Exclusive 2019 Update: VICTORY AT THE VA – West LA Veterans Administration master plan protects old nuclear dump from development
In a January 30, 2007 letter to the parents and colleagues of students of Brentwood School, Head of School, Dr. Michael D. Pratt, revealed that the exclusive private school on leased West LA VA land had hired two firms to evaluate school soil for radioactive and chemical contamination first reported by Los Angeles CityBeat and EnviroReporter.com last May. “I am delighted to report that our additional environmental testing has confirmed that there is no radiation on our school grounds above normal background levels,” Pratt wrote.
Emeryville-based Dr. Chris Whipple headed an ENVIRON International team last December in a three-phase investigation and testing of the property that included surface soil testing, aquatic center soil borings, and subsurface examination of the school’s athletic fields. “We took a fair number of samples and we didn’t get any detects of tritium or carbon-14,” Whipple said. “Our understanding from the VA had always been that there never had been radioactive material buried under the site that we occupy and that in the process of excavation, no radioactive materials were found,” added Pratt. The headmaster added that another environmental firm, URS Corporation, had conducted an “independent peer review” of ENVIRON’s conclusions, giving a thumbs up.
Longtime Brentwood nuke dump observer, Dr. Bennett Ramberg, was less than impressed with the four subsurface coring samples that were drilled in areas suspected of containing radioactive ash debris. “It appears that they didn’t follow the standard EPA protocol for boring,” Ramberg said. “Common sense dictates that four borings over such a large, multi-acre area is clearly not adequate.”
Los Angeles CityBeat and EnviroReporter.com had written May 18, 2006 that a September 2005 PricewaterhouseCoopers report had said that radioactive waste was buried under the school’s fields. The PwC study had noted that “Either the public was not informed as to the contaminates under the athletic fields, or these environmental hazards did not trigger a significant negative public reaction from nearby residents (including parents of students using the fields).”
Former Brentwood School student raises stink over phantom quotes
In early February, Los Angeles CityBeat received an irate call from a former student of Brentwood School, Michael Ritter, who is now the publisher of the online Saturday Night magazine. Ritter claimed that CityBeat had attributed quotes to him that were supposed to be off-the-record. The problem with his allegations was the quotes were never published in the paper. Add to that the fact that the quotes were on-the-record as Ritter had written an unsolicited e-mail to EnviroReporter.com last year when our initial expose, “Real Hot Property,” debuted in both the paper and this website.
Ritter’s critical comments of the school, which were on this site for twelve hours January 30 before removal due to space considerations, had nevertheless caught the attention of the institution. At a recent alumni baseball game, Ritter was questioned by Emily Manning, Brentwood School’s Alumni Relations Manager, who later faxed Ritter’s quotes to him suggesting they had been in CityBeat. “They were upset with me,” Ritter told EnviroReporter.com. “They were wondering where I was coming from.”
It was pretty clear to us where Ritter was coming from when he wrote this May 19, 2006:
“As a student who attended Brentwood School (graduated in 2001) and who has played MANY baseball games on the Barrington Fields and who walked through the gully (that is now the athletic field) many times to play sports at the VA field, I am well aware of everything you speak about,” Ritter told us. “For [Brentwood School Assistant Headmaster] Don Winters to say ‘If any of that had been underneath the field, you can be assured that we would have had a whole different attitude about the project,’ is absolutely ridiculous.
“How about you ask him about the syringes students found while walking to football practice?” Ritter continued in a letter written a day after we broke the initial story in May 2006. “I walked through that field everyday. It smelled and you knew what was below there. Everyone did. And every time some one questioned it, it was brushed under the table. From the report released by CARES written by PricewaterhouseCoopers stating that either the public didn’t know about the hazardous site or didn’t care is also BS. People knew about it, it was just kept very hush. The VA has been hiding this for years and will continue to deny deny deny. Brentwood School will do the same.”
The Radiation Blame Game
The Los Angeles Times picked up the VA dump story November 30, 2006 but soon issued a correction that stated, in part, that “The study was conducted by MicroTech LLC, a separate company hired by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and its findings were contained in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ broader report.”
This correction rankles Anthony Jimenez, the head of MicroTech LLC, an “award-winning, fast growing Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned and small business,” according to the website of the Vienna, Virginia-based company. “I didn’t provide anything to PwC and you’re about the 400th reporter that has called me to ask me about that,” Jimenez said Jan. 30. “I don’t work for PwC. I never worked for PwC. PwC is a sub on my contract – I’m not a sub on theirs. I don’t know how it ended up where it ended up because I’ve never done any work for them.”
