Woolsey Fire Data—Journal of Environmental Radioactivity
/By Maggie Gundersen
If you watch TV or surf the net, you’ve seen the daily images of climate-crisis-induced forest fires, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. While here in Charleston, South Carolina, we face rising seas daily, our west coast friends, family members, and colleagues face dramatic heatwaves, droughts, and most of all – raging forest fires. These climate-crisis-induced wildfires have claimed thousands of acres of land, destroyed entire communities, killed innocent people, and now release radioactivity that literally blows on the wind.
We are proud to announce the publication of our scientific analysis about one such wildfire, the 2018 Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles.
One of our findings is that the Woolsey Fire caused radiation from the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) to become airborne and travel as far as 9 miles into the Thousand Oaks community. So, then, what makes our study unique? Using sophisticated radioactive measuring devices on a huge sample set, we found radioactivity on the public side of the SSFL fence line that positively matched the radioactive ash particles we found downwind in the Thousand Oaks community.
Co-authored by Dr. Marco Kaltofen, Arnie Gundersen, and me [Maggie Gundersen], let me quote from our peer-reviewed research paper entitled Radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA, published by the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity:
“In November 2018, the Woolsey Fire burned north of Los Angeles, CA, USA, potentially remobilizing radioactive contaminants at the former Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a shuttered nuclear research facility contaminated by chemical and radiochemical releases. Wildfire in radiologically contaminated zones is a global concern; contaminated areas around Chernobyl, Fukushima, Los Alamos, and the Nevada Nuclear Test Site have all experienced wildfires.”
A 1959 meltdown at one of the Santa Susana Field Lab’s (SSFL’s) experimental test reactors and leaking radioactive materials emanating from the operation of other test reactors has left the SSFL site radioactively and chemically contaminated. Citizens and communities near SSFL were concerned about the spread of radioactivity into their homes for decades before the Woolsey fire occurred. Local citizens approached Fairewinds Energy Education and our scientific colleague Dr. Marco Kaltofen to analyze the extent of spreading radioactivity due to the Woolsey Fire. Thus, our community-volunteer citizen-science Woolsey Fire Project was born.
Fairewinds Energy Education and Dr. Marco Kaltofen designed specific procedures for area sample collections and the protocols to be followed by citizen-scientists conducting this work. Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles (PSR–LA) joined us in this community-volunteer citizen-science project to quickly train and lead citizen-scientists in wildfire ash, dust, and dirt collection as soon as possible after the fire had subsided.
Fairewinds Energy Education launched its global research projects with Dr. Kaltofen and Fairewinds’ community-volunteer citizen-scientists in 2012. “Citizen-Science is not a new phenomenon; it began more than 2000 years ago in ancient China to monitor and track migratory locusts that destroyed harvests (Nature 2018)” (Environmental Radioactivity 2021).
Moreover, this quote from Unfriending the Atom really captures the concept of citizen-science in today’s world:
“Citizen Science is a pandemic-proof and low-carbon footprint way to advance evidence-based Science and respectfully use the skills and knowledge of indigenous and community-based investigators.”
The Woolsey Fire Project Crew included: Dr. Marco Kaltofen, Fairewinds’ chief engineer Arnie Gundersen, and Fairewinds’ founder Maggie Gundersen, Denise Duffield with PSR–LA, community-volunteer citizen-scientists, Fairewinds crew members, and Dr. Kaltofen’s graduate students in a unique project program specifically created to analyze more than 350 dust and dirt samples collected by PSR–LA’s citizen-scientists. Let us be clear, the sample size of this project is a vast, scientifically meaningful set of data.
The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity published our Woolsey Fire Project peer-reviewed paper, entitled Radioactive microparticles related to the Woolsey Fire in Simi Valley, CA, on Friday, October 8, 2021. This paper clearly details how microparticles of highly radioactive dust and dirt migrate unseen and untracked when carried on ash in clouds of wildfire-induced smoke or in post-wildfire weather events like rainstorms and high winds. Let me quote from the Journal’s Abstract:
However, offsite samples collected in publicly-accessible areas nearest to the SSFL site perimeter had the highest alpha-emitting radionuclides radium, thorium, and uranium activities, indicating site-related radioactive material has escaped the confines of the laboratory. In two geographically-separated locations, one as far away as 15 km, radioactive microparticles containing percent-concentrations of thorium were detected in ashes and dusts that were likely related to deposition from the Woolsey fire. These offsite radioactive microparticles were colocated with alpha and beta activity maxima. (Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 2021).
