Employees Blame Rocket Lab For Cancer

LINKS TO THE DISEASE from tests conducted in the 1950s have prompted a lawsuit against Rocketdyne and its parent company, Boeing.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - Day after day, year after year, thunder roared down from the laboratory on the Hill. Full-throttle tests of rocket engines - dry runs for America's space and weapons races - rattled windows and teeth.

Folks in the 1950s welcomed the fiery rumblings. They did not complain about the huge clouds of reddish smoke that billowed from the mighty Atlases, Thors and Jupiters. Few even knew that the lab's nuclear experiments had resulted in radiation leaks.

But those were simpler times, when patriotism and paychecks were foremost in everyone's minds. The Rocketdyne field lab, perched on a bouldered ridge in the Santa Susana Mountains, had been crucial to the nation's moon program and its Cold War advances in missiles. And the Hill, as the lab still is known, had provided livelihoods to thousands of families in the Simi and San Fernando valleys.

Now, memories of the tests are poisoned. Some former employees of Rocketdyne, along with many people who live in the shadow of the Susanas, say they have paid a terrible price for their country's triumphs in the skies. They contend the lab gave them or their loved ones cancer.

"We were expendable," said Jim Garner, 45, a Simi Valley ironworker diagnosed with lymphoma three years ago. He had been part of a crew that dismantled a small nuclear reactor at the lab in the

mid-1970s. "Space exploration and the Cold War were so important at the time," Garner said, "that they fast-tracked everything, and they didn't protect the workers."

Garner, who underwent chemotherapy to shrink a fist-sized tumor in his chest, was sitting in the dining room of his ranch-style home, in a subdivision that Rocketdyne jobs helped build. His wife, Leslie, was busy in the kitchen. She was stricken with cervical cancer three years before her husband became ill.

"I firmly believe the lab gave me cancer," Garner said, his eyes bright with anger. "Did I bring home chemicals from work that gave my wife cancer? Something on my clothes? I think about that all the time."

Leslie Garner, 43, leaned against a breakfast counter and sighed. "I don't know where it came from," she said of her tumor, which was surgically removed. "But the sad thing is, there's been a lot of cancer in this valley. There are so many young people who've had cancer."

Rocketdyne, which continues to test Delta engines, says there is no credible evidence linking the lab to disease.

"We empathize with anyone who has cancer," said Steve Lafflam, Rocketdyne's director for safety and health. "But one out of four people in this country gets cancer, and they don't all live next to Rocketdyne."

The company dismisses as deeply flawed three studies that have raised concerns about the Hill's workers and neighbors.

An epidemiology analysis by UCLA found unusually high rates of lung cancer among Rocketdyne employees who handled the propellant hydrazine, a carcinogen. A second inquiry by UCLA's public-health experts determined that lab workers who were exposed to radiation had more than the normal incidence of leukemia and lymphoma.

A statistical review by the state Health Department also pinpointed a spike in bladder cancers in census tracts within 5 miles of the Rocketdyne property.

None of the research conclusively has tied the lab to cancers. But the findings have fueled a potentially massive class-action lawsuit against Rocketdyne and its parent, Boeing, which bought the lab in 1996. The plaintiffs' attorneys want to send letters to as many as 500,000 people who live or have lived close to the lab.

Numerous worker-compensation claims and individual suits also have been filed against Rocketdyne, including one by the Garners. Last summer, Motley Crue lead singer Vince Neil and his ex-wife Sharise, who blame the lab for the their young daughter's 1995 death from cancer, sued the company. The Neils once lived in nearby Chatsworth.

Rocketdyne denies charges in all of the complaints. It says the three studies were too narrow and did not take into account other possible factors in the cancers, such as smoking.

"These lawyers are saying everyone out there who's sick is sick because of Rocketdyne," said Phil Rutherford, the lab's radiation safety manager. "But there is no contamination of the community."

The company long has acknowledged a toxic history in the Susanas, however. Over the years, radioactive material and carcinogenic engine solvents fouled the soil and groundwater, respectively, within the confines of the 2,700-acre lab and on vacant land outside its boundaries.

A nuclear reactor was crippled by a partial meltdown in 1959. Radioactive gases were released. The event generated little notice until local environmentalists unearthed records 20 years later.

Rocketdyne scuttled its reactors a decade ago.

A $150 million cleanup at the lab, begun in the 1980s, is expected to last well into the next decade. Meanwhile, Rocketdyne says that no study has detected carcinogens at levels considered harmful to either workers or residents.

"There is contaminated water under the site, but it's contained," said David Dassler, a health monitor for the company. "And it's not drinking water."

Dassler and four colleagues were touring the lab in a shuttle bus. The lab is sprawled across a bluff of sandstone crags overlooking Simi Valley. German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun consulted in its design a half-century ago.

The engine-testing stands are giant scaffolding structures anchored in 200 feet of rock. During the lab's heyday, from the 1950s through the '70s, there were tests around the clock. Engines that passed muster would blast the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and space-shuttle astronauts into the heavens. Others would be installed on the MX nuclear missile.

Rocketdyne's payroll peaked at 22,000, a number that included its manufacturing plants in Chatsworth and Canoga Park. Today, there are about 5,000 employees at the three locations and only a couple of engine firings a week.

Cosmo Reo was hired on the Hill in 1957 as an instrument mechanic. He quit three years later to become a stockbroker. He fell mysteriously ill seven years later.

"He died a horrible death," said his widow, Betty Reo, 72. "His insides just disintegrated. We're still not sure what killed him."

Reo, whose ailments ranged from aneurysms to kidney failure, died in 1980 at age 60.