And maybe stay away from fruits and vegetables grown anywhere near there, and don’t drink the water, and…
…
Let’s go back in time with an excerpt from the May/June 2003 issue of Western Water , a publication from the Sacramento-based Water Education Foundation.
There’s danger lurking underground. The threat cannot be seen, heard, or felt immediately, but there it resides—in shallow pockets of groundwater and deep, cold subterranean aquifers situated hundreds of feet below the surface.
Sounds like the beginning of a horror movie…
In some cases, the chemicals are the remnants of long-dormant industrial and military operations conducted during a time of ignorance or indifference to the environmental impacts of careless handling and disposal.
…. Perchlorate is a chemical most associated with solid rocket fuel that has been appearing with alarming frequency in sites nationwide. Like MTBE, perchlorate moves rapidly through water and soil and consequently is the fastest-growing contaminant in California’s groundwater. Thanks to improved detection technology, decades of groundwater pollution are slowly being uncovered as underground plumes have shut down or threatened to shut down dozens of wells up and down California. Meanwhile, across the border in Nevada, an underground swell of perchlorate slowly percolates into Lake Mead and the Colorado River, threatening the supply for millions of people dependent on the river for drinking water.
“It’s turned into much more than any of us expected,” said Kevin Mayer, Superfund project manager with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region IX in San Francisco. “It’s gone from a fairly localized release of a pretty unusual and specialized chemical to finding it in … many public water systems.”
Again, these words are from 2003! Even back then, the article goes on to say that perchlorate’s presence in the environment had been known for decades. The authors also describe that it’s a vexing chemical because of its persistence and high solubility.
Experts say that were it not for the threat posed to human health and the environment, perchlorate would be a good tool to track the movement of subsurface water.
It has been a particular problem in Southern California, home to the aerospace industry. Regulators, local officials, and residents have dealt with plumes near Simi Valley, in San Gabriel Valley and in the Inland Empire region. The problem spurred a contentious process of identifying responsible parties and negotiating the terms by which cleanup will proceed. We all know the drill.
As one example, let’s look at Rocketdyne, a rocket engine design and production company, originally located not far from my home in a suburb of Los Angeles. It was part of Rockwell International from 1967 through 1996, and eventually became Aerojet Rocketdyne.
For years, the company launched rocket engine tests over the area, which generated many questions about violating air pollution regulations and created concerns about spills of toxic materials into nearby communities.
Two class-action lawsuits were filed against the company, and my former boss Ed Masry led one of them. I still have the documents related to the case: in one, a former employee testified that he tried to discuss his uncertainties about the company’s practices with management.
The response to him was, “It doesn’t matter if we kill a few people with our testing, because Rockwell has a large legal staff that can take care of that kind of thing.”
Sadly, this attitude is still rampant in big business. Why not trim the budget of your legal defense fund and spend more money on innovation that is good for all of us?
…