On the first of this month, Aerojet and Fair Oaks Water District held a community meeting to reveal and discuss plans to drill a well in Fair Oaks for monitoring a plume of contaminated groundwater, and met with staunch opposition from a group of residents who live nearby the proposed site.Originally, Aerojet and the water district were planning on creating a drilling site with in the month to reduce the spread of the ever growing plume. Some of these drilling sites were on the property of home owners in Fair Oaks.The plans are part of Aerojet’s $1.2 billion Superfund site clean up of the rocket fuel contamination from its site in Rancho Cordova. As of this meeting, plans for the well are still in limbo and without a decided location or timeline.

Aerojet’s operations began in Rancho Cordova in 1951, manufacturing solid and liquid propellants for commercial and military rocket systems, as well as assembling, fabricating, testing and rehabilitating rocket engines. Cordova Chemical Company, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aerojet, also used the site between 1974 and 1979 to manufacture herbicides, paint chemicals and pharmaceutical products. Since opening, some of the residual waste, by process of removal, has contaminated groundwater within reach of city and private water wells in Rancho Cordova, Fair Oaks, Carmichael, and Folsom, and other unincorporated areas in Sacramento County.

In 1983, that site was placed on The National Priorities List, and groundwater investigation and cleanup commenced regulation by The Regional Water Quality Control Board, The California Department of Toxic Substances Control, and The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 1997 the Site Assessment Section of The Environmental Health Investigations Branch began to take public health assessments. These assessments have continued through the present, and have evaluated community exposure to the contaminants from the facility, as well as the resulting potential health effects.

As monitoring has improved and regulatory standards for perchlorate have become more strict, Rancho Cordova has lost 20 municipal water wells since 1997. According to Larry Ladd, a Rancho Cordova medical geographer and community volunteer for the U.S. EPA – sponsored Community Advisory Group for Aerojet Superfund Site Issues, when more than one indicator contaminant is found in a drinking water well in Rancho Cordova, Arden Cordova water company removes that well from service in accord with the California Department of Public Health recommendations. “When you have two identified contaminants, there are probably many more unregulated or unidentified chemicals on the way,” says Larry. The three indicator Aerojet contaminants used to shut down wells are the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), perchlorate salt from solid rockets, which is known to cause serious harm to the thyroid, and N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), a carcinogenic byproduct of liquid rocket fuel also found in cigarette smoke and a wide variety of food and drinks such as processed meats and beer. The identified chemicals in the Fair Oaks plume are the solvents trichloroethylene and 1, 4 – dioxane.

Whatever the next step in Aerojet’s Superfund site cleanup plan, it can be agreed that the contamination of our groundwater remains a tangible issue likely to necessitate many more community meetings to come. The Community Advisory Group for Aerojet Superfund Site Issues meets every other month in Rancho Cordova City Hall. For further information contact Community Advisory Group chair Janis Heple at (916) 739-6361.

Article submitted by Nicole Allagree.