DID LOCKHEED LIE? : TOXICS STATEMENTS BASED ON LIMITED DATA.

Byline: Beth Barrett and Lee Condon Daily News Staff Writers c. 1997 Los Angeles Daily News 

Lockheed Martin officials acknowledged for the first time last week that they don't know whether highly toxic chemicals used at the huge aircraft manufacturing plant in Burbank created health problems for thousands of residents.

Ever since the Daily News disclosed in August that Lockheed had agreed to a secret, $60 million settlement with more than 1,300 residents who lived near the former plant, the company maintained there was no health risk. Among the complaining neighbors were 80 people who had cancer deaths or serious illnesses in their families.

Lockheed denied any liability for those health problems in the settlement. But in an exclusive interview last week, officials said blanket statements that the company's six decades of operations never endangered nearby residents' health were based largely on guesswork and limited scientific data.

``Based on what we knew before the (settlement), we believed in our gut as much as anything else and based on the cancer registry issue that there wasn't an impact,'' said James Buckley, associate general counsel for Lockheed. ``But that's a supposition.''

Landmark scientific studies dating to 1981 have established a link between cancer and toxic airborne emissions. Health-risk assessments required by a 1987 California law indicated that more than 50,000 residents in the San Fernando Valley and Burbank were exposed to risks in past years from various industrial sources.

The legacy of the state's Toxic Hot Spots law was that companies dramatically reduced their toxic emissions. But whether there is also a legacy of health problems has remained largely unknown because of a lack of further study.

Now top Lockheed Martin officials say they will conduct extensive studies for the first time on how the carcinogen hexavalent chromium and various solvents that contaminated soil and water may have affected residents.

To date, the only assessment of health risks was completed by Lockheed in 1989 to comply with state air-quality legislation, and that study did show an increased cancer risk to surrounding neighborhoods.

The study submitted to local air-quality officials estimated an additional 180 cancers per 1 million residents over a lifetime of exposure, caused mostly by hexavalent chromium, a paint additive. Inhalation of hexavalent chromium particles has been linked to lung cancer, researchers say.

Lockheed's estimates were on the high end, Buckley said last week, because the company did not want to face severe penalties for underreporting.

Those compounds, particularly hexavalent chromium, drove the $60 million settlement with Burbank residents last summer. The details of that deal were disclosed Aug. 4. The company had warned for months that the disclosure jeopardized the settlement's secrecy provision, but ultimately all the money was paid out.

Lockheed made a ``business decision'' to settle the residents' claims to ``short-circuit public hysteria'' and to avoid the possibility of an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit, Buckley said.

Since the settlement was disclosed, some 3,000 Burbank residents have joined in a state toxic-damage lawsuit alleging that contamination from the Lockheed plant caused their health problems and decreased their property values. A separate toxics lawsuit has been filed in federal court.

Shadow of doubt

Residents involved in that litigation said last week they never believed Lockheed officials' repeated insistence that no health risk to the community existed.

``The people have been lied to,'' said Mike Signorelli, a plaintiff in the class-action suit. ``Maybe they didn't do their homework because they were afraid of what the truth is. It shows there's a shadow of doubt in their mind.

``The burden of proof is in their court. Now they have to prove it ... that none of these cancers have come from this contamination.''

Signorelli, 44, has lived about 1,000 yards from Lockheed's B-1 plant for 16 years. He said he suffers headaches, swollen lymph nodes, anemia, sore throats and bronchitis, which he believes may have been caused by contaminants released during the demolition of the plant in the early 1990s.

Buckley said the company lied to no one but acknowledged that the nature of being a defense contractor is that it could not straightforwardly discuss activities at the site where the stealth bomber and other military aircraft were built.

``We understand we have created an environment of doubt which we have to overcome, but the company categorically denies it lied to anybody,'' he said. ``We have not been as freely communicative a neighbor as we might have, given the business that we are in.''

Among the toxics that residents cited were hexavalent chromium, which had been used to paint aircraft, as well as solvents, a couple of which have been identified as the primary contributors to contaminated groundwater in the area.

The settlement with residents followed a year of negotiations between Lockheed and those who had filed claims alleging health and property damage. It was mediated before retired appellate Judge John K. Trotter.

``The mediation was contemplated as a one-year process where both parties are conserving, to some extent, their resources,'' Buckley said in offering an explanation of the relatively narrow scope of the research so far performed.

``We haven't done all the intermediary steps and analyses to try to make an argument that says based on the number of aircraft we made, the amount of paint that was used, how we handled it, how our emission control worked, that X number of micrograms, grams, pounds or whatever left the plant and left the boundaries of the plant and impacted anybody in the community,'' he said.

Still, he said no ``smoking gun'' was brought forward during the mediation by the plaintiffs, despite the lawyers' claims that they could make the company look very bad before a jury.

Lockheed reviewed a study done by state health officials that suggested cancer rates were within normal ranges in the Burbank area, further suggesting there had been no health impact as a result of the company's operations, he said.

