Big, bad, wolves and mythic monsters are supposed to only exist in fairytales. I live in West Hills, a quiet, sunny suburb of Los Angeles where palm trees line the streets and children play in sprinklers in their front yards. It’s hardly a place for dark, vicious creatures.

My house is less than four miles from the toxic Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL), a cold-war era facility that was used for decades for rocket engine tests and nuclear energy experiments. Older residents remember the ground-shaking rocket engine tests that dumped thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into the soil and groundwater. There were ten atomic reactors on-site. The Sodium Reactor Experiment may have been America’s worst nuclear meltdown. There were three other meltdowns in addition to radioactive leaks, spills, and explosions.

Most people living nearby didn’t know about the radioactive work happening in the hills above their homes, or about the epic amounts of contamination that was being released into the environment. They assumed, “if it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let us live here.”

It’s not surprising that people living within two miles of the Santa Susana Field Lab have a sixty-percent higher cancer incidence rate, compared to residents living five miles away. My thirteen-year-old daughter is a two-time survivor. She’s one of the “lucky ones,” but she suffered in ways that would crush most adults and has buried several of her friends. In the last few years, we’ve learned of eighty children living near the site who have had cancer. I have seen firsthand what a cruel and heartless monster cancer is.

Higher cancer rates would be bad enough, but we also have wolves seeking to devour our children, not dressed in sheep’s clothing, but in expensive suits. The wolves are the interests trying to stop the complete cleanup of the Field Lab.

The wolves are bad, like the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), a division under CalEPA. They’re big, like the Boeing Company, NASA, and the federal Department of Energy which are responsible to pay for the site’s cleanup. They care more about profit than they do about people. It seems impossible, but they are fighting to keep the site as contaminated as possible to save money. They’ll huff and puff, even if it means our children die.

We’re afraid of these wolves and with good reason.

Last year the DTSC signed a new cleanup agreement with the Boeing Company, which owns most of the Santa Susana Field Lab. According to an article by Reuters News, this new agreement will allow Boeing to leave nearly all of the contaminated soil at the Field Lab. Permanently. The original agreement, signed in 2007, was to clean the site so that it would be safe enough for people to live there and eat the food they grew there, without getting cancer from it. It would have been a very stringent cleanup that would have protected families who live nearby. The wolves devoured it, leaving only the carcass of the promise they made our community.

We can’t move away; even if we could, this is our home. This is our community, full of people we care about. Even if we could escape, what about the other 700,000 people living nearby?

We’ve decided to stay and fight the wolves prowling our streets.

The original SSFL cleanup agreement signed over a decade ago with DTSC, NASA, and the Department of Energy was truly historic. It would have held the responsible parties to the strictest cleanup possible by removing all man-made radioactive and toxic contamination. That seems like common sense. But according to the DTSC, they’ve only done such a cleanup in California twice. That means that cleanups in California are generally meant to save as much money as possible and are concerned with public health as little as possible. We know that. We’ve seen DTSC do the same thing at Exide and other contaminated sites across California.

If our agreement at the Santa Susana Field Lab was upheld, it could set a new precedent that could protect millions of people. A new precedent would also cost polluters millions of dollars because doing better cleanup costs more money. You get what you pay for.

Because the Santa Susana Field Lab is only twenty miles from Hollywood, we have some powerful tools. We were fortunate to be part of a 2022-Emmy Nominated Documentary, In the Dark of the Valley, now streaming on Peacock TV.

The Kardashians invited us on their show and shared our change.org petition, helping us get over 855,000 signatures for the cleanup. These tools have given us a fighting chance for our site’s cleanup. We hope a full cleanup at the SSFL sets a new precedence, one that will protect other families across our state, and even our nation.

The wolves in suits might be fighting to kill the cleanup, but we’re fighting back just as hard because we believe that every child deserves to live in a safe, toxic-free environment.

Recently the DTSC said they will release an important set of cleanup documents at the SSFL, called a Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR), that will set the limit on how much contamination Boeing, NASA, and the federal Department of Energy will remediate. We know what they’ve agreed to with Boeing and we’re afraid they’ll give NASA and the Department of Energy similar deals. The PEIR is the final word before the cleanup begins. We’ve waited years for the cleanup and now we’re terrified of it. We know that if the DTSC approves a flawed cleanup plan for the entire SSFL, that leaves nearly all of the contamination behind, we’ll never get a second chance for them to do it correctly.

We’re being vigilant. We know that when the PEIR is released they won’t tell us directly how much contamination will be cleaned up in the document’s summary. They’ll use flowery language, saying how much they care about the health of the community and how they’ve worked hand-in-hand with the community. It’ll take technical experts and watchdog groups to pour through the thousands-of-pages document to assess how much contamination will actually be cleaned up.

My group, Parents Against SSFL, is a grassroots organization and we’re going to take the information from our experts and use it to inform, educate, and rally the community. We're not backing down even if we’re only armed with hypothetical pitchforks and shovels against a ferocious pack of well-dressed wolves.

They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. Help us expose them for what they are.

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