The Superfund Sites of Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Superfund Sites of Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

247 pointsiaw119 comments

Shocking how incomplete this article is. One of the prominent sites was caused by Fairchild, and it's specifically described in Gordon Moore's autobiography. he said they just dumped strong acids down the drain, unaware that it ate a hole in the drainpipe, and so all the other solvents they dumped down the same drain ended up hitting the water table and pluming (https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolution...).

he claims he didn't know that would happen, but every trained chemist learns to neutralize their acids before dumping them down the drain.

AFAICT, Moore and his buddies never had to pay anything for this- the companies settled with the government.

The statement about the acids doesn't make any sense. Every building engineer in charge of an industrial site knows that the pH of wastewater has to be within range, or the city will come after you for messing with operation of the sewage plant. My undergraduate university had a neutralization plant at its science site.

And what's with the solvents dumped down the drain? Only water-soluble material is disposed of through sewage, with constraints on biological oxygen demand. Solvents don't go into sewage, they are burned, and some halogenated solvents are exquisitely toxic to the biological stage in the treatment plant, but that is known. Also, the sewage engineers would notice.

With semiconductor plants it's usually halogenated solvent plumes. No leaky sewage lines involved.

This all happened in the 60s and 70s when Fairchild was getting started. AFAICT, they just ignored all the rules.

Note that this was before "semiconductor plants" as a thing existed: Moore invented a lot of the technology underlying semi plants at Fairchild.

They really shouldn't have skipped the rules, a common source of solvent plumes in groundwater is drycleaners. When did they start using halogenated solvents, in the 1930s?

[When did they start using halogenated solvents]

Post war I think. I saw an old educational movie from the 30/40s. 'How a dry cleaners works' they were using ether or some such for dry cleaning. Film went over how the fire alarm/suppression system worked.

I think the issue with halogenated solvents wasn't really understood at first. Businesses would just dump the stuff in the drain or on the ground. I remember a news report in Santa Cruz country, some business was getting harassed because they were supposedly illegally dumping perch. Turned out there was dry cleaners there in the 1950's and they were dumping perch in the septic system. 50 years later it was seeping into the San Lorinzo river.

Mid-Late 30's, before that it used gasoline or naphtha to do the cleaning.

I agree they shouldn't have skipped the rules. But, at the time, I guess they kind of knew they were onto something (semiconductors) and the decided to cut a few corners?

At this point it should be obvious that those starting out an industry, or those disrupting it so much as to make it in their image, have all the incentive in the world to break rules in small to medium ways consistently and pay for it later (if at all) from a position of dominance. Not only can they afford it later, but enough elites usually get in on the deal to make money on the way up help shield it from any major blowback.

Just look at Uber for a recent example. I'd bet you could pick any decade of the last 150 years and it wouldn't be that hard to find obvious, well known examples.

Those aren't 'small to medium ways'.

While I mostly agree, I was mainly trying to distinguish ignoring regulations and fraud and generally being horrible from murder, kidnapping, treason, etc which some people's minds might have gone to otherwise.

That said, I don't doubt some companies fitting my initial criteria also dabbled in these more extreme crimes occassionally to get what they wanted. I'd like to think it's much less common though.

I dont think they did skip the rules - there were few regulations of environmental discharge of chemicals before the 70's.

Largely they followed the rules as existed at the time, consider that before the late 60's most states had no rules on dumping chemicals into the environment - and the EPA didnt even exist before 1972 - the regulatory scheme as it exists now was developed largely between 72 and 92.

The consequences were not very bad, at least for the 60s guys.

In my hometown, GE did stuff like dump PCBs into the Hudson River and “donated” contaminated oils to towns for oiled gravel roads.

The company had to do some remediation, long after the folks who did it were gone.

Why would the individuals pay? - when you do work for hire, you're presumed to be doing the companies bidding, and they hold the liability bag.

As the article states, it was not known how polluting some of these solvents were (sometimes) until decades after the disposal happened.

Also, this is largely how superfund stuff works, GE has paid out many hundreds of millions to clean up the millions of tons of PCB's they dumped into the hudson river in NY over a couple decades.

This wasn't work for hire. Gordon Moore was a cofounder of Fairchild. As a founder who was doing primary research work, he should in fact be held directly accountable.

That would fly in the face of a couple hundred years of law.

That aside - in most cases no laws that existed at the time were violated, so its not as if he knowingly violated the law - TCE for example was not known to be harmful until the mid-70's, was not known to be environmentally persistent until even later, and was not declared a carcinogen until 2005.

