EnviroReporter.com debuted four years ago on May 18, 2006 alongside a Los Angeles CityBeat cover story entitled “Real Hot Property” about a biomedical nuclear and chemical dump buried in Brentwood on Department of Veterans Affairs land.
$4 billion plans to develop the West LA VA’s property by the George W. Bush Administration tanked soon after news of our VA Nuclear Dump investigation spread in a unique collaboration between the now-shuttered CityBeat and EnviroReporter.com.
Stopping potentially dangerous development doesn’t solve what made the developments possibly hazardous to the public’s health in the first place, though.
That’s evident at the still-unexcavated VA nuke dump where the government was embarrassed into excavating a ghoulish graveyard of Veterans’ tombstones out of part of it as I wrote for the LA Weekly in a December 10, 2009 article called “Brentwood’s Toxic Grave.”
The piece was backed up by extensive photo galleries that showed the tombstones tossed in the dump and left for years discarded. The photos include documentation of a series of questionable soil tests the VA performed in the dump that have not come back yet from the lab. The Weekly and this website will continue to report its ongoing investigation into this dump which impacts neighboring Brentwood School and a city-run dog park.
We’ll also continue covering the former rocket and nuclear testing facility, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, commonly known as Rocketdyne. Our extensive coverage in the last year included numerous feature, blog and print pieces in EnviroReporter.com, LA Weekly, Miller-McCune and the Ventura County Reporter. Sometimes, as the saying goes, the truth hurts and our reporting set off more than a few loose cannons who still are furiously firing away.
Continuing these and our other investigations means new story lines including “Space Monkey Business” and “We, Robot” for the Pasadena Weekly earlier this year where we exposed a NASA plan to intensively irradiate monkeys to see how humans would function on trips to the Moon and Mars.
Ongoing and new investigations burning into our fifth year promise to be as fiery as EnviroReporter.com‘s Denise Anne’s Perchlorate who, with a host of other Bad Actor Chemicals, were feted at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood at the First Annual Toxies Awards.
As EnviroReporter.com enters its fifth year, look for more hard-hitting in-depth investigative pieces that have defined our award-winning coverage. New features and expanding capabilities will enhance reporting in ways our readers are sure to find eye-opening and illuminating.
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