this
material related to your requests #13 through #16 concerning
environmental issues, and in particular, any possible radioactive
medical wastes beneath or near the location of the Brentwood
School’s athletic fields,” Nicholson wrote Waxman on December 12.
“VA’s response clearly identifies a number of independent
consultants and Federal and state reports that reviewed this issue.
The conclusion of all of these reports is that there were no
radioactive materials on the site.”
Actually, the VA doesn't clearly identify any such thing making the
Secretary of Veterans Affairs ill-informed or worse.
The additional information provided by the VA to MicroTech
consisted of just two letters and a closed site assessment form
from the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) January
9, 1995. Hardly "all of these" Federal and state reports. And none of
this information, scant as it seems, is included in the thousands of
pages of VA documents Waxman released.
Along with a 1993 letter from the U.S. EPA to the VA that is listed on
a February 10, 2006 VA e-mail to MicroTech, is a February 8, 2002
letter from CDHS to Ben Spivey, the West LA VA's industrial
hygienist. Spivey was at a meeting with this reporter in January 2006
at the VA that was arranged as a consolation for not giving me the
answers to questions of PricewaterhouseCoopers about the
controversial report. During that meeting, Spivey repeatedly
mischaracterized tritium and carbon-14, the most prevalent
radionuclides in the dump, as "short-lived." With half lives of 12.3
years and 5,730 years, respectively, these isotopes are hardly short-
lived.
What is in those documents remains to be seen. But what the
updated MicroTech environmental report will say is hardly a mystery.
"The contractor subsequently reviewed the reports and removed the
reference from the final report to VA that will be released when I have
made my final decision regarding which options are to be studied in
CARES Phase 2," wrote Nicholson.
Now that the CARES options chosen are public, the only thing left for
the VA to is to account for are those three Brentwood School reports
that revealed the buried radioactive waste. Problem with that is that
the reports, by companies that generated mounds of data, include
the 76-page "Brentwood School Projects Soil Investigation Report"
by URS Greiner Woodward Clyde, October 18, 1999, the 76-page
"Environmental Assessment Report by Locus," October 23, 2000,
and the 172-page "Soil Investigation Report by Locus," November
21, 2000.
Preliminary inspection of these comprehensive reports indicate that
Brentwood School's contamination problems may not end with
buried radioactive waste and ash -- diesel-impacted soil and high
concentrations of toxic heavy metals may be contaminating the
leased VA property.
EnviroReporter.com's investigation of these documents, and of
other information being supplied by current and former VA
employess, is ongoing. One thing clear so far is that we have
discovered more about the forgotten nuclear dump in Brentwood
than previously possible thanks to Congressman Waxman and his
Los Angeles and Washington D.C. staff.
No thanks is owed, however, to the VA which has not only failed to
complete Phase 1 of its promised investigation of the dump, as we
have reported in Los Angeles CityBeat (see "Hide and Seek,"
February 22, 2007), it has not commenced with Phase 2.
Perhaps most incredibly and incredulously, a $78,500 VA-
commissioned “comprehensive radiation walk-over survey”
conducted by Pleasant Hill-based Millennium Consulting
Associates did not only fail to cover all of the areas it promised it
would, it concentrated on doing surficial testing on areas buried
under 5,000 truckloads of dirt!
Surely these VA contractors had access to the documents we are
sifting through here and knew that they were performing a
deliberately useless task that, according to one Los Angeles City
Council source, cost three times as much as originally reported!
Nearly a quarter of a million dollars have been spent on what is,
essentially, a weed-whacking job.
Expensive as that seems, the extensive weed mowing revealed over
a dozen mysterious mounds, including one with lab tubing sticking
out of it.
And while EnviroReporter.com is digging through all these
documents, Congressman Waxman might ask why the VA hasn't
excavated the large mound in the middle of the dump associated
with Brentwood School waste. That is the same mound Spivey told
me about over a year and a half ago, a dirt pile of debris that emits
higher than normal radiation, and next to where this reporter found
radioactive lab glass and a hot syringe.
That excavation, and the careful digging up of the mystery mounds
south of the Brentwood School stack, would be a realistic and
reasonable start to unearthing the West LA VA's dirty secrets.