Imagine that you're a cofounder of a company that made billions - but you personally didnt benefit much from it - beyond a paycheck - is it fair for you to be personally responsible for that environmental damage, or should the government go after the company you worked for?

Superfund is set up to follow the money, the money that Intel, and the successors of Fairchild has, wildly exceed the money the founders made.

I'm not sure what laws you're talking about, the Superfund law: applies liability to corporate owners who commit gross negligence, and in this case, Moore was a corporate owner. Corporate officers are specifically the people who are on the legal hook.

When I worked in an academic lab about 7 years ago, we never neutralized acids or bases before dumping them in the sink. The logic is that they'll be diluted almost as soon as they go own the drain.

Of course, this was using small quantities of acid, not liters.

we're talking about liters of HF (nearly pure).

This is actually an article in the NYT’s photography section. It does not claim to be a complete survey of these sites.

Previously covered:

2001, salon: https://www.salon.com/2001/07/30/almaden1/

2013, the atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/not-e...

2015, gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-and...

2017, kqed: https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/388730

I've lived here off and on since 1999, but that Atlantic article was the first one to really get my attention.

I also lived in College Terrace in Palo Alto, where one of the superfund is. At the time very few residents knew about the issue. I believe it is the same today.

My neighbor Aaron Greenspan (also known for fighting his classmate Mark Zuckerberg on trademark issues) asked local authorities to do more to inform residents. It did not go anywhere. He eventually moved out, and so did I.

Here's one of his blog posts from back in 2013: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

I think Google is on top of a superfund site.

The main HQ isn't actually on top of a superfund site, but an ex-dump. We derive a fair amount of methane from the decaying matter underneath shoreline...

The Shoreline Amphitheater (yes, the idiots who ran Mtn. View back then couldn't tell an amphitheater from a theater) was built over the dump.

The first few events revealed the danger when people sitting on the lawn portion actually set the lawn afire with their lighters, due to methane seeping through the soil.

That first link is a rabbit hole. https://www.salon.com/2001/07/30/almaden1/

Cool trails up there, lots of history, just sucks that its the reason we can't fish in anything downstream of that in the south bay.

I worked at Spectra-Physics when the contamination occurred. It was below a plating line that did alodine prior to painting aluminum laser and instrument housings. The building pictured is Bldg 5, where I had my first serious job. This was a clean building where ion laser tubes were manufactured and scientific lasers, including the first high power single frequency, and ultrafast (picosecond) lasers were final tested. Spectra-Physics was bought and sold many times, and is now a division of a company that perfected a relatively simple vacuum gauge that relied on the movement of a stai steel diaphragm. Spectra was the first laser IPO, but it never really flourished; it was kind of ruined by Stanford MBAs. It’s competitor, Coherent, became a powerhouse, largely because it retained its technical leadership. My building 5 is now a Korean church. Now that’s a profitable business!

How weird - I used to live in that same house that's featured in that article. 1908 Colony St. in Mountain View, CA. I remember the landlord made me sign an agreement that indemnifies them from legal responsibility in the event I get sick from drinking the water, or leaky vapors, or whatever. It basically read that if I get sick for any reason, I can't sue anyone for it. What a lovely and generous place SV is!

Why would you sign that?

Because I young, broke and desperately looking for a place to live that was convenient and affordable.

Keep the windows open... buy bottled water.

Would you prefer I sue you if I get sick for any reason?

Do you want to pay the cost of environmental remediation in your rent? I'm sure your landlord would be willing to allow that.

I would prefer you not sue me if you get sick for any reason. Though I am not a multi-million dollar corporation responsible for toxic waste under your bed.

I don't want to pay the cost of environmental remediation through my rent. I would rather an agreement was reached to either deem the area uninhabitable or clean it thoroughly and deem it safe, in which case the non-liability clause oughtn't be necessary. I dislike the lack of guarantee either way.

I didn't mean to trivialize a complicated issue. It was more so hyperbolic musing that in an area that supposedly epitomizes Western civilization, technological progress and elevates humanism, we can't even guarantee basic safety from the elements.

It's mentioned in the link to the Atlantic article people are sharing that tech industries in the valley were specifically requested to hide all traditional outward signatures of industry like smokestacks and storage tanks to make the industrial buildings more acceptable to suburban folks - and it actually worked.

The person who owns your apartment building did not also operate the semiconductor fab that dumped toxic chemicals into the ground.

