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Rocketdyne's Toxic Legacy - Scary New Data
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 If you live near Rocketdyne, you know the score: The booming, blazing nighttime rocket engine tests are only the most obvious evidence that extremely heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals are in use there on a regular basis. You may know more than one person with cancer. You may have cancer.
If you don't know about it, then know this: the nation's premier testing facility for rockets and - in its heyday, nuclear energy and other toxic power sources - was built on a once-remote mountaintop between Simi Valley and Northridge. Civilization grew up around it. And, before anyone knew much about carcinogens measured in parts per billion, people were inhaling, drinking and bathing in them - and getting horribly sick.
This week, L.A. City Beat's harrowing cover story on Rocketdyne lifts some of the veil that the company has long held in place, and reveals some of the goriest details of L.A.,'s own "Two Mile Island" ...
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Rocketdyne's Santa Susanna Field Lab gave birth to most of the U.S. space program's most famous rocket engines, from the VW-sized F-1 engines that shot the Apollo missions to the moon down to the garbage-can-sized engine that lifted Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin off to bring them home.
While building the generations of engines that led up to those, Rocketdyne poured vast amounts of engine-cleaning solvent trichloroethylene, or "trike" into the ground, CityBeat reports: Trichloroethylene was used extensively at SSFL to clean rocket engines, test stands, and other machinery from 1954 through 1993. Before they thought to recycle the stuff, in 1962 for financial reasons, 1.73 million gallons slopped onto the ground and was sluiced into unlined troughs. A reported 520,000 gallons of it soaked into the groundwater and bedrock. DTSC data shows SSFL groundwater containing up to 79,000 parts per billion (ppb) of TCE, 15,800 times the EPA’s “maximum contaminant level” of 5 ppb. The chemical affects the liver, kidneys, immune function, and fetal development – large doses may cause death. My former landlord, a longtime Rocketdyne engineer, told of colleagues "just dumping it straight down the flame buckets," the steel blast deflectors that drained into the natural rocky bowls over which the test stands stood.
The oldest of these, Vertical Test Stand 1, was dismantled eight years ago, something I wrote about for the L.A. Times. I also wrote about the deadly explosion that killed two Rocketdyne engineers in 1994 as the rocket fuel chemical that they were burning in the open air, rather than disposing of properly, blew up in their faces; The ongoing illegal practice eventually cost Boeing a small, but unprecedented $6 million in fines.
What's truly appalling - though chillingly understandable from the standpoint of corporate liability - is that Rocketdyne has long denied, even in the face of state health reports to the contrary, that its work caused any of its neighbors to get sicker or die faster than they would have had they lived somewhere else.
What's even worse is that even as test wells beneath parts of the SSFL are showing trichloroethylene polluting groundwater at the horrifying level of 500,000 ppb, parent company Boeing is hoping to release some of the otherwise beautiful land there for construction of housing developments, CityBeat reports. They also point out that Boeing gave $83,538 to 28 Assembly members - 25 of whom helped kill a bill to prohibit such development without a cleanup.
As grand and glorious as Rocketdyne's history of space-race innovation is, its truer, long-term impact on L.A. will be the legacy of reactor meltdowns, toxic fluorine gas emissions and carcinogenic pollution that is still seeping into the groundwater, despite all the company's protests.
Give the CityBeat piece a read. You'll never want to hike the Santa Susannas again.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, July 22, 2004 - 10:56 PM
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