THE RADIATION RANGERS
But radiation isn’t on the minds of the men heading up the canyon this day. They know that the slime’s sheen wasn’t caused by radiation. They also know that if they collect the gunk themselves, the city and the developer will reject it outright as being biased. So they reached deep into their pockets and hired Ron Lovato of Moorpark-based Pat-Chem Laboratories, who also soldiers along with the band as it makes its way higher through this beautiful mountain landscape. Lovato’s kit includes water sampling ladles, soil scoopers, and various containers for volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds. A heavy cooler designed to keep the samples properly preserved for the lab is lugged laboriously.
Careful to avoid any contact with his skin, Lovato uses a long white scooper to dip into the mysteriously streaked creek water. Rust-colored mud is scraped from where the creek has begun to dry up and recede. After an hour of sampling, Lovato carefully stows his cargo in the cooler for the long walk back.
“The only reason I knew where the water was is that I knew where the water table was before and where the cattle got their water,” Matheney says. “There are cattle tracks all over the place. The cattle are going down and drinking out of that.”
“If we can walk directly back in there and the first place we find water it has got that slime on it, how the hell can they not find it?” Matheney continues. “And [KB Home is] unable to, and yet they’re doing all the testing.”
Arsenic and Waste
The results of the nearly $3,000 worth of collection and analysis by Pat-Chem Labs were astonishing. An astronomical amount of poisonous arsenic was detected in the surface water and adjacent soil of Runkle Canyon. In wetter times, that water eventually makes its way downhill to collect in Runkle Reservoir, up gradient of the Arroyo Simi. Water reaching here, or migrating through the groundwater, replenishes an aquifer that supplies water to tens of thousands of people in Simi Valley. That extracted groundwater makes up about 20 percent of the water blend utilized in the area.
Due to increasing awareness of the lethality of arsenic, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered the “maximum contaminant level” (MCL) for the substance in drinking water from 50 parts per billion (ppb), established in 1975, to 10 ppb in 2001. “A 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the 50 ppb standard did not adequately protect human health,” EPA says in describing its new arsenic rule. “EPA set the new MCL of 10 ppb to protect the public against the effects of long-term, chronic exposure to arsenic in drinking water. The new MCL will decrease non-fatal and fatal bladder and lung cancers and will reduce the frequency of other health effects such as diabetes, developmental problems, gastrointestinal illness, and heart disease.” Arsenic has also been linked to many other non-fatal conditions.
Runkle Canyon’s surface water readings for arsenic are 15 times the MCL for drinking water, over 21,000 times the EPA’s “preliminary remediation goal” and 37,500 times the agency’s “public health goal” for potable water.
The mud sample was laced with arsenic as well, coming in at over 548 times the EPA’s preliminary remediation goal for the contaminant in soil. That amount of the toxin is also 213 percent of the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) arsenic “field action level,” where further investigation is warranted.
As to the source of this arsenic, it seems logical to look uphill to SSFL which is probably more famous for its two partial nuclear meltdowns in 1959 and 1964; the earlier disaster releasing hundreds of times more radiation than Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. However, arsenic has been found at high levels at the lab. As CityBeat has reported (“Blinded by the Light,” July 22, 2004), arsenic readings in the northern part of the Happy Valley section of Rocketdyne’s massive 2,850 mountaintop complex were detected in 79 out of 80 soil samples with 63 of them being over the field action level.
The toxic metals nickel and vanadium were also detected in the water at worrisome levels by the Pat-Chem lab, in the case of the later, tripping a government “notification level” designed to keep pollutants out of the drinking water supply. Nickel was over 12 times the EPA’s public health goal in water and vanadium came in at 1.8 times the notification level which is a threshold at which the most local government entity should be informed. That entity would seem to be the city of Simi Valley since it annexed Runkle Canyon in September 2004.
The Runkle Canyon water is loaded with potassium, calcium, and sodium. Merely pouring it onto chemical-rated rubber gloves causes them to bubble after about 15 seconds for reasons not yet understood. This water, which percolates to the surface through seeps year-round, is so caustic that it seems to possess the properties of sodium hydroxide, or lye. It’s as if Drano or Liquid-Plumr is flowing through Runkle Canyon.
