The Wrong Plan

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) released its draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory cleanup on September 7, 2017. The EIR breaches DTSC’s longstanding commitments for a full cleanup. Furthermore, it hides the ball–it doesn’t disclose how much contamination it now proposes to not clean up, and completely omits risks to the community from contamination that would remain on site.

And, though DTSC’s DEIR doesn’t say what cleanup will be chosen, it rules out from even consideration the protective cleanup it had long promised for Boeing’s property and proposes options that would violate its agreement with DOE and NASA to clean up all detectable contamination at their operational areas of SSFL.

Astonishingly, Boeing is now pushing for a cleanup that is even less protective than any of the scenarios in DTSC’s DEIR, and that would leave about 98% of the contamination not cleaned up at all! Boeing wants the public and elected officials to believe that a full cleanup will somehow be more harmful than the plutonium, strontium, cesium, dioxins, PCBs, heavy metals, perchlorate, and other toxic materials with which the site is polluted. Boeing instead bombards the public with photos of rolling green hills and wildlife and stories of SSFL’s aerospace history. Boeing never mentions the damage to the environment caused by decades of nuclear and rocket-engine testing, and never utters a word about the health impacts of SSFL contamination, except to deny it ever hurt anyone.

Greenwashing SSFL’s toxic history and harmful contamination is dishonest and dangerous. Buried in Boeing’s own risk assessment reports are its own estimates of extraordinarily high cancer risks in some areas of the site, even after their proposed cleanup, which triggered an outcry from the community and elected officials. But rather than insisting that Boeing complete the risk assessments, or delaying the DEIR until they were finalized, DTSC released the DEIR without this critical health information, thereby giving an unbalanced and inaccurate assessment of the cleanup.

What we are left with is a DEIR that doesn’t include information about the risks from not cleaning up the contamination as promised and focuse instead entirely on purported potential negative impacts from cleanup, many of which are specious or exaggerated. The cleanup agreements protect endangered plants and species as well as cultural artifacts. And, most of the cleanup will occur in areas previously disturbed by decades of nuclear and rocket-testing activities. Claims that the cleanup will harm habitat or artifacts are false. And the failure to disclose the risks from the pollution, from breaching the cleanup promises, is irresponsible.

The only way to protect public health is for all of SSFL’s contamination to be cleaned up. We cannot allow Boeing to rewrite history, to erase the suffering of former workers and nearby community members who have gotten sick and even died because of SSFL’s contamination. Yes, Santa Susana needs to be protected – from Boeing. Please take action today!

A Truly Comprehensive Cleanup

In 2010, the Department of Energy and NASA signed historic agreements called Administrative Orders on Consent (AOCs) with DTSC to clean up their operational areas to background levels of contamination – meaning return the land to the way it was before they polluted it. Boeing refused to sign the AOCs, and sued to overturn the state cleanup law for SSFL, SB 990. DTSC, however, said that even in the absence of SB9 990 or an AOC, its normal procedures require it to defer to local governments’ land use plans and zoning decisions which for SSFL allow agricultural and rural residential uses, which DTSC said would require a cleanup equivalent to the AOC requirements.

Boeing resisted these standards, and said that it would instead cleanup to a weaker suburban residential standard. It said that although it intended the land to be open space, it would clean the site up so it would be clean enough to live on, as a way of providing assurance to the people who lived nearby.

In August 2017, Boeing broke its word, saying it should only have to clean up to recreational standards – which amount to almost no cleanup at all. Recreational standards are based on people only being on the site for short amounts of time. But people who live near SSFL do not live in open space, and if high amounts of contamination remain on site, they will continue to be at risk of exposure to SSFL contamination through offsite migration.