Search Results for 'Michael Collins'

Space Monkey Business

Critics say NASA is taking a giant leap backwards by irradiating monkeys in space-travel tests designed to simulate the intense radiation astronauts would experience in voyages to the moon and Mars. The Pasadena Weekly discovers that Italian human radiation tests aboard the International Space Station obviate the need for these crude and inhumane radiation tests on primates, the first of their kind in nearly three decades.

50 YEARS AFTER AMERICA’S WORST NUCLEAR MELTDOWN

Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a century.
By Joan Trossman Bien and Michael Collins
Miller-McCune – August 24, 2009

For Release Saturday A.M., August 29, 1959
CANOGA PARK, CA
“During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor Experiment, [...]

BRENTWOOD’S TOXIC GRAVE

Historic dumping grounds beneath the spectacular VA land finally get tested.

LA Weekly – December 10, 2009
Several days ago, men wearing radiation dosimeters stood on the Veteran Administration’s West Los Angeles property, atop an old toxic dump that partially underlies Barrington Recreation Center’s baseball fields and a city dog park, and began the federal government’s long-delayed [...]

Pratt to Collins Responses to Questions 11-24-09

Hi Michael,
I hope that the information below is helpful:
–The health and safety of our students and all users of the athletics fields at our campus is our paramount concern;
–Accordingly, when the school developed athletics facilities on property that it shares with the Veterans Administration, safety measures were put in place, including having a safety inspector [...]

Collins to Pratt Questions 11-24-09

Hi Michael,
Here are questions derived from reports available on Congressman Waxmans website at http://www.henrywaxman.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=4469
EnviroReporter.com has had this information on it since December 2007.
1. In Document 79, it shows that the Brentwood School athletic fields were built in an area that was used for dumping from three hospitals over decades until the early 1970s.
Question: Were you [...]

Collins to VA Questions 12-16-09

[Note that this version of Michael Collins’ questions for the VA includes redacted identifiers that were not in the original December 16, 2009 letter.]
Mr. Eric Gutierrez
Office of Public and Consumer Affairs
(310) 478-3711 Ext. XXXX
XXXX@va.gov
VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System
Hi Eric,
Thanks for calling yesterday offering to provide information, presumably relating to our recent coverage in the [...]

Atomic Tombstones

Soldiers’ tombstones are emerging from the muck of a biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on the Department of Veterans Affairs grounds in Brentwood, California. The VA says its long-promised $1 million investigation of the dump is still on yet it hasn’t noticed the gravestones. The dump is far larger than previously known. Adjacent Brentwood School’s athletic fields may have been impacted with heavy metal contamination with football field reportedly built over trench of syringes. School denies all and VA isn’t talking to LA Weekly or EnviroReporter.com.

BOEING BLOCKS LAB CLEANUP

Rocketdyne lab remediation left in limbo
By Michael Collins
(Ventura County Reporter – November 19, 2009)

(UPDATED WITH BOEING’S RESPONSES FOLLOWING ARTICLE)
Boeing’s filing of a federal complaint on Friday the 13th against the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control over cleaning up the monstrously polluted Santa Susana Field Lab was no tardy Halloween trick. The move attempts to [...]

Atomic Tombstones – January 13, 2008

These disconcerting photographs clearly show soldiers’ tombstones in the West Los Angeles VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump. It is a surreal and sad scene. Three days later, EnviroReporter.com‘s Michael Collins told Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) and her district director, Trevor Daley, about the situation and offered to show the site to the two. Daley [...]

THE HILLS HAVE EYES – VC Reporter

Simi Valley residents unite to fight ‘hot’ KB Home development in Runkle Canyon
By Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – September 28, 2006

“I am not a tree hugger, an environmental activist, or an Erin Brockovich wannabe,” said Patricia Coryell before an August 21 meeting of the Simi Valley City Council. Coryell and about two dozen other concerned [...]

RECALL RANCH

Washington Mutual may end up conserving Ahmanson Ranch, the land it fought to develop for more than a decade
By Michael Collins and Sharon McKenna
Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat – September 18, 2003

With the recall election bearing down on California, Gov. Gray Davis’ administration is in high gear advancing a newly progressive agenda. One initiative in the offing [...]

REAL HOT PROPERTY – LA CITYBEAT

A popular Brentwood dog park on Veterans Administration property is built over an old radioactive waste dump that may soon be unearthed by proposed development
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
SUVs and luxury sedans glide into the Barrington Dog Park just south of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood, where industry types and soccer moms [...]

WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED – LA CITYBEAT

Brentwood dump contains radioactive remains from decades of animal and human tests
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – May 25, 2006
During the 1950s and ’60s, both UCLA and the Veterans Administration were deeply engaged in the Atomic Age, doing their part for the Cold War by performing radiation experiments on a wide variety of animal and [...]

DAWN IN DESERT WONDERLAND

A road trip – and retreat – full of personality
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat – September 13, 2007
We were roaring up Highway 62 through charred desert mountains toward the outer fringe of the Los Angeles apocalypsphere in a candy apple red 1969 Ford Fairlane Cobra fastback with a throaty 428 four-barrel engine pumping out 335 [...]

DARKNESS OVER THE LAND

A Love Story
By Michael Collins
EnviroReporter.com – November 18, 2009

The October moon rose over the Funeral Mountains and shed its ghostly light upon Darkness. She was perched on a sun burnt spit of land above the salt pan, a dark angel ready for flight. Her black wings cast a long shadow on the tortured earth below, [...]

I ENVY THE DEAD

By Michael Collins
Los Angeles magazine’s “LA to Z” issue – December 2007

William Mulholland’s epitaph. The DWP chief spoke these words at a D.A. inquiry into the Saint Francis Dam disaster. Shortly before midnight on March 12, 1928, 12 billion gallons of water exploded from a reservoir near present-day Santa Clarita. The water wall was 78 [...]

MUD DWELLINGS

Mojave mansions from the ground up
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles magazine’s “LA to Z” issue – December 1998

At the California Institute of Earth Arts and Architecture in Hesperia, Iranian-born architect and author Nader Khalili has perfected the “superadobe,” which combines the ancient traditions of earth architecture with futuristic technologies: Pumps fill instant building blocks of sandbags, [...]

ZAP

By Michael Collins
Los Angeles magazine’s “LA to Z” issue – December 1997

Electric bicycle, or the sensation of being stopped by a cop riding one. The ZAP Force bile has a 0.75-horsepower electric engine powered by a 12-volt battery. ZAP Power Systems, a company launched three years ago in Sonoma County, began manufacturing the bikes as [...]

JONATHAN PARFREY

By Michael Collins
Los Angeles magazine’s “LA to Z” issue – December 1996
(1958- ) Atom smasher. As regional leader of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Parfrey has taken his battle against nuclear power around the Pacific Rim. Born in Manhattan, Parfrey attended Santa Monica High and UC Berkeley. After a brief acting career, [...]

Riley’s Revenge

Former Rocketdyne toxics chief, Norman E. Riley, blasts Department of Toxics Substances Control as an agency “where obfuscation, abdication of authority, collusion, and other contemptible behaviors currently trump honesty and integrity.” In a fiery e-mail to EnviroReporter.com, Riley admits misleading community regarding Runkle Canyon and that no public comments about cleanup plan were used.

Double Vision

Fifty years after America’s worst nuclear meltdown 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s “Sodium Reactor Experiment,” the government’s just-sacked head of lab remediation says the new Rocketdyne cleanup law is too strict and that site owner Boeing is going to sue the State over the standards. New Miller-McCune article and exclusive interviews.

EnviroReporter.com Runkle Canyon Comments

When Runkle Canyon developer KB Home gave the Department of Toxic Substances Control 41 environmental reports on its property, EnviroReporter.com analyzed each one and presented its 28 pages of findings to DTSC in July 2008. The department ignored most of these analyses which we subsequently submitted to DTSC in February 2009 as public comments to the Runkle Canyon Response Plan. Will the department again ignore these questions and comments now that there is new leadership for the Runkle Canyon site?

WRINKLES IN RUNKLE CANYON

50 Years After a Santa Susana Nuclear Accident Holds Up Land Development
By Michael Collins
LA Weekly – July 22, 2009
All hell was about to break loose at the Sodium Reactor Experiment on July 23, 1959. The reactor, tucked into a corner of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the Simi Hills 30 miles northwest of downtown [...]

THREE KEYS – THREE YEARS

“Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.”
(William Arthur Ward – 20th Century author)
When Denise Anne Duffield and I unveiled EnviroReporter.com in late May 2006, we had little idea of the effect that this website would have on the environmental issues we have reported on and continue to [...]

“Your journalistic practices”

“Dear Mr. Collins – without getting into the content of your story, I’d like to point out to you that your quote from Ms. Winger on our staff was so badly twisted out of context that it is utterly meaningless,” began the rant that we were about to read that confirmed to us what we have found wanting in the councilman’s office — competence and follow-through.