Bermite Powder Company

The Bermite Powder Company manufactured detonators, fuzes, boosters, flares and related ordnance on a parcel of about 1,000 acres in Saugus, now part of Santa Clarita, from the early 1940s to 1967, after which the Whittaker Corporation operated the property until 1987.¹ The site history compiled by the local historian Leon Worden at SCVHistory, which cites a 2004 account by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, gives the following sequence: Jim Jeffries, the former heavyweight champion, took the helm of the L.A. Powder Co. (incorporated in 1915) and in 1917 set up a Saugus gunpowder plant on the future Bermite property; in the week of April 22, 1935 Halafax Explosives Co. opened a 250,000 dollar plant financed by the Oklahoma oil businessman Erle P. Halliburton; in 1939 Patrick Lizza established Golden State Fireworks on adjacent property while Halafax manufactured fireworks at its site from 1936 to 1942; and Lizza's company, as Bermite Powder, acquired the former Halafax land from the county after Halafax defaulted on its property taxes.²

Products

According to the Department of Toxic Substances Control as quoted by SCVHistory, Bermite "produced detonators, fuzes, boosters, coated magnesium, and stabilized red phosphorus from 1942 to 1967," and between 1942 and 1953 also produced flares, photoflash bombs and other explosives.² SCVHistory adds that the Raytheon AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, which entered production in 1953 at China Lake, "used a Hercules/Bermite MK-36 solid-fuel rocket engine that would have been tested and manufactured at the Saugus plant," that Bermite built 50 two-bedroom bungalows on Walnut Street in Newhall for workers in 1939, and that its subsidiary Golden State Fireworks tested and manufactured fireworks on the property in the postwar period.² Whittaker's products there included ammunition rounds, detonators, fuzes and boosters, flares and signal cartridges, tracers and pyrophoric pellets, igniters and explosive bolts, power charges, rocket motors and gas generators, and missile main charges.²

Jack Parsons

The Los Angeles Times reported on June 19, 1952 that Jack Parsons, who with five other original stockholders had founded Aerojet in 1942, "had been with the Bermite Powder Co. of Saugus for a year until last Friday," June 13, when he left intending to go to Mexico to do "further research with explosives and miniature special effects for motion pictures." At Saugus, the article states, he "headed one of the rocket propellant detonation and pyrotechnic short-interval delay projects, a confidential research and development program." J. H. Arnold, whom the article identifies as treasurer and superintendent of Bermite, said: "He stayed until Friday to finish his project. I tried to get him to stay for tests, but he was anxious to get to Mexico. He had been working hard." Arnold described Parsons as extremely safety-conscious, careful, and "scrupulously neat," was surprised that Parsons had explosives in a small makeshift laboratory near his room, in violation of the Pasadena fire ordinance, and said that Parsons had once had a powder magazine near Rialto and had planned six or eight months earlier to go into the dynamite business.³ Pasadena police believed that the explosion that killed Parsons on June 17, 1952 resulted from his dropping a can of fulminate of mercury; the article reported that police had been told he was manufacturing small quantities of it for commercial purposes.³

Parsons had left Hughes Aircraft Company on September 26, 1950; the FBI's Los Angeles office classified its inquiry into classified rocket-propellant documents he had taken from Hughes as "Espionage - IS," and the Justice Department declined prosecution on October 25, 1951.⁴

Whittaker, the 1999 sale and the perchlorate litigation

Whittaker Corporation, reported that it owned a 996-acre parcel in the City of Santa Clarita, approximately 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles, "formerly used, until 1987, by the Company's former Bermite division, a discontinued technology unit."⁵ In September 1995 the city granted the entitlements needed to develop the land as a mixed-use residential, commercial and light industrial project; in February 1996 it approved a development agreement extending the ten-year life of the entitlements to more than twenty years; and in the fourth quarter of 1997 Whittaker wrote the carrying value down by 15.7 million dollars.⁵ The company stated that it had "clean closed" 13 of 14 facilities regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act at the Bermite division and, until the January 1999 sale, was working to close the fourteenth and to complete an investigation of the whole property; cash expenditures for clean-up at the division were 4.0 million dollars in 1996, 2.6 million in 1997 and 1.4 million in 1998.⁵ On January 11, 1999 Whittaker sold the parcel and related rights for 10.0 million dollars in cash, a 5.0 million dollar promissory note and a contingent interest in any final profit from the development; the purchase agreement, restated as of November 5, 1998, was with Santa Clarita, L.L.C.⁵

The water utility that succeeded the local agencies, SCV Water, states that perchlorate was first detected in groundwater wells in the Santa Clarita Valley in 1997 and attributes it to "improper storage, handling and disposal of perchlorate waste" at the former Whittaker-Bermite site south of Soledad Canyon Road; that large volumes of trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene were also disposed of there; that the agency pursued Whittaker and its insurers; that under a 2007 settlement the defendants paid 5 million dollars toward a perchlorate treatment plant and 14 million dollars toward pipelines; and that a 2018 suit over volatile organic compounds in wells Saugus 1 and 2, V-201 and V-205 produced a jury award of approximately 66 million dollars, still on appeal as of January 2025.⁶ SCVHistory records that the site left more than 275 known contaminants, that in 1987 "the facility ceased all of its manufacturing, testing and storage of ordnance and explosive items" according to the Department of Toxic Substances Control, that a 2,911-unit residential development called Porta Bella was approved by the city council within two years and did not proceed, and that Whittaker sold the property to an Arizona investor group in 1999, just before Whittaker was itself acquired in a hostile takeover.²