From the Ojai Valley News/VCSun
At an online Nov. 9 meeting with nearly 60 community members, Jamie Slaughter, a public participation specialist for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, announced plans for soil removal, cleanup and further testing at the former 6-acre burn pit site within the Santa Susana Field Lab site in eastern Ventura County overlooking Simi Hills.
Last year, DTSC regulators announced an “Imminent and Substantial Endangerment” finding regarding dangerous chemical and radioactive contamination at the site.
The “endangerment” finding focused on the nearly 6-acre area within the much-larger SSFL site — a former “burn pit” used for decades to dispose of toxic chemicals, in part by firing shotguns at 55-gallon drums. Thousands of toxicological tests over recent years have shown the site is contaminated.
Slaughter said that because of the “imminent and substantial endangerment order,” a public input period was not required, but said the agency nonetheless would answer questions and take input at the meeting and until Nov. 15 at the DTSC website.
Plants and small burrowing animals living in the vicinity of the former burn pit were endangered by the contamination, said Patrick Movlay, the senior scientist overseeing the cleanup and work plans for the DTSC. He said, “The DTSC has determined that there’s an imminent and substantial endangerment to ecological receptors like plants and animals.”
Movlay added that the cleanup “action is necessary to prevent or mitigate an emergency involving clear and imminent danger to ecological receptors.”
The online Nov. 9 DTSC hearing on the work plan focused on the endangerment finding and the removal work plan, which calls for an expedited removal of 15,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, which will require trucking an estimated 1,000 loads of soil and debris to remote landfills over the next few years.
Operations at the Field Lab began in 1948 and employed thousands of employees over its five-decade history, which included tens of thousands of rocket tests and 10 separate experimental nuclear reactors. The contamination at the 2,850-acre site includes radionuclides from a partial meltdown of the core of the Sodium Reactor Experiment, a meltdown that in July of 1959 released a large amount of fall-out radiation on the site and over the nearby San Fernando Valley.
Public questions at the online hearing focused primarily on the finding of an imminent and substantial endangerment for plants and animals at the burn-pit site, but not on the health of people living in Simi Valley and West Hills and other nearby communities.
Melissa Bumstead, who co-founded a “Parents Against SSFL” advocacy group calling for a “cleanup to background” levels of the entire site, asked why “human health is not being taken into consideration for this emergency cleanup.”
“I’m a parent living near the Santa Susana Field lab and my daughter is a two-time cancer survivor,” she said. “She’s one of 80 children in the local community that has been diagnosed with cancer. I don’t see any reason why the DTSC should be ignoring human health with this cleanup, and why the cleanup levels are not to human health standards or even really to ecological standards — why the levels still allow observable harm to wildlife.”
In response, senior scientist Movlay said that monitoring of air and groundwater for contaminants at the former burn-pit site would continue on a quarterly basis.
“This particular endangerment order was based on the ecological receptors and the radionuclides in the shallow zone,” he said. “By no means are we overlooking human health. Next year, we are expecting a corrective measures study that will include all risk-based cleanup goals based on risks to human health.”
This question was asked in slightly different ways by other members of the public at the hearing. Slaughter, the DTSC official chairing the meeting, said in response that the agency is working “on an ongoing human health risk assessment.”
“We really would like to have a very comprehensive and informed study on what it is we need to clean up, what are the contaminants, and what is the impact to groundwater, and what levels should we adhere to, to protect human health,” she said. “We are expecting this corrective measures study to come in next year.”
Other questions focused on the hearing itself. The work plan detailed in the 1,312-page Environmental Impact Report followed an agreement to resolve years of legal conflict between Boeing and the state. This concluded with a Settlement Agreement signed in May of last year between Boeing and the DTSC.
Advocates of a full “cleanup to background” argue that settlement sets the terms for the long-delayed cleanup, and the public hearings mean little, because the deal sets the legal parameters for action regardless of public input.
“The grossly weak plan that we are here to comment on is actually the embodiment of an agreement that Boeing and the DTSC signed more than a year ago after secret negotiations,” said Dan Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a group that has been calling for a “cleanup to background” at the SSFL for many years.
“The DTSC will not and cannot take any of the public comments into consideration now, because it already gave the store away a year ago in a backroom deal with Boeing,” he said.
The DTSC and Boeing agreed in 2022 to a “risk-based standard” for cleanup of toxins and radionuclides on the SSFL site. Independent experts — such as the Inspector General for NASA, in a 2019 report — say the cleanup for the Boeing part of the site will be far less extensive and far less expensive than the cleanup for the NASA part of the site, which is expected to take until 2045.
In response to a question from a Simi Valley grandparent concerned about contaminated groundwater coming into the community, Movlay said that he lived nearby in Canoga Park and he and his family drink the tap water.
“The wells that produce our water are heavily tested and the reports are out there for the public to view,” he said. “I have no qualms about drinking tap water.”
This answer was challenged by Jeni Knack, a Simi Valley parent and a co-founder of the Parents Against SSFL advocacy group. She pointed out that Movlay and his family live in Canoga Park, not Simi Valley, and that Simi Valley residents have reason to be concerned about their drinking water.
“Thirty percent of Simi Valley residents use a private water distributor that draws in part on two wells in Simi Valley that the EPA has stated could be contaminated with SSFL groundwater,” she said. “I think it was irresponsible of you to assure this person that her water was safe, because yes, while it is true that the private water distributor does have to submit quarterly testing of their contaminants, we don’t know when, if they’re testing the water, when they’re using 3% of that potentially contaminated water, or 67%. Your water might be safe in Canoga Park, but we still have potential risks here in Simi Valley.”
Knack added that she would be happy to send the senior scientist Movlay more information on the question. (Online correction Nov. 20 – This last sentence has been corrected to accurately state that Knack offered to provide more information.)
Kit Stolz 