It should be illegal to rent out a place that you believe is an environmental hazard. If this seems onerous, imagine the landlord knew the structure had dangerous wiring and wanted to waive liability for any fire damage.

I thought the photo in that article looked familiar. Burbed covered the sale of them back in the day: http://www.burbed.com/tag/gables-end/

I’ve done a bit of research on this issue and the plume that is in the soil. It’s not that bad for several reasons.

The contamination is TCE. TCE is a carcinogen and responsible for the “cancer spike” in the Whisman neighborhood about a mile or two away. It takes many years of exposure to increase your risk of cancer though. But its effects are much more acute against a fetus. TCE is destroyed by sunlight. It only becomes a problem when it accumulates inside a building.

With that in mind, the houses in the community were built with mitigation techniques — techniques that are familiar to anyone who’ve lived in areas with radon. First the houses are built with vapor barriers. This is to prevent the TCE vapors from seeping in. Second, the foundation have internal ventilation and vanes to draw air out (called sub slab ventilation). This is why you see so many of them at the roof of these houses. The design was approved by the EPA. (Google uses positive air pressure to mitigate in their buildings)

The EPA also monitors the plume and have done checks inside the houses to ensure TCE aren’t getting in. Also, the remediation and cleanup of the soil has progressed faster than expected. It should all be cleaned up within a decade, IIRC. Lastly, the plume has migrated away from the neighborhood and is basically headed towards the 101 and Google.

The people who should be concerned aren’t the people living in the newer houses but the ones who live in the houses built before the TCE issue was recognized.

A place I was renting had the same issue but from a different plume. As a renter the landlord wasn’t required to tell me this. I found out completely by accident after I had already moved in. I can’t believe that is legal since there is an acute risk to pregnant women, especially when the building has no mitigation methods. This is often the case because many buildings in SV are fairly old.

Here’s an article that talks a bit about the plume and community:

https://mv-voice.com/news/2011/06/14/new-cleanup-efforts-for...

And an updated one that tells you about the progress: https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2014/01/28/epa-reaches-3-milli...

A startup/lifestyle company I used to work for several years ago aggregates the GIS data of these superfund sites (and other environmental points of interest) and makes it available at [1].

The site is pretty old and some of the links need updating, but they still link to the monitoring profiles of these sites. For example, here[2] is the CA Water Board page for the Page Mill HP site.

[1]https://whatsdown.terradex.com/ [2]http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/profile_report.asp?glob...

This is pretty thin on content. More information:

[1] https://qz.com/1017181/silicon-valley-pollution-there-are-mo...

[2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Toxic-Plumes-The-D...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/vaporintrusion/vapor-intrusion-superfund...

The NBC article has a useful map: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy...

> This is pretty thin on content.

Note that this is a photography project and appears in the "Lens" section of the NYT.

After it was an HP building that soccer field in the photo was a gas station, which was likely worse.

And people are taking steps: in Santa Clara (the city, not county), residential areas are receive Hetch Hetchy water while areas zoned industrial get groundwater. When I had an office there I was able to look this up on the city's web site. The only time I've been willing to pay for bottled water.

Much of Moffett Field is a superfund site (the main reason it's still a government facility) because back during the cold war the Navy used to dump toxic de-icing chemicals on those sub flights that took off from there every hour...from an area right next to the marsh.

Back in the 80s I remember visiting the Intel fab (also in santa clara) and watching a farmer harvesting wheat next door. I always wondered what happened to that wheat since it was obvious back then that the leachate would be a problem (nowadays the water coming out of the fabs is cleaner than the water that come in...but the damage is done).

And it's not all bad. I remember sitting in Cadence HQ (early 90s) watching an old guy work in the cherry orchard next door. I'd have eaten those cherries. And before SGI and Alza HQs moved in (to where Google HQ is now) that area was all bean fields. We used to cut through there to get to the shoreline...though back then the park and concert hall was the mountain view dump, so also probably pretty bad.

SV actually managed to maintain the ag vibe for a long time. I believe the last operating farm in East Palo Alto just shut down within the last five years.

I have friends who like to eat from their garden and fruit trees in their yard. I have to remind them that they're living in Silicon Valley and who knows what sort of crazy industrial solvents are seeping up through the ground.

The main industrial solvent described in superfund sites in the south bay is TCE (trichloroethelyine), which does not bioaccumulate. The fruit won't contain it, even if you live right on the superfund site.

