{"id":1559,"date":"2023-08-11T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T20:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-usc-dornsife.pantheonsite.io\/wrigley\/?p=1559"},"modified":"2024-07-19T15:54:44","modified_gmt":"2024-07-19T15:54:44","slug":"the-santa-susana-field-lab-and-community-risk-perceptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/wrigley\/2023\/08\/11\/the-santa-susana-field-lab-and-community-risk-perceptions\/","title":{"rendered":"Rain, Wind, Wildfire Ash: The Santa Susana Field Lab and Community Risk Perceptions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Rain, Wind, Wildfire Ash: The Santa Susana Field Lab and Community Risk Perceptions<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n By<\/span>Leah Tieger<\/strong>\n \n August 11, 2023<\/span>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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How does a poet end up designing a community risk perception study?<\/p>\n

The answer begins with an errant powerline and a dry field. It\u2019s November 8, 2018, Santa Ana winds reaching the speed of slow cars in light traffic. As the Woolsey Fire takes hold, my mother takes a photo of the burning ridge from our driveway.\u00a0We\u2019re packing the car now<\/i>, she texts.<\/p>\n

I picture my childhood home burning, as if experiencing loss in theory could make the actual loss easier in practice. Over the next few days, my parents remain one block from the evacuation zone. The house is fine, but it keeps burning in my head for months, and when I finally start the creative manuscript that is now central to my dissertation, I\u2019m not thinking about risk perception studies. I\u2019m thinking about the intersection between confessional poetry and eco-poetry, how personal and familial histories might be rendered through the lens of anthropogenic climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Two years and many drafts later, I schedule a biopsy for the sore on my lip, the one that waxes and wanes but never fully heals. By now, I\u2019ve learned that the Woolsey fire started on the grounds of the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL), site of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. History, 4.8 miles from the house that didn\u2019t burn. I\u2019ve learned rocket fuel was illegally dumped there for decades, that more than one meltdown occurred. Some parcels of SSFL land are so contaminated that, were you to plant a garden there, were you to consume its produce,\u00a0your lifetime chance of developing cancer would be 90 percent.<\/a>\u00a0Wildfire transformed vegetation growing on these parcels into particulate matter, and embers can drift as far as\u00a024 miles<\/a>. Of the four children raised in my family\u2019s home, two have already been diagnosed with different cancers. My doctor calls with biopsy results. First ovarian, then cervical, now skin.<\/p>\n

My name is Leah Tieger, I\u2019m a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English, and I haven\u2019t studied a \u201chard\u201d science in over a decade. Still, as Phil Brown notes in\u00a0Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements<\/i>, \u201cvirtually all cases of contaminated communities are detected by residents.\u201d Lived experience becomes secondary to quantitative data in this context, and even if that wasn\u2019t the case, geographical cancer clusters and environmentally induced illnesses are almost impossible to prove on an empirical level. My risk perception study arises from and within this impossibility. How do members of my contaminated community simultaneously navigate the tension between subjective experience and objective data? What role do lived experiences play in cultural constructions of knowledge? How can those constructions be directed toward changes in public policy?<\/p>\n

Funding from the Sonosky Environmental Sustainability Graduate Fellowship allowed me to devote my summer to an independent study in survey design. This approach informed my threads of inquiry along the following lines:<\/p>\n