“If VA intends to throw me under the bus, I’d be very interested to see the document they’re trying to do it with,” Jimenez said. “The point is that right now, I would love to hear if it’s Secretary Nicholson, or whoever it is at the VA, I would love to hear what they have to say about any report I provided them.”
According to Pratt, Secretary Nicholson is preparing to announce that MicroTech LLC was wrong in that there was and is radioactive debris buried under Brentwood School’s athletic fields. In a January 22, 2007 letter to Nicholson, Pratt wrote that a “report MicroTech LLC prepared for the VA” that “stated that radioactive biomedical waste was buried under land Brentwood School shares with the VA” was “simply a mistake,” and requested that Secretary Nicholson clarify the situation.
Pratt, who consults regularly with the West LA VA’s director Charles M. Dorman, apparently has knowledge of the source of this explosive PwC information that EnviroReporter.com asked for and was refused. Our request for the PricewaterhouseCoopers/VA contract to evaluate 18 VA facilities, including the West LA site, for “asset realignment for enhanced services” was heavily censored. The cost of that contract, according to a Congressional source, has climbed from $9.7 to $10.5 million.
In December 2006, the VA finally fulfilled a request by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who is now the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, for answers about the radiation findings in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report. On March 27, 2006, Waxman demanded a slew of information from the VA. “Has the public been informed that contaminates are buried under or near the location of the Brentwood School athletic facility?” Waxman asked in a letter to VA Secretary Nicholson. “Whose decision was it to leave the non-excavated radioactive medical waste in place?”
The 5,500-plus pages of VA information may or may not contain the answers regarding radioactive waste under Brentwood School that Waxman seeks. The Congressman’s staff has not fully reviewed the mass of documents but already has noted what is missing: information pertaining to the VA’s sharing (leasing) agreements with Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Fox Studios.
Testing Red Flags
VA testing contractor, Millennium Consulting, says its Phase One report is due early February even though its promised testing is incomplete. Indeed, broad swaths of land slated for walk-over testing, shown on page 14 of the plan, were missed, including the inclines of the dump’s main arroyo, land adjacent Brentwood Theatre, and most of Brentwood School.
Though Millennium’s Phase Two testing begins this Spring with 80-foot deep soil borings, groundwater analysis and risk assessment, Millennium chief Michael Noel says he won’t be revisiting Brentwood School. “It has been more than adequately addressed,” Noel said Jan. 30.
But has it? Not according to Ramberg who points out that six of ENVIRON’s borings were in a small area under construction for a pool not known to have any dumped material, while just four successful borings were made in areas known to possibly have radioactive ash waste that could have been the result of the incineration of hot lab waste and animals years ago.
“To spend over $150,000 on insufficient testing, over half a year after the information came out, would seem a waste, wouldn’t it?” said Ramberg. “One can only speculate on why the school waited so long and what their true motivations are but fear of lawsuits would be understandable.”
Yet even those known ash pits’ placement on the school’s property by ENVIRON have come into question. The result of the school contractor’s map is a lateral ‘shifting’ of where the dump actually is on page 15 of ENVIRON’s report compared with a pre-1980 map and 1995 map of the known dump. However, the actual placement of the three ash pits on the school property seem to roughly correspond to the 2000 Locus map that Environ used for reference.
Ramberg also noted that the school is pressing the VA to confirm that not only is there no radioactive waste buried on its property, but also that there never was. This could seem odd in light of the large debris mound in the center of the known dump that the VA told EnviroReporter.com in January 2006 was a result of excavating waste from under Brentwood School’s fields. The mound’s ambient radiation is twice normal background and shards of radioactive glass and a ‘hot’ syringe were found next to the mound. The syringe still lays on the ground although Noel had said he would have it analyzed for radiation.
“It would behoove Brentwood School to know what’s in that mound since they maintain, perhaps presumptuously, that no rad waste was buried on its leased land,” said Ramberg. “It’s an obvious choice for Millennium’s Phase Two that (the mound) should be cored and a determination made if there is any radiation and how hazardous it is.”
“Wherever (Millennium) sees a mound, they should bore,” Ramberg said. “It’s that simple. But don’t get too caught up in the mounds; the entire dump area shown on the maps should be bored quite deep since there is so much fill in the arroyo and over Barrington Dog Park.”
Whether any Phase Two boring takes place at all remains to be seen. Until then, the dump still remains insecure, with one of its gates wide open the last time EnviroReporter.com visited the site which is adjacent MacArthur Field.
One of the only things warning the public of the dangers of the dump, are new metal signs that prohibit trespassing or excavating. Ironically, one of these “DO NOT ENTER” signs abuts a Brentwood School soccer field, giving the wrong impression that the moneyed institution is off-limits.
