Back in 2007, the state of California reached an agreement with Boeing Co. requiring the company to clean up the polluted site of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, outside Simi Valley, to an exacting environmental standard.
The site, on 2,850 acres 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, had been used for six decades as a government-sponsored rocket and nuclear testing complex. When the activities ceased in 2006, what was left behind was soil and water contaminated by radioactive detritus, PCBs, heavy metals, tricholoroethylene "and a witches' brew of other poisons," as the Natural Resources Defense Council once put it.
The site is "one of the most toxic sites in the United States by any kind of definition," Jared Blumenfeld, head of the California Environmental Protection Agency, told me in 2020. "It demands a full cleanup."
