WHITE BLIGHT
Runkle Canyon’s Chromium Conundrum
By Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – June 26, 2008
The men had been up that hot dusty trail before, high in the hills above Simi Valley. Hawks flew overhead as vernal pools evaporated in the late March heat. Tracks of critters led to the stream that still had an oily sheen to it as it did in May 2007. That’s when these two “Radiation Rangers,” self-styled concerned Simi Valley citizens, had the water tested and found heavy metals including arsenic at high levels. Their findings were later confirmed by tests conducted by the City of Simi Valley.
The Rev. John Southwick and Frank Serafine climbed higher into the lush chaparral, back to recon the canyon for any changes before a community meeting March 27 about the neighboring 2,850-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory, or Rocketdyne as the field lab is typically called. The lab’s soil and groundwater are heavily polluted by radiological and chemical toxins as well as heavy metals. The troubled property has an 11-acre drainage that runs down from its nuclear testing area into Runkle Canyon.
Rocketdyne is currently the object of a cleanup that could last years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The lab suffered two meltdowns, one of which in 1959 released much more radiation than the more infamous Three Mile Island meltdown did in Pennsylvania in 1979. Numerous spills, accidents and illegal burning of radioactive and chemical detritus from the Cold War-era lab qualified it in 2007 for EPA Superfund status.
Superfund is EPA’s program to identify, investigate and remediate the worst hazardous waste sites in the country, currently numbering more than 1,200, with approximately 70 percent of the cleanup activities paid for by the responsible polluting parties, which in Rocketdyne’s case means the Department of Energy, NASA and Boeing.
KB Homes, based in Los Angeles, hopes to build 461 homes in Rocketdyne-adjacent Runkle Canyon. The Radiation Rangers have been fighting the development for nearly two years over concerns that the land has been polluted by the lab and would be unsafe to build on. The Rangers maintain that high levels of leukemia-causing strontium-90 found in Runkle Canyon soil, first reported in the VC Reporter more than three years ago [See cover: "Which Way the Wind Blows," Feature, 3/17/05], came from Rocketdyne.
But even with everything they thought they knew about the canyon, nothing prepared them for what they were about to witness: Rounding a corner in Runkle Canyon, they came upon a sea of white rocks and powder covering vast expanses of the canyon, and where there once had been sage and scrub there now was a sizable white dead zone.
“This stuff is everywhere,” Southwick said. “It looks like it snowed in Runkle Canyon!”
What the men didn’t know was that the white rocks they would collect were loaded with chromium, a heavy metal that usually exists in two forms, including hexavalent chromium, which oozed into the national consciousness with the 2000 film Erin Brockovich. They also didn’t know that when the government’s own tests of the mysterious stuff came back, officials would dismiss it as harmless without determining the makeup of the chromium. As disturbing as this new dead zone in Runkle Canyon appears, it also appears to be precipitating to the surface in another canyon on the other side of
Rocketdyne in the San Fernando Valley.
Snow Job
This isn’t the first time the residents have had to take things into their own hands. Last year, Southwick and fellow Rangers Patty Coryell and Terry Matheney shouldered the financial burden of testing the land and surface water for heavy metals that the developers didn’t. Those tests yielded worrisome results. That helped lead to an April 14 voluntary cleanup agreement between KB Homes and the Department of Toxic Substances Control, which at this point consists of inspecting information. The Cal-EPA department, also charged with overseeing the cleanup of Rocketdyne, is currently reviewing Runkle Canyon environmental reports supplied by KB Homes, and other tests, data and analysis from the Rangers and this reporter.
That night at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, Serafine and Southwick huddled with the department’s project director for Rocketdyne, Norm Riley, at the Rocketdyne meeting. Riley agreed to take the sample for analysis.
“Norm remarked, ‘Can I take this on the plane?’ and we laughed about it,” Southwick said. “Norm was in very good spirits that evening, very friendly. He later commented that he had seen this substance ‘all over the place’ up in Runkle. We were so encouraged that he took the stuff to be looked at.”
“We are interested in knowing the identity of the white material on the surface of the rock,” Riley wrote in an April 16 e-mail to Morgan Hill-based laboratory TestAmerica. “We suspect it is probably a metal salt of some kind, e.g., calcium sulfate, sodium carbonate, or potassium phosphate, but we do not know.”
