Rocketdyne Field Lab Neighbors Sue Boeing

SIMI VALLEY —  Neighbors of Rocketdyne’s Santa Susana Field Laboratory sued the aerospace firm’s parent company in federal court Monday, alleging that decades of nuclear and chemical research at the mountaintop complex poisoned their land and water and caused them to contract cancer.

Ten plaintiffs from Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley filed a class-action suit against Boeing North American Inc., which in December bought the 2,668-acre research complex that its Rocketdyne division still runs.

The suit filed in Los Angeles demands that Boeing pay damages and set up a medical fund for future treatment of the cancer that the plaintiffs say they and their neighbors have suffered as a result of toxic and radioactive releases at the Rocketdyne lab over the last 51 years.

It asks the court to order Rocketdyne to make public all past and present risks of contamination posed by the field lab’s research into rocket engines and atomic reactors.

And it cites a laundry list of nuclear meltdowns, chemical explosions and toxic releases that Rocketdyne allegedly allowed to foul the air, water and land around the field lab ever since it opened in 1946 to design the first U.S. rocket engines.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Tina Nieves said Monday that Rocketdyne neighbors contacted her firm, saying that they believe that living near the lab caused extremely rare forms of cancer that are known to be brought on mainly by radiation exposure.

“They all live at opposite ends of the Santa Susana Pass,” she said, referring to the road that hugs the hill where Rocketdyne sits, midway between Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley.

“We thought that was pretty powerful evidence that there was some wrongdoing going on up at Rocketdyne, that a nuclear reactor facility was between these two cancer clusters we found,” Nieves said.

One woman named in the suit saw cancer crop up in three generations of her family, who lived for years in the shadow of the research lab. Another couple said they found eight of 10 families on their block had suffered some form of cancer.

The suit does not address possible health risks for Rocketdyne employees, who are the subject of a sweeping epidemiological study being performed by UCLA researchers.

Officials at Boeing’s Rocketdyne division in Canoga Park declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday afternoon, saying they have not been served yet.

“Nobody has advised us there was a filing,” said Paul Sewell, a spokesman for Rocketdyne. “I don’t think we would comment on litigation of this nature anyway--at this stage at least. We were taken completely by surprise. We weren’t expecting it.”

*

The suit lists several incidents from the 1950s on, when nuclear and chemical research allegedly spilled out of Rocketdyne’s classified, high-security facility and into the outside world.

Among them:

* A March 1959 release of fission gas that contaminated a containment room and several employees working on Reactor AE-6, after the reactor reportedly “scrammed,” or shut down automatically, upon reaching double its maximum allowable power.

* A series of problems in the summer of 1959, ending with the rupture and partial melting of nuclear fuel rods on Reactor SRE; this experimental reactor is cooled by liquid sodium, which explodes on contact with water. The extent of radioactive release could not be determined because on-site monitors went off the scale and others malfunctioned. Radioactive xenon and krypton gas were slowly released into the atmosphere over the period of a year.

* A fuel rod dripping with sodium exploded upon being washed with water in June 1959. The resulting blast created high radioactive contamination inside the building, which was vented to the outside.

* In 1960, a radioactive pipe from a reactor was taken outdoors to be decontaminated. There, it exploded and flew off a forklift and across a ravine at the field lab.

* A series of sodium fires, the most serious in May 1971, which could have exposed the plaintiffs and other neighbors to radiation.

* Outdoor disposal of chemical toxic waste. Before 1989, state and federal agencies let the firm dispose of hazardous waste left over from rocket experiments by simply blowing it up, a practice known as “thermal treatment.”

Even after the state of California ordered Rockwell to cease the disposal method, the firm apparently continued until at least July 26, 1994.

That was the day that Rocketdyne physicists Otto K. Heiney and Larry A. Pugh were killed when the rocket fuel chemicals they were working with blew up in their faces.

While Rocketdyne first said the men were doing legitimate tests on the chemicals, the firm later admitted they were just blowing it up to get rid of it.

Rockwell International, Rocketdyne’s parent company before the Boeing purchase, pleaded guilty last spring to felony charges of illegal waste disposal and agreed to pay an unprecedented $6.5-million fine. An FBI criminal probe is continuing.

Rocketdyne’s field lab, a sprawling complex of bunkers, buildings and open-air test stands, forged the machinery that the U.S. used in a high-stakes race for nuclear supremacy and mastery of the heavens.

It was the proving ground for the earliest missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. It produced nearly every rocket engine in the U.S. space program, from the Redstone that carried Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard aloft in the first manned American rocket flight in 1961 to the massive main engines that shove the space shuttles into orbit today.

