Boeing's Meltdown Makeover is a special five-part EnviroReporter.com investigation that reveals an extensive Boeing "media campaign" to bamboozle the press and public into thinking that the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne) is safe enough to use as open space despite new evidence showing huge amounts of radiation and chemical contamination at the site.
Part One,
Greenwashing Rocketdyne , exposes a new public relations campaign targeting local and national media designed to recast SSFL in a positive light according to confidential Boeing information inadvertently revealed online. The plan seeks to erase Rocketdyne's infamously polluted past which includes at least three partial meltdowns, countless spills and mishaps involving radiation and chemicals, and open burn pits where some of the most lethal toxins ever made were set ablaze.
Make Over Earth, Inc. a PR firm hired by Boeing and headed by former Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Gary Polakovic, envisions use of "third parties" to "add credibility and authenticity and blunt allegations of green-washing" and to "shift discussions from a site with a sordid past to one with potential."
Faced with a determined community of longtime activists dedicated to cleaning up SSFL to normal background levels of chemicals and radiation, lab owner Boeing has embarked on a years-long strategy of undermining remediation of the property according to documents, e-mails, interviews, voicemails, photographs and videos uncovered by EnviroReporter.com during a four-year investigation. Easing the cleanup would potentially save America's largest exporter millions of dollars.
At risk without a complete lab cleanup are future SSFL open space users, surrounding communities and the Los Angeles River, slated for a $2 billion revival central to the city of L.A.'s 50-year master plan.