Another wrong impression that concerns Ramberg is what the public might have of the accuracy of either the ENVIRON or Phase One of the Millennium tests to accurately determine radiation dangers. He noted that of half the 12 borings that ENVIRON cored, six were in approximately the same area, and just four in suspect areas. He also note ENVIRON scooped up one soil sample per acre from the 20 acres the school leases from the VA. “How representative and accurate is one sample per acre, dug no more than six inches below, when we’re talking about rad waste perhaps under 15 to 30 feet of fill?,” Ramberg added. “Not very.”
With the release of Millennium’s Phase One report imminent, with no abnormally high radiation to be reported according to Noel, what will the results reveal? The “walk-over” examination of the areas Millennium actually did test, while useful for detecting gamma radiation which travels great distances, wouldn’t have detected buried tritium or carbon-14. These low-energy beta radiation emitters can’t be readily detected with a surficial sweep because of the inch or less they radiate.
This was a problem when the dump was initially signed off on as safe, as we reported in our initial exposé:
On May 7, 1981, five NRC inspectors went to the Brentwood dump site and did a 45-minute walking inspection with two gamma detectors and picked up nothing but background measurements. They noted that 20 – 30 feet of “fill material and dirt” had been added to the burial sites and “there were no radioactive materials detected.”
“That’s not going to tell you anything,” Joseph Karbus, head of the Radiological Health Unit of the LA County Health Department, said at the time regarding Geiger Muller counter inspection of the dump. “You have to go down and take a core sample to find out anything.”
ENVIRON’s Whipple noted this ineffective survey as well. “I did read a report that the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] did their final site closure with a team of half a dozen people walking around the site doing a gamma scan. When I asked the NRC guy ‘why you would do a gamma scan where it was thought tritium and carbon-14 were disposed of?’, he said, ‘we wondered that too.’”
This is the same manner that Millennium swept the acres it did manage to cover in its $78,500 survey over several days in December 2006.
Whipple notes that while no students, faculty or employees may be being exposed to radiation at Brentwood School presently, if the waste were buried deep underground like the PricewaterhouseCoopers report says, that doesn’t mean they didn’t miss it in their $150,000 survey. “I can’t state positively that there is no radioactivity at the site.”
The ENVIRON chief noted that if there is radioactive material buried under Brentwood School fields, or in any unexcavated ash pits, and the land were to be further developed at sometime in the future, say for a high-rise building, there would be cause for concern. “It probably would be worthwhile to worry about exposures to the workers while they’re digging it up. Exposures to residents living in the high-rise building? Probably not.”
This scenario encapsulates the Brentwood nuke dump conundrum: does the public accept leaving radioactive waste in place, or does the VA make sure to adequately characterize the entire site in Millennium’s Phase Two and take the appropriate measures to remove any radioactive waste?
Buildup to testing Bombshell — A mid-December 2006 perspective
As a direct result of EnviroReporter.com and Los Angeles CityBeat‘s “Real Hot Property” expose on the nuke dump on Veterans Administration property in Brentwood, followed by pressure from Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl, the VA has hired Millennium Consulting Associates to begin testing 27 acres of land for nuclear and chemical soil and groundwater contamination. This historic initiative is outlined in the December 7 CityBeat article “Nuclear Reactions“.
Phase One of the testing concluded December 8, with a report due in late January 2007, and will cost $78,500 according to the VA. Phase Two will begin this spring and will bore up to 80 feet into the ground to search for radioactive waste, and will cost much more than the initial “walk-over” inspection and radiation measuring.
Cutting down much of the dump’s vegetation and weeds has revealed 18 mounds that register high in ambient radiation and match old maps of the biomedical disposal areas used by the VA and UCLA from 1952-1968.
EnviroReporter.com discovered more evidence of radioactive debris laying on the ground adjacent a burial mound associated with the construction of neighboring Brentwood School.
Photographs of the place past and present are in our nuke dump gallery.
EnviroReporter.com has also obtained aerial photographs taken between 1999 to 2003 that clearly show several dumping piles thought to contain radioactive biomedical waste.
Numerous television crews descended on Barrington Dog Park Nov. 30 when the Los Angeles Times published an article describing the testing. The Times article read:
The dumping was largely forgotten until earlier this year when reporter Michael Collins, writing for the alternative weekly Los Angeles City Beat and EnviroReporter.com, raised new concerns about the dump area. Collins said in the story that he used a nuclear radiation monitor and found “shards of radioactive glass that registered over four times normal.”
