Field lab pollution endures

Before they learned words like dioxin and perchlorate, mothers let sons and daughters play near streams that trickled down from hills that hid some of the government's biggest secrets.Susan Abram in the Daily News.

Families who settled in neighborhoods blooming in Chatsworth, West Hills and Simi Valley led idyllic lives, even when their bedroom and kitchen windows rattled from the roar of rocket engines being tested at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the Simi Hills.

But in May 1989, surveys from the Department of Energy - reported exclusively in the Daily News - revealed that radioactive and toxic contamination from decades of nuclear experiments and rocket tests had leaked into soil, groundwater and bedrock at the hilltop site.