STATE STAINED IN ROCKETDYNE SCANDAL
The DHS’s apparent pattern of data quashing and collusion with Rocketdyne stretches back to 1990, when it suppressed its own findings of elevated bladder-cancer rates in west San Fernando Valley tracts near SSFL. In 1996, over the objections of the oversight panel, the DHS leaked the preliminary draft of a UCLA radiation study to Rocketdyne, allowing the corporation to press for changes in it. And last year, the agency advanced a preliminary draft of a UCLA study of chemical exposure to the company, again over the panel’s protests. State officials intensified their scrutiny after last month’s disclosure, that DHS had failed to make public a report showing a 17.2 percent spike in lung cancers in the 19 Simi Valley census tracts nearest the lab.
Before the grim radiation-study findings were released in late 1997, showing that exposure to radiation at SSFL created health risks at ionizing levels much lower than previously believed, the DHS and Rocketdyne worked together to limit publicity damage. A paper trail of DHS-Rocketdyne collusion apparently began in March 1997. The DHS’s Peggy Reynolds sent an e-mail to Richard Kreutzer, chief of the environmental-health investigations branch, concerned that DHS officials needed to meet with Rocketdyne honchos to plan a strategy to deal with the devastating results of the UCLA radiation study before it was released. Reynolds said that she had talked to both Rocketdyne consultant Susan Santos and Phil Rutherford, manager of Rocketdyne’s environmental-remediation program, to huddle over “what may be feasible and appropriate” in terms of a community-health study.
Two days later, a DHS administrator promptly responded. “As the worker-health studies near release, Rocketdyne management has been worried that they face growing litigation from community residents regarding cancer and radiation exposure from SSFL,” wrote Robert Harrison, chief of the DHS occupational-health surveillance and evaluation program, in an e-mail to Kreutzer. Harrison pondered whether the DHS should do its own study but sagely added that the “community doesn’t trust DHS.”
They shouldn’t, according to Dan Hirsch, co-chairman of the oversight committee and founder of the anti-nuclear group Committee To Bridge the Gap. He contends that the DHS and Rocketdyne made a backroom deal: Kill off the current citizens panel, eliminate the chance of a community study, and wrest back control of the health investigation into the hands of the DHS.
Nor was Hirsch comfortable with Governor Davis’ decision to replace the DHS with the state EPA. In particular, CalEPA’s Hickox said he plans to place the whole affair under the jurisdiction of his Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), which Hirsch refers to as a “captured” agency. “The DTSC, in my estimation, is at least as in need of being investigated as the DHS,” Hirsch said. “[The] DTSC has also been heavily influenced by Rocketdyne to prevent it from doing its job.”
Hirsch points to the 1994 deaths of two Rocketdyne workers (see sidebar) as proof. The SSFL workers were killed incinerating explosive rocket propellant, a procedure conducted in a manner that apparently violated DTSC guidelines. Hirsch claims that lax DTSC enforcement helped bring about the disaster. “They have been asleep at the switch for years,” he said. “The DTSC has been captured, and it’s ludicrous to even think that they could investigate DHS for collusion with the company.”
Others aren’t so chary of the DTSC. “Yes, there are problems at DTSC,” said Kuehl staffer Syrus Devers. “However, they have a new director there who is a pretty good guy, Ed Lowery,” he said.
Still, Devers said, “Lowery is going to have to put in the hours, and it’s not going to be easy. The ‘we-be’s’ are all over — ‘We be here before you, we be here after you’re gone, and we be the ones who run the agency.’ If you are going to turn an agency around, you’re going to have to fight the we-be’s.”
Devers is also receptive to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee investigation. “Assemblyman Wildman has the ability to subpoena documents, haul state-agency employees before the committee to give testimony, send his staff out to look at records,” Devers stated. “Ed Lowery is a good guy, but it’s a big job [and] if it turns out that he is not up to the task, it might be nice to have another investigation going that’s a little farther away from Rocketdyne in Sacramento. [If] it’s a little more under legislative control, [it] might be a little more aggressive.”
In addition to the DTSC, Davis also suggested that CalEPA place the Rocketdyne reviews under its Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Here too, however, activists are skeptical about the state’s ability to adequately investigate supposed malfeasance between the DHS and Rocketdyne. “OEHHA has been a nightmare, at least under [former Governor Pete] Wilson’s administration,” according to Joe Lyou, an activist with the Committee To Bridge the Gap. “They have been accused of biasing their test results, delaying the releases of their studies to accommodate corporate interests and destroying records that go against their biases.”
Whatever state agency steps into the breach left by the DHS, it won’t have much trouble getting up to speed. A federal class-action suit seeking damages against Rocketdyne for health effects and declining property values has recently been certified by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the name of 500,000 potential claimants. Other residents are making complaints and appeals public on the Internet.
“I’m mad as hell,” said one recent posting. “I moved to Simi in September 1998. Myself and members of my family were getting beet-red faces. Then, after being here three months, I started itching all over. I am young and never had any of these problems before moving here. There is something terribly wrong with what is going on.”