The field lab also carried a lethal array of chemicals and radioactive elements in its toolbox, from the highly carcinogenic solvents hexavalent chromium and trichloroethylene to radioactive plutonium, one of the deadliest substances known to man.

*

Among the Rocketdyne plaintiffs:

* Nicky Pelaez of Simi Valley, who contracted thyroid cancer in 1996 at age 25 after she grew up in the shadow of the Santa Susana Field Lab.

* Mary Jane Vroman, who has lived in Woodland Hills within five miles of the field lab since 1967 and lost her 7-year-old granddaughter to leukemia in 1990. And her son, Clay Vroman, suffered from hyperthyroidism and severe weight loss from 1971 until the late 1980s, when he had surgery to kill his thyroid gland.

* Vroman’s daughter, Mary Christine Crilley of Simi Valley, who grew up in Woodland Hills and was diagnosed with a breast tumor in 1988 at age 21, and with thyroid cancer in 1994.

* Barr and Carlene Mugrdechian, who lived in Woodland Hills within five miles of the Rocketdyne field lab between 1966 and 1970 and live at another Woodland Hills home today. Barr Mugrdechian has bladder cancer he alleges was caused by the field lab’s work.

* Kathy Hecker of Valencia, who grew up in Woodland Hills and later lived in Canoga Park from 1960 to 1973, three miles from the field lab. She suffered an abnormal deterioration of her uterus, forcing her in 1983 to undergo a hysterectomy. She was diagnosed with thyroid cancer last June.

Crilley, 29, said she did not begin to link her thyroid cancer to Rocketdyne until recently.

As a child, she rode her bike in the Hidden Hills neighborhood, hiked through the arroyos and caught tadpoles in the streams, but the occasional boom of a rocket engine test was all she knew of Rocketdyne.

Then she contracted thyroid cancer and began reading up on the subject, fearful that the illness would kill her and leave her 3-year-old daughter without a mother.

Medical journals told her that thyroid cancer is largely caused by radiation exposure, she said.

And when she saw newspaper articles about Rocketdyne’s atomic research, she attended a recent public meeting of state and federal cleanup officials at Simi Valley City Hall and heard for the first time about the atomic reactors, the toxic spills and the open pits where Rocketdyne workers burned sodium, she said.

“I would have preferred not to believe that a neighbor would have done that,” she said. “It’s very sad, because thyroid cancer takes 15 to 25 years to manifest itself, so there’s potential for very many more casualties from this.”

The plaintiff class could extend to dozens of the plaintiffs’ neighbors, who the suit alleges were also afflicted with cancer because of their proximity to the field lab.

The suit cites a late 1980s study that found neighborhoods around the field lab showed a higher-than-average incidence of bladder cancer, known to be caused by radiation exposure.

And plaintiffs said an informal door-to-door survey they conducted also showed a high incidence of cancer in their neighborhood.

Hecker’s parents, Laurence and Margaret O’Connor, found that families in at least eight of the 10 homes on their block have one to three cancer victims, the suit alleges. And they found 57 incidents of cancer in their entire Woodland Hills neighborhood.

The plaintiff class could also encompass thousands of other potential litigants living near the lab who might allege that Rocketdyne’s research has damaged their property.

The property damage portion of the suit encompasses landowners bounded by the Santa Monica Mountains and the Ventura Freeway on the north and south, and by Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Moorpark Freeway on the east and west.

Boeing officials last December said they would assume responsibility for cleaning up the toxic legacy of Rocketdyne’s nuclear and chemical research.

*

One longtime Rocketdyne critic said Monday, “It looks like Rockwell sold [Boeing] a bill of goods.”

Joseph Lyou, executive director of Committee to Bridge the Gap, declined to speculate on how difficult it would be for the plaintiffs to prove that Rocketdyne’s work made them sick.

“In broad, general terms, you’ve got the problem of the delay between the cause and the effect,” Lyou said. “And the onset of solid cancers such as thyroid cancer, as is being talked of in this lawsuit, is likely to take place 15 to 25 years after the exposure. . . . At the same time, I don’t want to take away from the validity of the issues raised in the suit, and that’s why [I say] it’s up to a court to decide whether these allegations are valid or not.”

The suit is to be handled by two legal teams.

One is the Pasadena firm of Hector Gancedo and Tina Nieves, who researched the plaintiffs’ allegations and Rocketdyne’s history of rocket and atomic tests and drafted the suit itself.

The other is Capello and McCann of Santa Barbara, a firm experienced in class-action lawsuits.

The attorney who co-signed the suit with Gancedo, J. Paul Gignac, said Monday he recently worked on the massive class-action suit against Exxon over the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska that was filed on behalf of fishermen, landowners and other businesses.