Please note that in publishing this paper, the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity graciously allows each of you to read it for free for 50-days! Just click here or on the image below and it will take you to the page containing the downloadable PDF.
Remember, you may download the PDF for free for only 50-days.
We will also post our authors’ share link on social media and the on Fairewinds’ Home Page and our outstanding Peer Reviewed Journal Page.
If you have not read the two previously published peer-reviewed journal articles, also co-authored by Fairewinds and Dr. Kaltofen, that detail the migration of radioactive microparticles from the Fukushima meltdowns, please take an opportunity to do so. It is essential to us you know that the nuclear industries and the governments that support nuclear weapons and atomic power do not acknowledge that microparticles of radioactive dust and dirt pose a significant risk to life on our whole planet.
Okay, in plain language, what did we learn from analyzing those 350 ash and dirt samples?
The Woolsey Fire Project analyses of collected samples determined that one out of every 30-samples, fully 3%, contained much higher radioactivity than anticipated. This research also revealed that the radioactivity migrated from the SSFL site.
Citizen-scientist collected dirt samples located on public land adjacent to the SSFL fenceline. These samples matched the radioactivity on ash samples as far away as Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.
The fire burned a vast area between SSFL and the sea, so only a fraction of the ash produced by the fire originated at SSFL. It is therefore not surprising that only a fraction of the ash measured from offsite was radioactive. However, our report proves that the radiologically contaminated ash we found did come from the Santa Susana site.
Our most radioactive sample was found 9 miles away in Thousand Oaks. This sample was 19 times more radioactive than normal background levels, was a chemical match to what we measured at the fenceline, and clearly shows that more radioactive material is yet to be identified on the SSFL site and in the communities beyond.
Deposition of radioactivity could have been much worse! The most radioactive part of the SSFL site did not burn during the Woolsey Fire.
The analysis created in the Woolsey Fire Project clearly questions the previous studies that belittled radiation releases from the Woolsey Fire as it traversed the SSFL site and progressed to Malibu beach.
Map showing the Woolsey Fire area (in red lines). Photo from Wildfire Today
We know that 3% does not sound like a large number, but let’s put it in perspective. According to the 2010 US Census, 730,000 people are living within ten miles of SSFL. So, three percent of 730,000 means that at least 22,000 people may have been exposed to significant radiation carried by the Woolsey Fire on ash contaminated by the Santa Susana Field Lab radioactivity.
Let’s look at it another way, for every ton of smoke and ash thrown up by the Woolsey Fire as it burned on the SSFL site, 60 pounds – 3% – of that ash contained highly radioactive particles, some of which were airborne as far away as Thousand Oaks and beyond. As a result, when I look at Woolsey Fire Photos and see those clouds billowing over SSFL, I imagine that 3% of those clouds were radioactive during the fire.
For several years, I was a volunteer in a community-based volunteer ambulance Corp near a group of nuclear power reactors in upstate New York. I am horrified when EMS personnel are fighting the Woolsey Fire without a respirator or radiation protection suits. We believe these facts are genuinely frightening!
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA - The Los Angeles Fire Department joined allied agencies on the afternoon of November 8, 2018 in battling the wind-driven Woolsey wildfire that began in the Simi Hills of Ventura County and spread southward into Los Angeles County toward Malibu. Hundreds of homes are believed to have been lost, and at least three civilians are believed to have perished in the flames. © Photo by Mike Meadows
It is still fire season in California. Unfortunately, these more frequent, intense, and volatile fires are the new normal for our planet. Scientists, impacted communities, and many governments worldwide acknowledge the global climate emergency. These are facts, not fake news. Moreover, many corporations, colluding regulators, and politicians who line their pockets with bribes continue to deny the depth and scope of our planet’s climate emergency. We are one major wildfire or one violent weather event away from spreading radioactive contamination all over the U.S. from radioactive test sites, nuclear labs, atomic power reactor sites, atomic weapons’ waste dumps, manufacturing facilities for fuel and weapons, and leaking uranium mines spread out all over our beautiful country.
