[Note: here’s a story I wrote for Friday’s Ojai Valley News, about the decades-long controversy over cleaning up one of the most contaminated sites in the state, both chemically and with radionuclides.]
Public Health Officer warns of dangers of not fully cleaning up Santa Susana Field Lab
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Ventura County Public Health Officer Dr. Robert Levin spoke at a hearing of the state Board of Environmental Safety in Sacramento last week on the subject of the Santa Susana Field Lab, a rocket- and nuclear-testing site near Simi Valley.
After decades of nuclear-reactor experiments and thousands of rocket-test engine firings, the site has been contaminated by highly toxic and often carcinogenic chemicals used in rocketry, including perchlorate and hydrazine.
Levin added his official voice to many county residents and investigative and environmental organizations who charge that legal maneuvers and foot-dragging on the part of federal contractor Boeing, now overseeing the SSFL site, and the Department of Toxic Substances Control — the state agency regulating the cleanup — are failing to protect Simi Valley and Ventura County residents from decades of dangerous contamination at the 2,900-acre site.
The contamination has been documented, and the health implications studied. A long-term survey of cancer rates among the approximately 6,000 workers at the plant found in 1994 that workers assembling rockets at the SSFL had a lung-cancer rate twice that of other workers. The survey found elevated rates of blood, bladder, lymphatic, and kidney cancers among other SSFL employees as well.
Cancer registries of Simi Valley in the 1990s found 17% more lung-cancer cases in Simi Valley than in other Ventura County cities. In 2007, a Centers for Disease Control survey by a University of Michigan researcher Hal Morgenstern found 60% more key cancers among residents in Simi Valley than in other local towns five miles away.
“The Santa Susana site was set aside for rocket-engine and nuclear-reactor testing in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s,” said Levin, who has served as the public health officer in Ventura County since 1998, in his statement to the state Board of Environmental Safety.
“During that time that it was used extensively for rocket and nuclear testing, we saw increased cancer rates, and potentially birth defects and poisonings, which will continue forever,” he said.
“Our public health position, which protects your health and the health of your parents and your children, supports the original 2007 and 2010 agreements, which would have cleaned up the Santa Susana mesa to its original state, and removed the threat to human health entirely. When you make a mess, you’re supposed to clean it up.”
Boeing, which bought the SSFL from a now-defunct aerospace firm, consented in 2007 with NASA and the Department of Energy, the Responsible Parties with whom it shared the site, to a complete cleanup.
In 2010, under pressure from the DTSC, the state Legislature, and local officials such as Supervisors Linda Parks of Ventura County and Sheila Kuehl of Los Angeles, NASA and the DOE finalized an agreement to “clean to background” the area within the SSFL that each administered.
The contractor Boeing agreed in concept, but did not sign on to a “cleanup to background” requirement, eventually substituting instead a “risk-based standard” for the decontamination.
In the years since, a coalition of grassroots, environmental, and local activists allege that Boeing has won legal concessions from the DTSC for a “risk-based standard” that will decontaminate only a small fraction of the cleanup originally promised in 2007, 10% or less.
Levin concluded his comments to the regulators by warning: “Now, a new plan has been approved by the Department of Toxic Substances Control which would ignore what was previously agreed upon, and remove only a small portion of the contaminated soil and radionuclide waste. The DTSC is supposed to protect the public.”
Levin asked the new state oversight board that conducted the hearing in Sacramento — the Board of Environmental Safety — to vote to hold Boeing and state agencies such as the DTSC accountable for a complete “cleanup to background.”
The five-person Board of Environmental Safety was created by legislation initiated by Democrats in the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. It was central to the Senate Bill 158, which is intended “to improve the Department of Toxic Substances Control transparency, accountability, and fiscal stability,” according to the Board’s website.
In its introductory presentation on SSFL to the oversight Board, DTSC Branch Chief Steven Becker said that the EIR certified in June would lead to a “very stringent” decontamination of the site. He said it could begin as soon as 2025.
Dan Hirsch, veteran investigator for the Committee to Bridge the Gap, who has been documenting the contamination at the SSFL since 1979, pointed out that the DTSC, NASA, the DOE, and Boeing promised in a 2007 Consent Agreement that the cleanup would be complete by 2017. He said the agency promised that a final EIR would be released to the public years before the 1,200-page Final Program Environmental Impact Report came out in June. He contradicted with charts drawn from the EIR itself Becker’s statement that the final cleanup settlement plan would lead to a “more stringent cleanup.” Hirsch called the claim “false.”
After hearing the presentations from Levin, Hirsch, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Carolyn Reiser, and Simi Valley parent representative Melissa Bumstead, chair of the Board Jeanne Rizzo asked if it was true, as Bumstead had said in her presentation, that the FPEIR from the DTSC “superseded” the earlier binding agreements of 2007 and 2010.
“Nothing has been superseded when it comes to NASA and the DOE,” said DTSC Director Meredith Williams, speaking of the areas of the SSFL site owned by the federal agencies. “But the Boeing agreement is a process agreement, about how the cleanup will be done.”
Board member Sushma Bhatia asked if the DTSC had the ability to enforce cleanup deadlines. The cleanup promised by the agency and the three Responsible Parties — the Department of Energy, NASA, and Boeing — promised to be complete by 2017 is now not expected to start before 2025. Becker said the DTSC did have that ability, but admitted that the agency could not impose penalties to enforce cleanup schedule.
In the end, the Board of Environmental Safety took no action and made no comment as a body on the EIR, the Department of Toxic Substances Control, or the Santa Susana Field Lab agenda item. Director Meredith Williams of the DTSC said she would soon propose a new subcommittee to focus on the SSFL.
Kit Stolz 