I'm not aware of a major soil contaminant around here that does bioaccumulate. I guess lead from the old leaded gasoline, which we stopped using in the 1970s. (Areas around roads that were active prior to the 1970s will have higher soil lead levels). But that's the same as any place in the US.

> I guess lead from the old leaded gasoline

This is a major issue in parts of Oakland, not South Bay but not far away [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Oakland

Leaded gasoline wasn't phased out in California until 1990.

January 1 1992 and it was the first state to do so.

I think mid to mid-late 70's was when most cars could no longer take leaded gasoline (the pump nozzle wouldn't fit, and catalytic converters would get plugged). Leaded gas was still available, but as older cars died not much leaded gas was pumped (cars back then didn't have as long of a life cycle, so probably by 85 or so more cars than not were on unleaded).

You started to see smog equipment in '75 but initially not everyone used catalytic converters. Some, like BMW and Mazda, used thermal reactors. Leaded fuel was common enough that part of the smog check was to ensure that a leaded nozzle couldn't fit.

Its interesting, I've always been asked what the 'official' definition of Silicon Valley is, or if some specific city is 'in' Silicon Valley or out. Like say, Redwood City.

By looking at this map here, https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/plume-minimal/index.html# you can easily tell by wether the city has a Superfund site.

This data is only for cities in Santa Clara County:

  This map shows the sites of toxic chemical "plumes" in Santa Clara County, CA

Besides one in SF (and a couple in Oakland), all the "Superfund" sites in the "Bay Area" are in Santa Clara County. https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...

Silicon Valley should be basically Santa Clara Valley, but in practice, it basically means everywhere including SF and the east bay.

> but in practice, it basically means everywhere including SF and the east bay

Silicon Valley includes neither SF nor the East Bay, not even in practice.

You must not read much national or international media.

> "As more high-tech companies were established across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, and then north towards the Bay Area's two other major cities, San Francisco and Oakland, the "Silicon Valley" has come to have two definitions: a geographic one, referring to Santa Clara County, and a metonymical one, referring to all high-tech businesses in the Bay Area or even in the United States."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

I'd add Hunter's Point to this list as it is being redeveloped right now - but that former Naval Shipyard has quite a story.

Some details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Naval_Shipyard

If you enjoy higher cancer rates due to radiological contamination, this area is for you.

Latest fun: San Francisco accepted Hunters Point shipyard land that may still be radioactive

EPA, state health regulators approved transfer in 2015 despite awareness of fraud allegations https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/13/17081188/san-francisco-hunte...

In 2008, I looked at renting on Treasure Island, back when it was just starting to be developed from a derelict military base into a neighborhood. The townhomes being rented were the old military housing, in rows along the streets. One section, identical to others nearby being lived in, was fenced off with portable fences and a radiation hazard sign every 100 yards or so. The information was available at the time, but you had to go looking for it. Now that it is transferred to the city of SF and redevelopment is proceeding, I see a bunch of articles about it again.

Needless to say, I didn't rent there. I ended up on the Peninsula, but a few weeks after moving in, I noticed there was an old gas station along El Camino Real that was fenced and had venting pipes and equipment--leaking gas tanks are no picnic either.

https://www.google.com/search?q=treasure+island+radiation

This seems like the NY times continuing anti-SV coverage. For example, while Santa Clara has some number of super-fund sites supposed the most in the country, would we expect this based on historical manufacturing GDP? Is it out of line?

There seems to be a suggestion of something sinister about Silicon Valley with mentions of the work culture--as though it was monolithic--and calling it toxic. Commenting on the clothes people wear--to what end? can't trust a guy who wears a hoodie?

I'm not sure social media is so much worse if this is journalism.

SV is unique in the USA in that it's a major industrial area that evolved into a huge urban center, not a small rural town. So the impact of each bit of pollution is much larger.

Also, the electronics industry is usually viewed as ecologically friendly, although I'm not sure why.

Eco-friendlyness and general kharma in the public eyes is usually dependant on how many vendor-layers you are away from the horrifyng layers of reality.

Chicken-Stable-Cleaner - horrifying.

Egg-Delivery-Truck-Driver - acceptable.

Hotel-Breakfast-Cook - never met a nicer person.

If the horror is additional well distributed, and humanity is secretly addicted to your product and wont imagine live without it- you get a free ride on the kharma slide.

>>Coltan from african warlords mined by enslaved children in every cellphone! Will humanity give up cellphones to save the innocent? Click here - to find out.<<

It would be a interesting project to find out the actual kharma-cost of a product though. Imagine the inheritance, if the industry relies on a lot of kharmatic lower services- or propells other low-kharma activitys onwards.

