Third Decade’s the Charm

EnviroReporter.com turns twenty 2006-2026

Two decades ago today, EnviroReporter.com and the alternative weekly newspaper LA CityBeat/ValleyBeat jointly published “Real Hot Property” about the little known biological radioactive dump on the grounds of the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration (WLA VA).

That multi-year exposé upended plans by President George W. Bush’s Veterans Administration (VA) to renovate the 388-acre WLA VA into a $4 billion development that would include luxurious condominiums on land expressly deeded to America’s Veterans.

The WLA VA boondoggle was crushed by our reporting in 2007 and went belly-up as we reported ten years ago in EnviroReporter.com DECADE 2006-2016. Private businesses using the WLA VA to line their pockets, as evidenced in our VA Nuclear Dump investigations, have also been given the boot though they still cling to their leased Veterans campus facilities.

EnviroReporter.com has groundbreaking ideas on how to best develop the VA property, ideas that go beyond the West LA VA’s master plan, which was modified by the VA in 2019 to exclude in the dump area, reflecting our comments.

West LA VA biological nuclear dump is a park waiting to be born after remediation

Perhaps the ideas in this piece could be adopted much to the benefit of Veterans themselves and President Trump’s proposed “National Center for Warrior Independence.”

Our award-winning WLA VA investigation came on the heels of this reporter’s exposé that demolished Washington Mutual’s $2 billion plan to build thousands of homes on the 2,783-acre Ahmanson Ranch wildlands hard on Los Angeles County’s western border.

The former Ahmanson Ranch, now saved as the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve, deserves a name change as we promoted in “Rob Reiner’s Ranch” and its associated Change.org petition.

Numerous actors, comedians, directors and producers have already endorsed the idea that the preserve be renamed the “Rob and Michele Reiner Open Space Preserve” because of Rob Reiner’s central role in saving the place from development.

Just these two reporting triumphs are worth more than $9.6 billion in 2026 dollars. Indeed, both the WLA VA and former-Ahmanson Ranch issues are still in play today. We also explore in this piece some of the major investigations undertaken by EnviroReporter.com in the last decade.

West LA VA Avoids Environmental Disaster

When the West LA VA’s 2016 Preliminary Draft Final Master Plan came out, the Obama Administration’s maps showed development of the “arroyo” where the dump is located, with walking paths, benches and landscaping without nary a word about the potential dangers underneath.

EnviroReporter.com’s official comments on the plan, as well as our interfacing with subsequent Trump VA officials in public meetings in 2019, led to the most unexpected of decisions: leaving the dump alone. No development whatsoever for the next 30 years with a fence around its wildish 11 acres.

We reported on this astonishing turn of events in 2019’s Victory at the VA. I had never experienced anything like it as a reporter. Face to face, shaking hands, one VA honcho said to me regarding the dump, “Leave it alone.”

“After a long contentious battle, the decision to leave the contaminated nuclear and chemical Brentwood VA site undeveloped marks a major victory for public health and safety” said former President George H. W. Bush State Department official, Dr. Bennett Ramberg, who is now an international nuclear issues columnist.

“While plaudits may be due the Trump administration for signing off on resolution of the VA dump, the major credit for success goes to … EnviroReporter.com/CityBeat for keeping the issue alive year after year pressing career government employees to do the evaluations that recommended keeping the site undisturbed,” Ramberg added.

EnviroReporter.com stopping Pres. George W. Bush’s proposed non-Veteran residential development made these new Veteran apartments possible

President Biden Administration’s VA began building the first of hundreds of units for Veterans according to the VA Master Plan fixed in 2019 by our suggestions. All of this well-designed housing sits across from the dump separated by a chain link fence and keep out signs.

Nice view. But it could be nicer and go a lot farther in making possible the Trump Administration’s stated goal of housing 6,000 homeless vets. Actually, one could house 10,000 veterans if the next phase of West LA VA development beyond the current Master Plan did the following:

Dig up the dump. Then really develop the West LA VA into its modern potential by remaking the cleaned up dump a park accessible by veterans filling up those beautiful units on MacArthur Avenue, dumpside.