Brentwood School conducted an environmental assessment of its
property in December 2006. Those $150,000 tests involved one
surface soil sample randomly chosen per each acre of the twenty
acres Brentwood School leases from the VA, and twelve 30-foot-
deep borings into the ground to look for radiation. As reported in
"Hide and Seek," the tests were criticized as "insufficient" and a
"waste" due to the limited nature of them.
The mystery of the Brentwood nuclear and chemical dump moved
that much closer to solving with the release of the 5,500+ pages of
VA documents by Congressman Henry Waxman (D - Los Angeles)
August 8, 2007. It is interesting the amount of effort that outgoing
Secretary Jim Nicholson put in trying to convince Waxman that no
radioactive materials were buried under what is now Brentwood
School athletic fields, far more effort than providing information
about other controversial aspects of this most valuable 387-acre
property such as enhanced use leases for film companies.
As reported in "Nuke 'Em High" for Los Angeles CityBeat August 16,
2007, VA contractor MicroTech billed the department $2,508 March
9, 2006 "to update the environmental baseline report" with new
information that would refute its own report that radioactive waste is
buried beneath Brentwood School's athletic fields. That report will
most likely be released around the September 6 CARES meeting.
With all the emphasis Secretary Nicholson put on discounting the
dump being under the school in his letter to Congressman
Waxman, and with all the effort that the VA and MicroTech put into
'updating' the explosive revelations contained in the
PricewaterhouseCoopers report, imagine our surprise when this
paltry amount is compared to what we found MicroTech was being
paid in total by the VA in documents released by Waxman: $413,669.
"0.6 percent?!" exclaimed EnviroReporter.com's Denise Anne
Duffield. "Keeping the truth away from us after a five-year
investigation is certainly worth at least one percent!"
Indeed, Nicholson might consider that, for all that money, he should
at least get the right information before passing it along to Waxman.
“I wish to bring to your specific attention information contained in this
material related to your requests #13 through #16 concerning
environmental issues, and in particular, any possible radioactive
medical wastes beneath or near the location of the Brentwood
School’s athletic fields,” Nicholson wrote Waxman on December 12.
“VA’s response clearly identifies a number of independent
consultants and Federal and state reports that reviewed this issue.
The conclusion of all of these reports is that there were no
radioactive materials on the site.”
Actually, the VA doesn't clearly identify any such thing making the
Secretary of Veterans Affairs ill-informed or worse.
The additional information provided by the VA to MicroTech
consisted of just two letters and a closed site assessment form
from the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) January
9, 1995. Hardly "all of these" Federal and state reports. And none of
this information, scant as it seems, is included in the thousands of
pages of VA documents Waxman released.
Along with a 1993 letter from the U.S. EPA to the VA that is listed on
a February 10, 2006 VA e-mail to MicroTech, is a February 8, 2002
letter from CDHS to Ben Spivey, the West LA VA's industrial
hygienist. Spivey was at a meeting with this reporter in January 2006
at the VA that was arranged as a consolation for not giving me the
answers to questions of PricewaterhouseCoopers about the
controversial report. During that meeting, Spivey repeatedly
mischaracterized tritium and carbon-14, the most prevalent
radionuclides in the dump, as "short-lived." With half lives of 12.3
years and 5,730 years, respectively, these isotopes are hardly short-
lived.
What is in those documents remains to be seen. But what the
updated MicroTech environmental report will say is hardly a mystery.
"The contractor subsequently reviewed the reports and removed the
reference from the final report to VA that will be released when I have
made my final decision regarding which options are to be studied in
CARES Phase 2," wrote Nicholson.
Now that the CARES options chosen are public, the only thing left for
the VA to is to account for are those three Brentwood School reports
that revealed the buried radioactive waste. Problem with that is that
the reports, by companies that generated mounds of data, include
the 76-page "Brentwood School Projects Soil Investigation Report"
by URS Greiner Woodward Clyde, October 18, 1999, the 76-page
"Environmental Assessment Report by Locus," October 23, 2000,
and the 172-page "Soil Investigation Report by Locus," November
21, 2000.
Preliminary inspection of these comprehensive reports indicate that
Brentwood School's contamination problems may not end with
buried radioactive waste and ash -- diesel-impacted soil and high
concentrations of toxic heavy metals may be contaminating the
leased VA property.
