Simi Valley Mother: 'Childhood Cancer Is Not Rare In This Community'
SIMI VALLEY (CBSLA.com) — A group of Simi Valley mothers whose kids have been diagnosed with cancer gathered for a town hall meeting on Tuesday night to discuss their concerns related to a former nuclear testing site that the mothers believe to be linked to unusually high childhood cancer rates in their community.
The site in question is the 2,800-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory, where government contractors and agencies tested rocket engines, nuclear reactors and liquid metals over the course of 50 years. In 1959, a partial nuclear meltdown at the site released an unknown amount of radioactive substances into the ground and atmosphere.
The site is just two miles south of Simi Valley and was acquired by Boeing in 1996.
In recent years, the laboratory has been the topic of much heated debate – including who should pay for the cleanup, how much can be done to remediate the environmental damage and what the ongoing health risks are for residents. A 2007 study found that people living within two miles of the site had 60 percent higher incidences of certain cancers.
The cleanup was supposed to start in 2010 but has been tied up in lawsuits and bureaucratic delays, and still has yet to begin.
Now, a group of Simi Valley mothers who live near the site are calling attention to a rash of recent childhood cancer diagnoses in their community and demanding to know when the cleanup will get underway. Ten of those mothers gathered at a town hall meeting hosted by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control on Tuesday night to discuss their heartbreak and torment.
"To watch your child go through 16, 18 months of treatment, it's horrific," said one of the mothers, Amy Lehman.
"Childhood cancer is not rare in this community and nobody should have to go through what we've been through," said Julia Haney.
The state says that it has needed to take additional time to figure out how to clean up the site. Cleanup efforts are now expected to begin in 2017.