Attorneys with the Tarzana law firm of Wasserman, Comden & Casselman, who represented the residents in the settlement, declined comment.

Unanswered questions

The current litigation will force Lockheed to answer the questions left open at the end of the mediation, Buckley said.

``What we do now is an exhaustive turning-over of every pebble, looking at every piece of paper,'' he said. ``If we don't know the answer to some of these questions at the end of the day, having been through this process, the answer is not knowable. It will not be because we didn't look hard enough.''

Bruce Simon, one of the lawyers litigating the federal lawsuit, said the fact that the company paid $60 million in the settlement suggests the claims may have had some merit.

``The fact that they haven't investigated to see how many people they may have harmed doesn't mean there wasn't a health risk,'' Simon said. ``You can't rule out the possibility and the probability that people have been harmed.''

Lawyer Allan Sigel, representing residents in the state case, said a large number of his clients have cancer.

``Burbank is a very sick community,'' Sigel said, adding that some 30 percent of his 3,000 clients have reported some type of cancer in questionnaires.

He acknowledged, however, that he has not yet done follow-up medical exams to confirm the existence of those cancers.

``They're saying, `Yes, we did a bad thing, we polluted the environment, but we didn't put enough poison out there to hurt anyone,' '' Sigel said.

Patrick Grannan, another lawyer in the federal lawsuit, said the people of Burbank cannot rely on a corporation's ``assumptions'' that its contamination did not create a health risk.

``If it's my son or daughter, that's not good enough for me,'' Grannan said.

Buckley said that had the mediation uncovered serious health problems, the public would have been told.

``Lockheed Martin as a responsible corporate citizen would not have hidden the fact that the mediation discovered that we were killing millions of people in Southern California,'' he said. ``That's just not the way the company functions.''

Broad review

Buckley predicted the lawsuit will require Lockheed to provide millions of pages of documents, call numerous expert witnesses and enter new scientific realms to defend decades of operations involving the toxics, including hexavalent chromium.

The company also plans to ask for a review of the plaintiffs' medical records, and for a physician to examine each of them, he said.

A health-risk assessment of the manufacturing site in 1989 concluded that ``emissions of hexavalent chromium contribute 86 percent to the total cancer risk.'' The study was required under the Air Toxics Hot Spots Information and Assessment Act of 1987.

South Coast Air Quality Management District officials have said even a small amount of the chemical drives up cancer risks downwind because of its high potency.

The company's official 1989 assessment of health risks said about 2.28 pounds of hexavalent chromium were emitted into the air that year alone, in addition to 28 other toxics that entered the atmosphere from eight sources at the plant. Six of those sources were from paint spray booths.

Cadmium and cadmium compounds made up the rest of the cancer risk, it said.

Buckley said the company provided regulators with an estimate of toxics emitted in 1989 high enough to ensure it was not underestimating the problem because of the risk of severe penalties.

Health effects

The scientific knowledge of hexavalent chromium's potential health effects is incomplete, say Lockheed officials and researchers contacted by the Daily News.

The expert arguments on the compound's potential health effects before Trotter were also inconclusive, he said.

``They brought in experts who said hexavalent chromium could cause all kind of things; ours said it only could cause respiratory problems,'' Buckley said. ``The persuasion on `hexavalent chrome' is, `Gee, we don't know how the science on this is going to play out.' ''

In a letter to his clients, Tarzana attorney David B. Casselman said Trotter heard the arguments on causation and, without issuing a ruling, ``made it clear to both sides that the issue was a close one.''

``He explained that it would behoove the parties to settle in order to avoid the unpredictable risks that the causation issue would present at the time of trial,'' the Nov. 13, 1995, letter from Casselman stated.

The disclosure of the lawsuit caused an uproar in Burbank, with residents demanding to know what Lockheed had been doing at the site for so many years that might have affected their health.

At a Jan. 23 public meeting, Lockheed's outside counsel Pierce O'Donnell promised that answers would be forthcoming.

``You need and have a right to know now,'' O'Donnell told the crowd. ``Let me assure you that Lockheed Martin will not hide behind the lawsuits as an excuse not to share with the community everything that it knows.''

Buckley said Wednesday the company, which for decades was the focus of Burbank community life and labor, stands by that promise.

``We continue to believe there was no health impact,'' he said, ``but we'll have a lot more information when we're done.''

Lockheed last week lost its bid to stay in federal court in the mass tort case, and the case was sent back to state court. The company had argued that it should be in federal court because it operated for many years at the behest of the U.S. government.

The government hasn't been formally drawn into the toxics lawsuit, but Lockheed last week sued to recover millions in cleanup dollars, contending the contamination occurred while it was performing work for the government.

``The Burbank story is inextricably woven with the role of the federal government,'' Buckley said.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--color) ``The company categorically denies it lied to anybody?''

- James Buckley

Lockheed associate general counsel

(2) Outside counsel Michael Flaherty, left, and associate general counsel James Buckley discuss Lockheed Martin's lawsuit defense.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News