Excavate the dump before building extensive housing with subterranean parking on the bluffs above the arroyo covering the immense area now taken up by Barrington Park’s underused baseball fields, the dog park and parking lots north, east and south of the post office.

EnviroReporter.com has all the West LA VA dump maps one needs to get at the goo, which isn’t too tough a job by any standard when considering the relatively confined area and ease of access. With the dump out of the way, let the construction begin.

11-acre arroyo with biological nuclear dump could be dug out using EnviroReporter.com maps and Lidar then designed to be an accessible green space for thousands of future veteran residents

The thousands of fortunate future veteran residents of those new bluff apartment complexes could then use the adjacent Olympic-class swimming pool, track and football/soccer field, tennis courts and gymnasium that Brentwood School will have to abandon if they are finally evicted off of federal property.

The current Master Plan protects the dump from development and doesn’t deny its existence like previous versions of the West LA VA’s master plans. Leaving it alone was, and is, the agreed upon option.

Remediating the dump, though, would remove that headache forever. Future development wouldn’t be encumbered and the tree-blessed area already is ripe for a nice gardening makeover with paths, benches and tables.

Brandeis-Bardin’s Toxic Denial

2017’s “Brandeis-Bardin’s Toxic Denial” was the culmination of a multi-year Brandeis-Bardin investigation. Hard on the northern border of the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), around 600 acres of the 2.200-acre Jewish camp in Simi Valley California get runoff from the lab uphill.

EnviroReporter.com exposed elevated levels of radiation and chemicals after filming gurgling lab-tested goo coming out of the ground downhill from nuclear Area IV from the lab commonly known as Rocketdyne.

Gurgling goo at Brandeis-Bardin Institute bordering and downhill from nuclear Area IV of SSFL

Dangerous radionuclides including plutonium-239/240 and uranium-238 were found in 2004 soil higher than later SSFL readings. Elevated strontium-90 and beta radiation in 2005 was detected in water flowing into Brandeis-Bardin.

The federal Department of Energy identified isotopes on the property as “fission products” and “used in reactor control rods,” information never shared with the Jewish camp’s attendees until we reported it.

Ten experimental nuclear reactors operated in SSFL’s Area IV directly uphill from Brandeis-Bardin, including the infamous Sodium Reactor Experiment which partially melted down in 1959 in its unreinforced building. That disaster spewed hundreds of times more of certain types of radionuclides than the more known Three Mile Island meltdown in Hershey, Pennsylvania did in 1979.

EnviroReporter.com returned to the issue in 2022 with “Brandeis-Bardin Groundwater Toxins Hit Historic Highs”. The cancer-causing radionuclide cesium-137 tested at its highest level ever in the first quarter of 2022 at Well RD-59B adjacent a popular hiking trail at the Brandeis-Bardin camp in Meier Canyon. RD-59B also hit “new maximum detections” in the well’s artesian water flow for gross beta radiation and radium-226.

The metalloid carcinogen arsenic’s concentration tripled in adjacent Brandeis-Bardin Well RD-59A from 2011 to 2022. Radioactive potassium-40 increased by over 52 times in the same 11-year period.

A June 2021 groundwater report measured radium-226 at 1.18 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) in Well RD-59A. Half a year later in early 2022, that number went to 1.46 pCi/L. That is a 23.7 percent rise in less than a year.

NO HIKING BEYOND THIS POINT Brandeis-Bardin Institute sign downhill from site of former Sodium Reactor Experiment which partially melted down in 1959

The former Ahmanson Ranch development planned by Washington Mutual on the other side of SSFL than Brandeis-Bardin fell apart because of contamination oozing out from under SSFL. The levels of radiological and chemical contamination EnviroReporter.com uncovered in this investigation vastly exceeded that found in Ahmanson Ranch. Future development of this property for luxury homes could be the height of folly.

Hiking in the Hot Zone

Later that same year, EnviroReporter.com covered community protests in “Critics question safety of Boeing’s Santa Susana Field Lab hikes” where hundreds of unsuspecting folks are encouraged to trod through Rocketdyne’s so-called Southern Buffer Zone.