None of the contaminated locations anywhere in the U.S. are cleaned up [fully remediated] to protect people and the environment. Defunct facilities, like SSFL in California, or leaking sites, like the Hanford weapons and waste dump in Washington State, must be permanently scrubbed of all radioactively contaminated dirt, dust, and debris. Additionally, we must not absolve our own government and corporate contaminators of their moral, legal, and financial responsibilities. These are severe community-centered Environmental Justice issues.
In terms of the Woolsey Fire and despite comments to the contrary by California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control, radioactivity is migrating offsite at Santa Susana.
More importantly, our study is not alone in this finding. Government scientists also discovered significant radioactivity in hot spots beyond the site boundary of the Santa Susana Field Lab. However, these scientists had a minimal sample size compared to ours and did not use the sophisticated analytical tools Dr. Kaltofen and his graduate students applied. The analysis created from Woolsey Fire Project data clearly questions the previous studies that belittled radiation releases from the Woolsey Fire as it traversed the SSFL site.
Most importantly, the Woolsey Fire began at the Santa Susana Field Site near the site area seriously contaminated with radioactivity from the 1959 test reactor meltdown at SSFL. The Woolsey Fire then moved south/southwest on the SSFL site (see map below) before moving offsite and across adjacent recreational park grounds used for hiking and camping.
Fig. 2.Map of Woolsey Fire extent with wind pattern overlay (NASA, 2018) showing approximate fire origin (circle), wind direction, and maximum wind gust speeds (yellow 30 mph, orange 30-40 mph, red >40 mph).
Thus, the Woolsey Fire still transported significant SSFL radioactivity to surrounding communities, even though only a portion of the SSFL meltdown radioactivity actually caught fire. What does that mean for the tens of thousands of people living nearby? With our world amid a climate crisis, another wildfire near Los Angeles could quickly burn all the radioactively contaminated areas at SSFL, causing its migration to many surrounding communities. As I said before, the climate emergency we all face together is factual. We are one major fire or one volatile weather event away from a significant radioactive release at SSFL!
In each project Fairewinds has pursued, we work with community-volunteer citizen-scientists to conduct these incredible radioactivity study programs and then place the findings in the public domain via validated peer-reviewed research papers.
In Radioactively-hot Particles Detected in Dusts and Soils from Northern Japan, the first peer-reviewed journal article co-authored with Dr. Kaltofen, the authors focused on the migration of radioactivity from the three Fukushima Dai-ichi meltdowns in Japan. It was published by the Science of the Total Environment [STOTEN] journal.
The second peer-reviewed paper we researched with Dr. Kaltofen, entitled Radioactive Isotopes Measured at Olympic & Paralympic Venues in Fukushima & Tokyo, was published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers in the Journal of Environmental Engineering Science. It details the high rates of radioactivity at the Tokyo Olympic 2021 sites in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. Although this journal article describing our research about Fukushima radioactivity at the Tokyo Olympic sites in Fukushima was blocked in Japan by the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and Japan’s mainstream media, this research paper is presented on the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) website. As a result, this research paper has become part of the IOC’s permanent collection.
In Summation, there are several important takeaways that we want you to have:
Please read the actual research published by the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity regarding the Woolsey Fire Project’s findings. Although, yes, the science parts are geeky still, you must see this work in the original publication with its maps and graphs.
If SSFL had been cleaned up before the Woolsey Fire, as scheduled to be by 2017, Fairewinds Energy Education and Dr. Kaltofen would not have needed to take on this project.
If the SSFL clean-up transpired as determined it would be, there would have been no radioactivity or chemical waste to harm the communities containing more than 730,000 people within 9-miles of SSFL.
Santa Susana is a witches’ brew of chemicals as well as radioactivity. The Woolsey Fire carried radioactive isotopes off the SSFL site and deposited them in the community. Furthermore, the Woolsey Fire Project assessment by Dr. Kaltofen and Fairewinds Energy Education did not include the formal analyses of all the chemicals used at the SSFL site that also contaminated it and migrated offsite during the fire. A list of chemical contaminants of concern at SSFL can be found here.
Despite comments to the contrary in the state study by the Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC), in which they said no SSFL radiation leaked offsite, we found radioactive ash that is definitively linked to SSFL. Those samples were as high as 19-times above the evaluated background. Moreover, the most SSFL contaminated sample was found more than 9 miles away.
