i ve really changed. i ve really healed, and now i am willing to have confrontation not for confrontation s sake, but to protect people that i care about. i still wanted to throw up afterwards. she has always been fierce. her motivation to never stop just keeps getting stronger and stronger. melissa bumstead is a super hero. i ve never met anyone like her. she is the face of this cleanup. she has to keep going. peep like melissa will change. i know she has changed it already. there is nothing like a mom wanting to protect her children. there is no force on earth that is more powerful. my daughter went through excruciating pain, and she buried two of her friends last year. we are praying to god that we finally get the cleanup, because sometimes i can t sleep at night, worrying that my children are in danger. and i know i m not the only one.
and what they do is they say the santa susana field laboratory has to be cleaned up to background levels. and essentially, what that means is if there is contamination on-site, it gets cleaned up. from your vantage point, what is the status of nasa s actions with respect to the cleanup? congresswoman, all that information you just related is my understanding as well as where we are. and nasa is committed to fulfilling our obligations under the afc. i m tired of fighting. let s clean up the background. let s get this site closed. yes, things happen. yes, they are unfortunate. and we ve made a commitment to clean it up. that cleanup was supposed to have already been concluded by 2017. and boeing and the federal agencies have ensured it hasn t even started. and i m certain that these federal agencies do not want to set a precedent in terms of really cleaning up to a proper standard. and what happens when you cut your corners on safety is you kill people.
it was very weak, and it was exactly what boeing wanted. a recreational risk based cleanup which is what boeing is pushing is based off people being on the site very infrequently. people who live near santa susana do not live in all through the 2000s there was an effort to require a full cleanup. then state senator sheila kuehl who represented the area introduced bill after bill. workers and neighbors have become sick and too many have died. it s time to require full and complete cleanup. ask for your aye vote. in 2007, she finally got her legislation through. believe it or not, under schwarzenegger there was an actual serious effort to clean up that site. but after governor brown came to office, things shifted very dramatically. boeing, however, went to court and overturned the law and through some exceedingly troubling action by the administration, that lawsuit was lost.
we re here at the nasa meeting right now. they re trying to justify why they should be able to leave contaminated waste in our community. i want to show you one of these justifications that i can t believe, and i ve seen a lot of falsehoods. this one is amazing. oh, my gosh. found no discernible differences to health and safety across the action alternatives. that s absurd. nasa claims that under federal environmental law that they have to look at different alternative ways to clean up the santa susana field laboratory. they re wrong. california has been clear over the years that the level that the site has to be cleaned up to is to background. so if there is contamination, it gets cleaned up. we clearly signed an agreement for full cleanup, and they have proposed at least two meetings to break those and walk away from the contamination. if they found contamination on the surface, they re saying we re going have to dig 20 feet down to bedrock, and that s going moonscape t
i feel more hopeful, even the right now things are looking pretty glum again for the cleanup. i m more at peace with the thought that this could be the rest of my life. before, that thought was just too frightening. i feel like whether or not it s the santa susana field lab or maybe other sites, if this were to be the rest of my life, i would not fight it. i had my own plans for my life. i wanted to illustrate kids books and i wanted to be an author. and i wanted to garden. you know? i had a really simple life planned out and it sounded just fantastic. and the thought of not getting to have time to excel at any of those things was really hard. i was praying about it. i thought well, i m allowed to