Hundreds of hikers and tour-goers were made to sign waivers indemnifying Boeing and NASA for harm, with no opportunity to review the waiver in advance even though massive chemical and radiation contamination along the hiking route was not yet cleaned up.

That contamination included radium-226, plutonium-239/240, TCE, dioxins, PCBs, and the rocket fuel oxidizer perchlorate, the toxin that sank the Ahmanson Ranch development in 2003.

“BOEING EARTH DAY FRAUD” and “TURN BACK! Toxic Trails AHEAD” signs greeted startled hikers arriving in cars at the entrance to SSFL on, ironically, Earth Day 2017. “SSFL MAKES ME SICK” and “Don’t Let BOEING Fool You” placards were not exactly what the trekkers expected judging from their shocked faces passing by.

Protesters of Boeing hikes through the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s Southern Buffer Zone 2017 which are still going on despite EnviroReporter.com’s extensive documentation of the contamination there

Regardless, these questionable hikes have been continued to this day. One Boeing ally even tried to get an SSFL trail named after himself for all the trouble he had gone through “greenwashing” Rocketdyne’s pollution as nothing to be too concerned about. That effort failed as we documented in Toxic Trails and L.A. County Terminates Toxic Trails.

Joan Trossman Bien

The email came out of the blue. “You know, this July is the 50th anniversary of the meltdown,” Joan Trossman Bien wrote, referring to the Sodium Reactor Experiment. “Are you writing anything for it? Fifty years, and we still don’t know what really happened. Perhaps FOIA requests will be more effective with the Obama administration. Hmmmmm.”

Joan quickly convinced me to work with her, a rare instance in my case. It turned out to be a delight to crank out “50 YEARS AFTER AMERICA’S WORST NUCLEAR MELTDOWN” for Miller-McCune, later Pacific Standard.

Joan Trossman Bien was my only co-writing partner for twenty years other than EnviroReporter.com editor Denise Duffield. And I was the lucky one for that.

She had a unique voice, this Chicago native who settled in Moorpark in Ventura County. Joan could write like she sounded, which is not easy when you sound like that. Joan’s dazzling intellect was graced by a rapier wit. From the get go, Joan was a blast, a rocket blast.

Joan Trossman Bien was an extraordinary journalist with a wicked wit

When Joan passed suddenly in April 26, 2018, Denise and I were gutted. This vibrant 64-year-old left behind a wonderful husband, Steve, and an equally amazing daughter Julie.

“I wanted you to know that Joan was always grateful, and more than a little astonished, that you gave her the opportunity to work with you on the SSFL article,” Steve wrote May 3, 2018. “The publication of that article not only opened doors for her but gave her the confidence she needed to pursue the thing that she liked best, researching and writing about those things which she felt the public would benefit from knowing.”

Joan Trossman Bien turned out to be one of the most talented and driven journalists I have ever known. She could come up with umpteen article ideas that sparkled, investigate and master each subject at hand, then would pitch to places like the Ventura County Reporter, Moorpark Patch, Ventana and Pacific Standard magazine and get the gig.

I am uniquely honored to have gathered much of Joan’s delightful and galvanizing work for your reading enjoyment available at Joan Trossman Bien Articles.

Fire on the Mountain

At about 2:24 pm on November 8, 2018, the ferocious Woolsey Fire erupted. Igniting on Area IV of SSFL, the conflagration burned 80 percent of Rocketdyne and 96,949 acres over 13 days. Three people were killed, 295,000 evacuated and 1,643 structures torched.

Over 2,404 acres of brush that covered 2,849-acre Rocketdyne burned in the Woolsey Fire, brush that had sucked up radiation, trichloroethylene, dioxins, PCBs, and a cauldron of chemicals. It went up in smoke, 18 tons of it per acre. That’s over 43,272 tons of smoke particulate, as we reported in “Smoke Screen – Woolsey Fire Contamination Cover-up.”

