Excerpt from the EnviroReporter.com exposé Brandeis-Bardin’s Toxic Denial:
Ralph Powell arrived in the Simi Hills in 1962 and went to work as a patrol officer in Area IV. The longtime Simi Valley resident recalled working in the nuclear zone at a SSFL Work Group meeting September 24, 2015. His recollections included being engulfed in explosions from the Sodium Burn Pit, which drains into the same canyon Brandeis-Bardin where EnviroReporter.com found high plutonium and uranium with Area IV’s atomic signature.
“A famous cowboy road his horse up to the property line and says ‘I’d like to speak to a supervisor’ and [the supervisor] says ‘What’s your problem, sir?’” Powell told the rapt Work Group audience of a story from 1962. “And he says ‘I have 28 head of dead cattle down here that drank water out of this pond.’ So he assumed it was runoff from this disposal pit which it probably was.”
Powell, who has suffered from extreme peripheral neuropathy, confirmed exclusively to EnviroReporter.com that the “famous cowboy” was indeed James Arness. Ten years later, Arness donated his land to Brandeis-Bardin. That included the working ranch and livestock.
“In 1972, the neighboring land owner, James Arness, star of TV’s still wildly popular Gunsmoke donated his 950 acres, making the Brandeis-Bardin property 3,200 acres,” according to AJU’s Brandeis-Bardin-based Camp Alonim website. “This is the second-largest piece of land held for Jewish communal purpose, second only to the State of Israel.”
9-24-15 Ralph Powell at SSFL Workgroup
James Arness as Matt Dillon Gunsmoke 1969
James Arness in Gunsmoke 1956
24 Years of Award-Winning SSFL/Rocketdyne Reporting
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