The areas where samples were collected by Fairewinds’ and PSR-LA community-volunteer citizen-scientists are marked on a map showing sample areas. This does not mean that other locations are clean. While millions of places could have been sampled, we sampled in the regions that people were concerned about due to wildfire smoke and ash deposition.
Additionally, our citizen-scientists and/or people who sent samples directly to us did not use Geiger counters or other radiation monitoring equipment. The samples were random samples taken in neighborhoods on public land and open space land or on people’s property, specifically at their request. You must recognize we did not locate samples by using radiation monitoring equipment, yet we still found significant SSFL contamination that blew in the wind on wildfire ash.
Lastly, I believe it is indefensible that our own government did not follow its legal and moral obligations to notify and monitor people living near SSFL when the first meltdown occurred in 1959. As a result, people were exposed to radiation and never knew it.
It is even worse to know that the legally binding clean-up of the site was never completed as it was scheduled to be by 2017. Our Woolsey Fire Project would not have been needed in 2018 if the SSFL had been remediated as expected by 2017.
Suppose another major wildfire hits Santa Susana and burns more of the 1959 meltdown contaminated areas. In that case, a large portion of California and nearby states will be contaminated with radioactive isotopes depending on the wind and weather directions.
Furthermore, depending on how the rainstorms carry the radiation, it will eventually fallout at other locations in other states and communities hundreds and thousands of miles away. Many scientists tracked radiation from Fukushima “falling out” at places all over the U.S. and throughout the Northern Hemisphere worldwide.
Finally, some of the radioactive isotopes at the SSFL site will remain deadly for thousands of years, and some of the chemicals there will never decay away.
Here at Fairewinds Energy Education, we always ask this question about radioactivity:
What is in the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe?
Remember, Radiation Knows No Borders!
Additional Related Materials
Please read these additional important materials regarding the Woolsey Fire and the contaminated Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL), the U.S. atomic legacy as evidenced in Unfriending the Atom, and the impact of the worlds’ expanding climate emergency. The global climate emergency impacts all aspects of our lives, from extensive flooding in SC [where we live] to the West Coast’s raging and increasingly severe wildfires.
A failure of governmental candor: The fire at the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory By Daniel Hirsch | Published February 21, 2019, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The Woolsey Fire began on November 8 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), located adjacent to Simi Valley, California, and enveloped much of the lab’s grounds, eventually burning all the way to Malibu and the Pacific Ocean, impacting nearly 100,000 acres.” Please read the historical and well-researched article. Author Daniel Hirsh is the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and president (unpaid) of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy NGO.
Unfriending the Atom, Exotic data from mundane objects resulting in a radioactive Zoo that “is the public face of the Unfriending the Atom project. We are a network of citizen-scientists joining public artists in making visible the hidden presence of nuclear radiation.” This unique scientific art project was created by Dan Borelli, Artist and Lecturer/Director of Exhibitions at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Marco Kaltofen, PhD., PE (civil, Mass.) President Boston Chemical Data Corp. Harvard Artist Dan Borelli @danborelli and Registered Professional Engineer Dr. Marco Kaltofen @marcokaltofen are the keepers of a global radioactive zoo, collecting samples, objects, and stories from locally-based citizen-scientists.
Charleston, South Carolina’s Daily Paper the Post and Courier published The Greenland Connection in late September 2021, detailing the impact of Greenland’s melting ice sheet, which is the most significant cause of Charleston’s extensive flooding and rising sea levels. “Greenland’s ice is melting in a big way, too. This summer, so much melted in one week that you could flood the entire state of South Carolina with 2 feet of water. The ice sheet normally melts in the summer, but it’s melting faster now than it has in 12,000 years. … That’s one reason sea levels in South Carolina have risen faster than many other places around the globe.”
This Post and Courier special series is part of the Pulitzer Connected Coastlines nationwide climate reporting initiative in U.S. coastal states. “The initiative is building a consortium of newsrooms and independent journalists across America to report on the local effects of erratic weather patterns on coastal populations using the latest climate science.” The Pulitzer Center currently supports 16 reporting projects. It will cover climate change issues on every coastline in the mainland U.S.—the East Coast, Great Lakes, Gulf Coast, and West Coast—along with Hawaii and Alaska.
The global climate crisis is real news, not fake news.