2018 Woolsey Fire marches toward Malibu originating on SSFL’s nuclear Area IV and launching over 43,000 tons of toxic smoke from just the lab alone

Our Woolsey Fire Investigation explored just how dangerous that air could be. One week before the fire erupted, SSFL-owner Boeing held a Sunset & Sip event where people, after signing waivers, were allowed to walk through grossly contaminated Area IV and the Southern Buffer Zone (SBZ) and were rewarded with wine and beer.

The Woolsey Fire started several hundred yards north of the wine sipping on NASA land, incinerating most of Area IV and the SBZ. After the fire, Boeing itself found radionuclides in Woolsey Fire smoke on its property including the highly poisonous Polonium-210 (Po-210), a substance 250,000 times more lethal than hydrogen cyanide. The Po-210 was found in two separate sensors in the SBZ near where Boeing allows hikes.

When the Santa Susana Field Laboratory was first bulldozed into existence in the Santa Susana Mountains in the late 1940s, it was still out in the sticks. Now the place is nestled near multi-million-dollar estates, like the ones that Kim and Kourtney Kardashian were at.

The Kardashians first expressed alarm about SSFL-related toxins when the Woolsey Fire forced them to evacuate from their Calabasas homes on November 8, 2018.

“Shocked & furious to learn smoke from the #WoolseyFire started at former nuclear testing site, Santa Susana Field Lab, & is potentially radioactive,” tweeted Kim Kardashian to her 58 million followers Nov. 14, six days after the devastating fire ignited. “Sign now to demand that incoming governor @GavinNewsom gets this site cleaned up: [No more kids with cancer: clean up the Santa Susana Field Lab]”

A year later, Denise appeared on Keeping Up With the Kardashians in her role as Associate Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles (PSR-LA). This was reported on in “Kardashian Show Tackles Santa Susana Field Lab Contamination.”

Denise Duffield with Kim and Kourtney Kardashian in 2019 discussing the dangers of SSFL and potential radiation and chemicals in its fire smoke which blanketed the Kardashians’ homes in the Woolsey Fire

“There’s widespread contamination in the soil, in the groundwater, and in the surface water,” Duffield told the Kardashian sisters’ who were wide-eyed with amazement and anger. “In 2010, they said it was going to be cleaned up by 2017. It hasn’t even started.”

And it will actually never happen as further EnviroReporter.com Rocketdyne stories told in subsequent years. That means that another Woolsey Fire-type catastrophe will happen again and eventually again, with the same result of radioactively and chemically-impacted smoke from contaminated land settling by the ton upon Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Grace in the Dark of the Valley

All that airborne smokey goo and radioactive sludge bubbling up through broken pipes has to go somewhere. And some of it just might be killing kids.

EnviroReporter.com’s “Grace in the Dark of the Valley” showed the human side to the effect on the community that may have been a result of activities and contamination related to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

The film follows the story of Melissa Bumstead, a West Hills resident whose daughter Grace was diagnosed with a rare leukemia in 2014. When Bumstead met other mothers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles whose children also had rare cancers – and lived nearby – she began a search for answers that led her to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

One of over 30,000 rocket tests at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory has left the land and groundwater contaminated with radiation and chemicals with no plan to get it all out

Grace’s courage in facing childhood leukemia is inspiring to watch. Seeing this amazing girl’s face light up as she gazes upon a Christmas tree is one of the most powerful quiet moments in the documentary.

Denise also appears in the film, representing PSR-LA. Her affection for the local community and her command of the issues is moving and impressive. She is inspiring to watch especially when she tears into government officials attempting to quash a public meeting.

NASA’s Last Stand

2020’s NASA’s Last Stand investigation exposed how the space agency sought historic listing for the entire SSFL property claiming it as “pristine” sacred Native American land. That designation would allow NASA to say the entire site was exempt from cleanup by exploiting exemptions in the cleanup agreement for Cultural Resources, leaving massive amounts of toxins unremediated.

At the same time as pressing for this historic designation, NASA broke its prior 2010 agreement with the State of California to clean up SSFL to background levels of soil pollutants and groundwater contamination.

