CBG Comments on NASA’s Phase 1 Groundwater CMS & DTSC’s Statement of Basis

Beginning decades ago, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL) site was used to develop civilian rockets, plus military missiles for delivering nuclear warheads that could end our world. Grossly irresponsible practices such as dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of trichloroethylene (TCE) directly into the ground and groundwater resulted in widespread toxic contamination. In 2007, a Consent Order was signed requiring all contamination in soil to be fully cleaned up and the permanent groundwater remedy to be installed — by 2017. We are now in 2025, and none of those promises have been kept.

Now, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) propose cleanup efforts at just three – repeat, just three – of the 53 wells polluted with TCE, and plan to target only a handful of the dozens of toxic chemicals that are contaminating the site. Those three wells are contaminated with TCE at levels at least 2,000 times higher than legal limits. NASA and DTSC propose limited remediation for those three wells to marginally reduce contamination to levels that are still hundreds of times higher than health-based limits, and then to walk away from their cleanup obligations. They call this “monitored natural attenuation” and say that in centuries it will somehow get down to legal limits on its own. In other words, the plan put forward by NASA and DTSC is to do a trivially small cleanup and leave behind the vast majority of contamination for future generations to suffer from the toxic effects.