We’ve called Gracie our “Ninja Princess” since 2014 when she was taken by ambulance to the emergency room where she’d later be diagnosed with an incredibly rare and aggressive form of Leukemia. As she lay in the stretcher she told the ambulance’s EMT that she was a real-life ninja. Really, he had asked? At four-years-old? Oh yes, she told him, I practice every day. Four years later and Gracie has since beat her cancer once already, relapsed in 2017, had a bone marrow transplant...and she’s still a ninja because the blood work is back… ...and our Ninja Princess has kicked her cancer to the mat again! She’s still cancer free and she has 100% of her donor’s cells, meaning her bone marrow transplant was successful! It’s been such a huge encouragement to our family and friends! And we have more good news! One of the ways Boeing has try to make the Santa Susana Field Lab seem safe was by advocating for hiking trails to be built along the borders of the contaminated site. Because if people are already hiking there, it can’t be that bad, right? The site’s 2,668 acres do look like an idealistic hiking spot. It’s beautiful, but deadly. Radionuclides like Cesium-137, Strontium-90, Plutonium-239 and Tritium are still there on site, buried under the topsoil. But when our advocates and community members met with the LA County Department of Parks and Recreation and told them that residents don’t want to be at risk of being exposed to carcinogenic waste when hiking, they listened. They changed their plans to wait until the site is 100% completely cleaned first before building the hiking trails. They know residents need to be safe from nuclear exposure. It’s a big deal for our fight! We won’t have to worry that our kids will be taken on hiking field trips along the borders of one of America’s worst nuclear meltdowns. We won’t have to worry about out-of-town visitors hiking without knowing they’re at risk of getting cancer. We won’t have to worry that Boeing is saving money with toxic, state-funded, hiking trails to avoid paying for the 100% cleanup themselves, even though Boeing agreed years ago to fund their portion of the cleanup, as they co-own the contaminated land along with the Department of Energy and NASA. And hopefully it’ll mean less kid-ninjas who have to fight cancer, and more kid-ninjas in karate classes where they belong!