This extensive investigation looked deep into the lab’s past and found that an “ardent Nazi” had designed most of the test stands at Rocketdyne. While most folks steeped in their rocketry history know of former Nazi Wernher von Braun’s role in America’s space program and testing his Saturn V rockets at SSFL, few knew about Walter Riedel, an eccentric who really was the goose-stepping father of SSFL. Reidel even pulled off an early UFO hoax.

“Ardent Nazi” Walter Riedel with other SSFL scientists, standing third from right, designed most of Rocketdyne’s test stands and other essential buildings

“Like the Alfa and Bravo Test Areas, the Coca Test Area Historic District is also significant,” said a 2009 NASA report, “for the design and engineering of the test site, by DMJM, as well as rocket expert Walter Riedel, inclusive of the test stands and blockhouse, the ancillary buildings and structures, and the elements of the natural and man-made landscape.”

All these Rocketdyne test stands were designed by Riedel, who joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and belonged to five Nazi organizations. EnviroReporter.com showed that Riedel knew how to literally work thousands of people to death. At SSFL his land-scarring handiwork is passed off as pristine Native American land in NASA’s fraudulent historic designation scheme.

As a kid who grew up in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Freedom 7 astronauts would run by my home on our sandy street every morning and wave at me, I love the space program. It is particularly galling to watch NASA so contaminate SSFL and refuse to fully clean up its deadly mess, but it still has the money to send astronauts on a useless journey to the Moon to do something we have already done a half century ago.

Wayne Fishback’s World

You don’t have to be a massive corporation to destroy the beautiful mountains around Los Angeles as our 2020 Wayne Fishback Investigation, begun in 2006, shows.

EnviroReporter.com followed this story for 14 years, taking hundreds of photographs of Wayne Fishback’s two huge mountain dumps in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. EnviroReporter.com also has attained information and eyewitness documentation that shows the landslide potential of both Fishback dumps.

Fishback was convicted of civil contempt of court in Ventura on December 18, 2019 for failing to submit a cleanup plan for the massive dump he operated in the eastern part of the county near the grossly polluted SSFL. He was given 60 days to comply including obtaining all the necessary permits or check into jail, that or the Sheriff will come looking for him.

They did and he was jailed. Fishback was then released and continued a huge dumping operation in Browns Canyon above Chatsworth California. Fishback was subsequently sued by Los Angeles County and ordered to pay millions.

Illegal dumping in Browns Canyon Chatsworth California in 2015 as well as similar massive dumping destruction in Ventura County is unprecedented

The Ventura dump took in an estimated 100,000 cubic yards of construction debris and 40,000 cubic yards of soil to hide it, which according to 2015 court documents, would fill an eight-story-high football field.

Wayne Fishback never paid those damages and the mountains he ruined remain filled with garbage and construction debris as our Fishback galleries show.

Rob and Michele Reiner Open Space Preserve

The idea to rename the Upper Las Virgenes Open Space Preserve came to me the night my family and I heard of the Reiners’ tragic murders.

Naming a place after the heroes that saved it is an ancient tradition and should be reserved for the greatest among us.

Rob Reiner took information that this reporter gave him and, along with other brave idealistic people, saved Ahmanson Ranch. The idea to call the place after the Reiners has garnered notable support from their peers.

Alec Baldwin, Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Short, Rita Wilson and Robin Wright are some of the celebrities signing the Reiner name change petition.

It is our intent to use this petition to ask Governor Gavin Newsom to rename the former Ahmanson Ranch, now a state preserve, after Rob and Michele Reiner.

In doing so, it would highlight the preserve’s historic nature and remind millions of Southern Californians that it is literally right next to millions of people in the Conejo and San Fernando valleys for them to hike, bike, horse ride and picnic.

The “Rob and Michele Reiner Open Space Preserve” may replace this sign if our efforts are successful in renaming the place that they were central in saving

Should our efforts not succeed, at least “Rob Reiner’s Ranch” will stand as a testament to one of the greatest achievements of this beloved American icon. Plus, the preserve is still there in perpetuity regardless.

And, on this twentieth anniversary of EnviroReporter.com, we hope to be there too, bringing you the kind of in-depth environmental investigations that only we can deliver.