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ROCKETDYING
By Michael Collins
(LA Weekly – October 14, 1999)
Military industrial giant Rocketdyne has been reeling in the last few weeks from a barrage of negative publicity
about pollution problems at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Sen. Barbara Boxer has demanded a more
stringent cleanup at the San Fernando-Simi-valleys straddling site. And Channel 2 News produced a four-part
expose on the contamination, albeit one that largely covered territory mined earlier by Offbeat. But what really
caught our attention was the admission by a NASA official that the pollution at and around the lab stemmed in part
from military testing. At a public task force meeting concerning the laboratory cleanup, the NASA official said
that 77 percent of the 21,509 engine tests conducted from 1954 to 1983 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory
were for the Department of Defense. Rocketdyne officials had accused this reporter of lying last year when we
disclosed that the company was a major supplier of America's nuclear arsenal. Now we learn that not only were
engines for the nuclear-tipped Navaho, Atlas and Jupiter missiles tested at the Rocketdyne site. The process
involved hosing down the engines with 1.73 million gallons of the extremely poisonous solvent TCE. The runoff
was funneled into a pond; about a third of it eventually seeped into the soil, contributing to the contamination
problems at the site today, according to the NASA official.
By Michael Collins
(LA Weekly – October 14, 1999)
Military industrial giant Rocketdyne has been reeling in the last few weeks from a barrage of negative publicity
about pollution problems at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Sen. Barbara Boxer has demanded a more
stringent cleanup at the San Fernando-Simi-valleys straddling site. And Channel 2 News produced a four-part
expose on the contamination, albeit one that largely covered territory mined earlier by Offbeat. But what really
caught our attention was the admission by a NASA official that the pollution at and around the lab stemmed in part
from military testing. At a public task force meeting concerning the laboratory cleanup, the NASA official said
that 77 percent of the 21,509 engine tests conducted from 1954 to 1983 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory
were for the Department of Defense. Rocketdyne officials had accused this reporter of lying last year when we
disclosed that the company was a major supplier of America's nuclear arsenal. Now we learn that not only were
engines for the nuclear-tipped Navaho, Atlas and Jupiter missiles tested at the Rocketdyne site. The process
involved hosing down the engines with 1.73 million gallons of the extremely poisonous solvent TCE. The runoff
was funneled into a pond; about a third of it eventually seeped into the soil, contributing to the contamination
problems at the site today, according to the NASA official.
