DTSC Oversight Committee Hearing

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

California State Senator Henry Stern asks California EPA Secretary Jared Blumenfeld about the Santa Susana Field Lab during the Oversight of the Department of Toxic Substances Control Meeting. The video is an unedited excerpt from meeting.

Secretary Jared Blumenfeld: The Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Valley, that’s one of the only places in the United States where there was a nuclear meltdown. There was more than a million gallons of TCE that was put into the soil there, so we know this, we all have our work cut out for us.

Senator Henry Stern: You know, one of these sites you talked about, where promises were made and haven’t really been followed through on Santa Susana-- as you said a million gallons of TCE, commitments in 2010-- thanks for already visiting the site and for also trying to hold the feds accountable. I want to get into that dynamic a little bit with you here. Just your perspective on this complicated relationship we’ve got with the federal government, where they are a responsible party. In this case the Department of Energy and NASA, who built our rockets that spilled out all that TCE, along with Boeing, or their corporation prior to that, were some of the responsible parties that we identified. They made commitments in 2010, it looks like the feds are trying to pull back and break their commitments right now. 

The Department of Energy put out a pretty weak NEPA analysis, which I appreciate that the DTSC sent that letter back in December saying, this doesn’t look like you’re meeting your consent orders, your contractual obligations to cleanup. But how do you see things proceeding both from a -- DTSC, rebuilding the trust with the public that you talked about. And we were supposed, I think the cleanup timeline was 2017, back in 2010 and it’s 2019 and we haven’t even got started. So, I don’t expect you to have a full answer right now, I know you’re still midway through your CEQA process and your environmental analysis isn’t complete, so maybe the acting Director [Meredith Williams] could comment at the appropriate time. 

But at a high level, the feds are on the hook for billions of dollars in costs and they’re trying to get out of it completely. We meanwhile might have to hold them accountable and private parties. So, any just initial take on what could be done. 

Secretary Jared Blumenfeld: I’ll give a very initial take. It’s a complete mess. And the level of toxicity, the history there, and when you’re on site it’s just depressing. I mean, everywhere you look there were flagrant violations of even what they knew back then. Another case I worked on at my last job was uranium mining on the Navajo nation that was for the same exact effort. To build weapons for the cold war. 

It was important work but it had a huge toxic legacy. Santa Susana, just for the other members that aren’t familiar, there’s three parties. NASA, the Department of Energy and Boeing. And the State of California has an agreement called an Order On Consent [AOC] with the two federal agencies. And that order is to cleanup the facility to background. It was inked by Steven Chu, the nobel laureate who was head of the Department of Energy at the time, NASA during the Obama administration and I was at [federal] EPA at that time. 

It’s not, it doesn’t give discretion to the federal government. There is no, this is what they’d like to do. It’s very clear what the need to do, it’s a legally compelling document that we can get courts to help enforce. The federal government doesn’t want to pay and in my experience at U.S. EPA we were very unpopular because we would hold other federal agencies accountable. 

We need, as the state of California, to make sure the federal government does two things. One, does what it says it was going to do. And secondly, pays for what it says what it was going to do. It’s going to be a struggle because the federal government isn’t prioritizing these kinds of cleanups. Their goal is if you have a less stringent cleanup standard, and this makes sense to all of us, you pay less to clean it up. So there’s a direct correlation between the amount of money they pay and the level of cleanup we receive. Boeing has another portion of the site and we need to make sure they adhere to their obligations which are also legally binding with us. 

All that requires legal work. All that requires people knowing, this is the bottom line. People know that we are in it. We’re serious. And we’re not going to walk away from the project and not allow others to walk away from their commitment. That’s hard to do when, to senator Stern’s comments, we’re [DTSC] in disarray. We’ve been in disarray. We’re working every day to make a decision to move the agency back into health, back to a place where we’re running properly. Retooling, working out what the budget is, and holding very large, very sophisticated leaders accountable is really difficult. So we need to put some stuff behind us. We need to move past that era of disarray into an era of-- we’ve got a few issues that we’re solving together. This is what they are, this is how we’re doing them, at the same time working to clean it up.

We met with families that live around the site. There’s migration [of contaminants] offsite from that facility to communities. It was really emotionally devastating, just moms talking about their young kids that have cancer. Yeah, there is a very real and personal face to all these sites and we can’t ignore that. 

At the same time we need to be rigorous and disciplined and diligent in our approach to solving them. Thank you.