ROCKETDYNE TOXICS LOCATED VIEWS DIFFER ON TESTS OF ROCKETDYNE SOIL.

Byline: Lisa Mascaro Staff Writer

SIMI VALLEY - The most comprehensive assessment yet of toxic chemicals in the soil at the Santa Susana Field Lab shows what Rocketdyne officials say are just pockets of contamination, but what activists call a witch's brew of chemicals.

State regulators are reviewing the preliminary report, drafted after more than 2,000 samples were collected from the site in 1997 and 1998. The report will guide the cleanup that so far has been handled one trouble spot at a time.

``It's something that we can kind of use as a road map to where soil is contaminated out there,'' said Ron Baker, a spokesman for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. ``We'll oversee a cleanup out there based on this investigation. . . . Certainly it will broaden our activities.''

Baker said the department cannot yet comment on the types or amounts of chemical contamination. He said a public workshop will be held soon, probably in February.

Rocketdyne officials said contamination was found mostly where expected: around the rocket test stands, labs, run-off ponds and natural creeks.

The company spent $1.5 million on the two-year study, required under federal regulations, in which thousands of holes were dug for samples from the 2,800-acre lab site.

``By no means is it spread evenly across the site. It's in pockets,'' said Art Lenox, Rocketdyne's environmental mediation project engineer.

``I'd love to buy a piece of land up here. We've done quite a bit of work to date. The results are favorable. The contamination that we're finding to date is limited.''

Activists, however, are worried about the extent of the contamination from chemicals - some potentially cancer-causing - across the site in the hills between Chatsworth and Simi Valley.

``There is a witch's brew of chemicals throughout the site,'' said Joe Lyou, a member of a community group that monitors cleanup at the location.

``I am particularly concerned about the dioxins and PAHs,'' he said of two potentially cancer-causing chemicals, ``because they're so toxic at such low levels and so widespread across the property. It's going to present a real big problem for Rocketdyne to be able to assure the community it's cleaned up properly. It's going to be a real big undertaking.''

Lenox, however, said some of the chemicals could be easily removed - some with a month of work with a backhoe - and that the company is putting together interim plans for that.

The company will be responsible for cleaning up chemical contamination of the soil at the site where rocket engine testing has been conducted for decades.

Activists briefly mentioned the facility investigation Wednesday night during the quarterly meeting of the group formed a decade ago after radiation and chemical contamination were disclosed at the lab.

During the session, activists also lashed out at government regulators who they say are not doing enough to protect the community.

Their concerns came during a debate over how much nuclear contamination remains on metal parts that are being sold as scrap and on rubble from buildings that is being sent to municipal landfills.

One activist said a movable building from the former nuclear energy research area had been donated to a school.

``My grandson could go to school in one of these buildings,'' resident Marie Mason shouted during the meeting. ``It's absurd to sit here for 10 years and listen to the same rhetoric.''

But officials from both Rocketdyne and the Federal Energy Department, which oversees radiation cleanup, said the buildings have been cleaned to federal standards before they are dumped in municipal landfills.