The VA introduced an environmental firm to about two dozen residents, government officials, and dog park people, at a Nov. 27 community meeting at the Barrington Park Recreation Center. The media presence included KNBC Channel 4’s Beverly White, EnviroReporter.com’s Denise Anne Duffield, and international nuclear expert and columnist, Dr. Bennett Ramberg, who has commented extensively on the Brentwood dump.
“We want to do good science,” said Millennium Consulting Associates’ president, Michael Noel, CIH. “We don’t want to be here in the future saying we didn’t do it right.”
The two-phased assessment of the soil and water of the dog park, adjacent arroyos, a swath of the VA’s golf course, and land at Brentwood School began Nov. 28. That’s when Noel’s team traveled to Westwood Park to take “control” samples for radiation reference readings.
“Millennium Consulting Associates, a firm with expertise in environmental and industrial hygiene, has been retained by the Veterans Administration to perform an environmental assessment,” according to a press release issued by Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl. “Millennium’s President, Michael Noel, CIH, will explain the scope of the dog park assessment process, the sampling strategy, the schedule for the testing, and answer questions from the public.”
EnviroReporter.com obtained a schedule of the nuke dump testing, the first part of which ended December 8. The dog park, popular with celebrities like Tori Spelling and the Barbi Twins, was closed for three days during the initial testing phase, as KTLA Channel 5 News reported. As initial dog park testing ended, Noel’s team encountered hostility at the off-leash dog park when attempting to traverse the park out of the VA site. Dog-walkers were so obstinate, according to witnesses who spoke with EnviroReporter.com, that the police had to be called in. L.A.’s Department of Rec and Parks issued the dog-walkers a written rebuke and it’s possible the dog park will have to be closed should interference with the testing team reoccur.
Despite varying accounts of the incident, it seems to have been overblown says Sue Black, founder of the Friends of Barrington Dog Park. Black has been a demonstrably active advocate that the testing of the VA property be done for the benefit of all. “[The incident] was instigated by one individual,” says Black. “There are scores of dog park visitors who wholeheartedly support this project, and many were unhappy to hear about that incident. It was unfortunate, but it didn’t affect the project and it absolutely does not represent the vast majority of dog park visitors.”
Councilman Rosendahl led efforts to have the park tested after our reports began May 18, 2006. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) requested VA answers about Brentwood School nuclear waste and was supposed to get them by August but still hasn’t. EnviroReporter.com‘s questions to PricewaterhouseCoopers about the Brentwood School dump were never answered and only after the Los Angeles Times article correction did we learn that the Department of Veterans Affairs-hired company that made the assessment was actually MicroTech LLC.
Word of testing the Brentwood nuke dump began on June 12, 2006, when the director of the Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles Healthcare Center (VA), Charles M. Dorman, appeared on KABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News in response to EnviroReporter.com and Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat’s ongoing investigation of the nuke dump on VA property in Brentwood. After denying that the dump was close to public recreation areas, and producing yet another redrawn map of the old dump site, Dorman promised to “identify what the honest-to-God truth is on this issue” and share the results with the public. Read a transcript of the interview in KABC Eyewitness News.
Dorman did not bother to tell us of this important decision even though it was in reaction to our five-year investigation into this nuclear and chemical dump on the northern reaches of Brentwood’s sprawling Veterans Administration campus that has sparked calls for further scrutiny by officials from the Los Angeles City Council to the U.S. Congress. Read more in “Digging Up the Dirt,” published in Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat on June 29,2006.At a Veterans Town Hall meeting, August 12, 2006, Dorman told Collins that the VA would spend $45,000 to test the dump and then share results.
There have been a lot of changes since we first broke the story on Brentwood’s buried treasure: a nuclear and chemical waste dump partially under Barrington Recreation Park and off-leash dog area. One of those changes wasn’t common sense. The Fifth Annual Bow wow ween took place at the park with the cat walk, for dogs of course, right over a known part of the nuke dump! If that wasn’t enough, there were celebrities like the Barbi Twins. If this seems incredible, see for yourself!
The Investigation
On May 18, 2006 Michael Collins published “Real Hot Property“, an in-depth investigation of a nuclear dump that lies under a popular dog park and prestigious school in Brentwood, California. A week later he published “Where the Bodies are Buried“, which revealed the human and animal radiation experiments that helped create the dump. The dumping was conducted between 1952 -1968 by the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration (VA) and nearby UCLA. The dump is located on property owned by the VA, property which is currently up for grabs as part of the CARES initiative.
Since the story broke, stunned and concerned community members have begun pressing for answers. Veterans rights advocates have expressed outrage over what they view as yet another VA sell-out at their expense.
The VA has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
Exclusive 2019 Update: VICTORY AT THE VA – West LA Veterans Administration master plan protects old nuclear dump from development
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