EnviroReporter.com's investigation of these documents, and of
other information being supplied by current and former VA
employess, is ongoing. One thing clear so far is that we have
discovered more about the forgotten nuclear dump in Brentwood
than previously possible thanks to Congressman Waxman and his
Los Angeles and Washington D.C. staff.
No thanks is owed, however, to the VA which has not only failed to
complete Phase 1 of its promised investigation of the dump, as we
have reported in Los Angeles CityBeat (see "Hide and Seek,"
February 22, 2007), it has not commenced with Phase 2.
Perhaps most incredibly and incredulously, a $78,500 VA-
commissioned “comprehensive radiation walk-over survey”
conducted by Pleasant Hill-based Millennium Consulting
Associates did not only fail to cover all of the areas it promised it
would, it concentrated on doing surficial testing on areas buried
under 5,000 truckloads of dirt!
Surely these VA contractors had access to the documents we are
sifting through here and knew that they were performing a
deliberately useless task that, according to one Los Angeles City
Council source, cost three times as much as originally reported!
Nearly a quarter of a million dollars have been spent on what is,
essentially, a weed-whacking job.
Expensive as that seems, the extensive weed mowing revealed over
a dozen mysterious mounds, including one with lab tubing sticking
out of it.
And while EnviroReporter.com is digging through all these
documents, Congressman Waxman might ask why the VA hasn't
excavated the large mound in the middle of the dump associated
with Brentwood School waste. That is the same mound Spivey told
me about over a year and a half ago, a dirt pile of debris that emits
higher than normal radiation, and next to where this reporter found
radioactive lab glass and a hot syringe.
That excavation, and the careful digging up of the mystery mounds
south of the Brentwood School stack, would be a realistic and
reasonable start to unearthing the West LA VA's dirty secrets.
| "Dog Park Danger?" KNBC Channel 4 - May 25, 2006 (This takes about 1 minute to load.) Copyright 2006 NBC Universal, Inc. |
| VA Nuclear Dump Investigation - page 2 |
| For previous coverage, go to Page 3 |
Previously Reported:
August 24, 2007
August 24, 2007
Previously Reported:
September 13, 2007
September 13, 2007
Million Dollar Maybe
VA commits to further Brentwood nuke dump
study, though uncertainty remains
VA commits to further Brentwood nuke dump
study, though uncertainty remains
- VA commits $1 million to second phase of nuclear dump
survey but aim to find nothing
- "We're going to waste a million dollars for no purpose,"
VA official says to LA city insider in four-hour discussions
before September 6 CARES public meeting
- VA Secretary Nicholson's Special Assistant Halpern says
nuke dump delayed Bush Administration plans for
development
- "There were other issues that we ran into that were much
more complicated," says Halpern. "Certainly the issue
around the radiation of Barrington Park which we have
addressed in the Phase One report coming out. Now
enter the Phase Two study to insure that there is
absolutely nothing there underneath there."
- Supervisor Yaroslavsky, former LA Mayor Richard Riordan
and others speak to development issues at meeting
- EnviroReporter's Collins asks about areas missed in
Phase One radiation survey
- LA Councilman Rosendahl expresses concerns -- "[F]irst
phase didn’t resolve the comfort level of the community as
it might of," he says
- Halpern and Collins talk after meeting with VA official
declining to address Phase Two excavation methods
- Phase One report says "[A]verage readings for the East
Arroyo, West Arroyo, and the Brentwood School lower
soccer fields were notably above the Control areas.”
- High readings found despite missing most of dump site
- Phase One report lacking access to important reports
released to Congressman Waxman in August 2007
- January 2000 environmental report says 5 by 100 foot
debris pit is buried under Brentwood School football field
Million Dollar Maybe Not - VA Special Assistant to the Secretary,
Jay Halpern, looks at EnviroReporter Michael Collins' card during
brief exchange after CARES meeting Septermber 6, 2007.
Jay Halpern, looks at EnviroReporter Michael Collins' card during
brief exchange after CARES meeting Septermber 6, 2007.
Before and after Million Dollar Mistake? Phase I report says
Brentwood School football field were "notably" more radioactive
than control area. (Brentwood School)
Brentwood School football field were "notably" more radioactive
than control area. (Brentwood School)
Report says 5 x 100-foot debris pit
was under football field. (Brentwood School)
was under football field. (Brentwood School)