Sour Satisfaction
Boeing settles massive lawsuit over the Valley's heavily polluted Rocketdyne
site

~ By MICHAEL COLLINS ~

Planning ahead: Rocketdyne works on its coming legal case


For years, the residents of Simi Valley and western San Fernando Valley towns
adjacent to
Boeing's Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) have claimed that the troubled
site, polluted
with myriad high-level toxins – including the remains of two partial nuclear
meltdowns –
was responsible for a cluster of cancers and other deadly diseases in scores of
people.
Two weeks ago, Boeing agreed not to fight them anymore, and settled a sprawling
lawsuit
that had been churning away in the courts since 1997.

The confidential agreement includes no admission of responsibility on the part
of Boeing
or SSFL's former parent company, Rockwell International, but did keep the
lawsuit from
going to a jury trial. Jury selection was slated to begin on the day of the
settlement,
September 21.

As last week's enormous Chatsworth wildfire blazed through parts of the
2,668-acre
facility, formerly known as Rocketdyne, sending skyward enormous plumes of
possibly
radioactive smoke, the conclusion of eight years of contentious litigation was
just sinking
in.

"Plaintiffs and defendants are both satisfied with the settlement, and settled
these claims
to avoid the high costs and delays of litigation," both sides said in a
statement announced
by Boeing spokesman Dan Beck, who pointed out that the company admitted no
wrongdoing. But that's exactly what upsets some environmentalists, who complain
that
the confidentiality of the settlement means that some evidence will never come
to light.

Over 100 plaintiffs with 174 claims, represented by Cappello & Noël of Santa
Barbara and
Gancedo & Nieves of Pasadena, agreed to a confidential settlement that will
avoid the
necessity of over 90 separate trials that could take up to four years to
complete. According
to lead attorney Barry Cappello, who was quite pleased with the settlement, many
of the
dozens of clients were gravely ill and dying, so it was time to act. "You know
the song `(I
Can't Get No) Satisfaction'?" he told CityBeat. "We got satisfaction."

The lawsuit took shape in March 1997 with seven original plaintiffs. A fourth
amended
complaint was filed in March 1998 based on 21 causes of action that alleged
injury related
to Rockwell and Boeing's activities. The lawsuit contained two distinguishable
elements
consisting of a class action brought forth in part for property damages, and
another for
personal injury and wrongful death on behalf of 59 individuals. The plaintiffs
suffered a
setback in 2000 when the class action part of the lawsuit was decertified,
leaving their
attorneys to prove the connection between SSFL and the three other Rocketdyne
facilities
to the suffering of their clients.

The mountain of evidence produced by the attorneys, buttressed by expert
testimony
submitted into evidence, was culled from 200,000 documents and 2 million pages
of
information. The lawsuit alleged that the 1959 meltdown of a nuclear liquid
sodium cooled
reactor released enough radiological poisons to exceed 15 to 260 times the
amount of
radiation released in the U.S.'s most infamous meltdown, at Three Mile Island,
as CityBeat
reported last year in a cover story entitled "Two Mile Island."

The plaintiffs alleged that for over 50 years the Rocketdyne facilities, which
were involved
in the testing and manufacture of large rocket engines and experimental nuclear
reactors,
polluted the environment with huge amounts of radiation, including strontium,
cesium,
and plutonium. The lawsuit contended that gross contamination also occurred from
poisonous chemicals including hexavalent chromium, trichloroethylene (TCE),
arsenic,
hydrazine, formaldehyde, and the metal beryllium.

The lawsuit detailed one of the most contaminated sites at SSFL, the sodium burn
pit: a
three-acre expanse where barrels of radioactive reactor waste were simply tossed
into a
cesspool of pollutants. Rocketdyne workers would often draw lots to see who
would get to
shoot at the barrels, which would explode and sometimes go flying two hundred
yards,
disgorging their poisons in the process. The pit operated from 1959 to 1975, but
"there
have been no records of any kind kept by any department on the frequency of
disposal,
kind and amount of the material disposed of, or ultimate fate of the material
after leaching
through the soil," according to an internal Rocketdyne document from 1966
introduced as
evidence. The burn pit has since been excavated down to the bedrock.

This galaxy of goo has been cited as the source of a multitude of maladies.
Using
individually calculated risk assessments, University of Illinois College of
Medicine
professor Marc Lappe, who has since passed away, analyzed the causes of the
bone,
kidney, lung, and other cancers endured by the plaintiffs. One such case was
that of John
Lallo, who was 14 in 1957 when his exposure to the carcinogens hexavalent
chromium
and TCE began. In 2002, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. In another,
46-year-old
Scott Arend became afflicted with renal cell carcinoma in 2000 afterbeing
exposed to even
higher doses of these two toxins used at SSFL. And Sharon Grandinetti, who was
first
exposed to these substances in 1955, came down with bladder cancer in 1997.

One of the crucial moments during this legal battle came June 8 of last year
when U.S.
District Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian, in the central California district,
denied Boeing's
motion to dismiss radiation claims of the plaintiffs. Tevrizian ruled that it
sufficed to show
that exposure to radiation was a "substantial factor" in contributing to a
plaintiff's injury
while acknowledging that each individual case would have to prove it was based
on the
"factual circumstances."

The decision was a green light for Cappello. "We have filed 11 expert reports
including
emissions on dioxins, hex chrome, radiation, and TCE, risk-dose experts,
medical-toxicity
experts," he wrote in a March 22 e-mail to CityBeat. "Our medical expert has now
opined,
on over 90 individual cases, that their cancers/diseases are directly linked to
the three
Rocketdyne facilities' toxic air emissions (cooling towers for hex chrome, SRE
[sodium
reactor] meltdown for radioactive iodine, and TCE usage)."

As the hearings edged toward the sealed settlement, both sides clashed over the
use of
experts. Cappello had to replace Lappe, who died of brain cancer, with three
experts that
Boeing's lawyers sought unsuccessfully to exclude from trial. Cappello failed in
an attempt
to introduce evidence that milk consumed from local Simi Valley dairy cows had
caused his
plaintiffs to ingest radioiodine, going so far as to produce an archival Russian
spy satellite
photograph that showed the cows grazing in a Giacopuzzi Dairy pasture near SSFL.
Judge
Tevrizian dismissed that as "too speculative" and strongly urged the parties to
settle,
which they did a month later.

"I only wish the rest of the community got satisfaction from this confidential
settlement,"
wrote longtime Rocketdyne activist Marie Mason in an e-mail. "Cappello said his
experts
found links between exposures from toxics from the site to illness, but the rest
of us will
never hear this information with a locked-and-sealed settlement. What else can
we expect
from Rocketdyne – pay off and walk away saying they have done nothing wrong.
What a
cop-out for the attorney and Rocketdyne. So much for satisfaction."

Critics of the settlement insist that crucial information is now lost with the
confidentiality
of the agreement. "Our organization is very concerned about the health of people
exposed
to toxins released by Rocketdyne," said Jonathan Parfrey of Physicians for
Social
Responsibility. "The settlement seals evidence, which may link Rocketdyne's
contaminants
to local health problems. Is this the best way to protect the public? I don't
think so."
Not everything that takes place in litigation is filed with the court is the
lawsuit doesn't
proceed to trial, including deposition transcripts. But, according to Cappello,
only the
settlement is sealed and the evidence is available to the public. When told by a
reporter
that the vast majority of this evidence, evidence even used in this article, is
currently
online and just a walk away from his downtown Los Angeles office in the District
Court,
Parfrey seemed surprised. "From what I understand, that material is not
available," he said.