EPA Faults Handling of Rocketdyne

State investigators on Friday criticized California’s health protection agency for its conduct at Rocketdyne’s missile test lab near Chatsworth, accusing the agency of failing to communicate pollution hazards to the public, withholding controversial studies and having cozy dealings with the company.

The report also accuses the state Department of Health Services, a key player in assessing potential health risks related to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, of duplicity for publicly promising an in-depth health study, but internally calling it unwarranted.

“There can no longer be any doubt that there has been a serious breach of responsibility on the part of [the Department of Health Services],” said Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica).

Gov. Gray Davis ordered the inquiry in May in response to concerns by environmentalists, Kuehl, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein that the health department might have been acting in collusion with the company. The investigation, conducted over three months by a branch of the California Environmental Protection Agency, confirms some of those suspicions. But it also challenges the perception that toxic and radioactive contamination at the 2,668-acre site poses a menace to people living nearby.

Specifically, the investigators criticized the health department for failing to disclose a 1997 survey by the California Cancer Registry that describes an elevated incidence of lung cancer among 91,000 people living near the lab. That report was completed at a time of intense public interest in the issue and coincided with the second phase of a study of Rocketdyne workers’ health conducted by UCLA researchers, but the health department deemed it of little value and elected to file the report rather than circulate it. Environmentalists discovered the document in the spring and distributed it to the news media, prompting Davis to order an investigation.

“There appears to be an organizational failure in that the [health department] did not distribute or share the report with other potentially interested parties,” investigators from the California State Department of Toxic Substances Control concluded. Taking “no action was not an acceptable public policy in the absence of a detailed explanation to the public,” the document says.

However, investigators stopped short of charging the health department with suppressing the cancer study. Rather, they said experts in the department’s Cancer Surveillance Section and Environmental Health Investigations Branch considered the 1997 study flawed and of no use to other scientists.

For example, the study found 17% more lung cancers among people living within five miles of the lab. But the study did not account for smoking habits, the leading cause of lung cancer in the nation, and other factors that would suggest the disease was not caused by Rocketdyne pollution.

Experts Find No Evidence

Indeed, experts at EPA and two independent scientists who participated in the investigation, UC Davis epidemiologist James J. Beaumont and Faith G. Davis, chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois, found no evidence in the study that the community was at risk.

“The results do not support the presence of any major environmental hazard,” the investigation says.

Anita Gore, spokeswoman for the state Health and Human Services Agency, which oversees the health department, said agency officials received a copy of the cancer report Friday and were still reading it. She said the health department did not intend to mislead the public.

“There were no deliberate actions to suppress information,” Gore said. “Perhaps some poor decisions were made, but nothing appears to have been done that is in violation of a statute or regulation.”

In contrast, the state health department was surprisingly forthcoming when it came to divulging information to Rocketdyne corporate officials, the investigators found. For example, Dr. Robert Harrison at the health department ignored a directive from a powerful citizens panel that had been granted authority over the preparation of the report under a contract with the Department of Energy, and gave company officials draft copies of worker health studies being prepared by UCLA researchers. Harrison told investigators that he acted to ensure “adequate scientific review” of the studies, but the investigators dispute that.

Additional Findings

The health department “violated the collaborative spirit, if not the terms of this contract,” when it released studies over the strong and explicit objections of the advisory panel, the investigation says.

“The result was [an] intensifying spiral of distrust by the community, perpetuated by acts perceived by the community to be evidence of increasing bad faith by [the health department],” the report says.

Furthermore, the report finds that the health department’s actions to undermine the authority of the oversight panel may have been more extensive. On two occasions before December 1997, representatives from the health department and Rocketdyne participated in conference calls to discuss the makeup of the panel and ways to reorganize it, according to the report.

Community leaders, long suspicious that regulators were too cozy with the company, reacted angrily to that finding.

“The report pulls back the curtain to show the agency was trying to impede efforts by the advisory committee to address public health risk,” said Dan Hirsch, a co-chairman of the panel and leader of Committee to Bridge the Gap, an activist group.

Pledges Made to Community

The report also takes the state health department to task for failing to carry out pledges to conduct a community health study for residents living near the Santa Susana lab concerned that leaks, spills and accidents at the site may have harmed them.

Although the health department’s Environmental Health Investigations Branch has made numerous commitments to the public and state legislators since 1991 to conduct such a study, internally, agency officials considered it unwarranted and unfeasible because of limited funding and manpower, the report says.

In addition, the agency was unwilling to divert resources from other programs, such as childhood leukemia and brain cancer studies, to examine health in communities near Rocketdyne. The investigators agree with the health department that “the public health epidemiological community does not today view the Rocketdyne data as significant or elevated enough to justify a major commitment of state resources.”

Consequently, the health department did not proceed to do the work or offer the public an explanation for the delay, a finding the investigators said was unacceptable.

“The pattern and practice of delay is evidence of poor internal . . . management practices,” the investigators concluded. The health department “failed in its duty to conduct such studies or in the alternative, to articulate to the public a reason why such studies were inappropriate.”

A Vow to Change

The report contains several recommendations to improve management within the health department, foster better relations between the advisory committee and the agency and disseminate the latest findings among all relevant health researchers. Gore, the spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Agency, said the Department of Health Services will implement those changes.