Though it could end up, showing that the it- is actually a net-positiv to humanitys kharma, after all i drastically reduces what humanity would have usually done with its spare time.

> Hotel-Breakfast-Cook

...if you only knew what I know, that wouldn't be item #3.

/then again, food handling in general is sausage making at its finest I suppose...

> It would be a interesting project to find out the actual kharma-cost of a product though

I'm having trouble finding it and would love if someone else found it, but a couple years ago someone did an academic paper doing just that for the iphone, tallying up all externalities (abuse of workers and the environment for example) involved in manufacturing the product and coming up with a "real" cost of making it. I recall they concluded an iphone would cost $1000 to $2000 if the true costs were included.

I seem to remember the phrase "dark value" but it hasn't been helpful in googling for the paper.

I went to school in Pittsburgh, PA where they are building condos and bars on slag piles from 19th century blast furnaces. I don't think industry in cities is unique. For a few more examples: Philadelphia has an oil refinery practically downtown. Even without leaving the Bay Area Oakland and Richmond have heavy industry in close proximity to people's homes inside the cities.

Not super unique I think. Rochester NY got rich with optics manufacturing (Bausch&Lomb, Eastman Kodak), and is now a world leader in optics research. Less manufacturing than there used to be but the talent never really left.

> SV is unique in the USA in that it's a major industrial area that evolved into a huge urban center

Not unique at all. That's how most large urban areas in America got started. They became urbanized because people lived close to their jobs in the days before highways.

Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and pretty much any east coast city became urban because of heavy industry. Factories located there because of the ports which brought in raw materials. Those ports then spawned more heavy industries (railroads, shipyards, etc...)

Maybe SV just sucks? Unless I was paid at least half a million a year I wouldn't even consider living there.

If you play your cards right, half a million after benefits and stocks are consider is within reach for engineers. Director level and up and it’s very attainable. The Bay Area isn’t perfect, but it has a lot to offer for many, especially if you’re in the top 10% or so of earners out here. If you make minimum wage out here it’s probably awful aside from the weather and how nice and relaxed people generally are compared to the rest of the US, though I’ve seen that slipping in the past 5 years, especially on the road — it seems like there are a lot more angry drivers now than even a few years ago.

This is in the "Lens" section, for what it's worth. The point is the photography, not so much the article.

> This seems like the NY times continuing anti-SV coverage. For example, while Santa Clara has some number of super-fund sites supposed the most in the country, would we expect this based on historical manufacturing GDP? Is it out of line?

Silicon Valley is what it is today specifically because of the semiconductor fabrication industry. That's why the area is named after the metal used in transistor manufacture, and not anything about software. The same manufacturing process resulted in the Superfund sites.

So, whether or not it's quantitatively different, it's certainly qualitatively different - in general, a manufacturing history in other parts of the country is only related to current industries by virtue of generic economic growth. Silicon Valley today is essentially the same industry as it was in the 1950s.

Etsy, for instance, is at the same address in Brooklyn where Robert Gair first mass-produced cardboard boxes in 1879. But that area of town isn't called "Gairville" any more.

Missing the point of your comment entirely, I'm going to point out that "Silicon" is not a metal, it's a semiconductor.

Thanks, and honestly, a software person not remembering what silicon even is is not too far from my point :)

I think you're reading more into this article than is there to read.

FWIW, the greater NYC/NJ area is also one of, if not the most polluted region of the USA, because it was so powerful and economically strong when the industrial revolution happened and the earliest industrial chemical shenanigans occurred.

For example: Newtown Creek between Queens and Brooklyn and/or the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn were industrial supercenters in the 19th century ans were known to contain some weird and nasty crap at the bottom that was referred to as "black mayonnaise" as early as 1900. They're not much better now. Both are major superfund sites, and you would be well advised to not touch the water.

Also, in the 70s/80s, it got to the point where the East River, which separates Manhattan from Long Island, sometimes actually visibly caught fire. Really.

North Jersey, eg greater Paterson, Elizabeth, etc, is infested with superfund sites. Chemical companies up the wazoo were operating with impunity for decades.

This makes me wonder: If SV only has 20 something superfund sites from back when tech was very small, how many superfund sites does china have with their massive factories?

The entirety of China should be a Superfund site. I lived in Suzhou for about a year or so and Lake Tai nearby is pretty much radioactive [1] (figuratively, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were literally.) It seems that much of the surface water in China is extraordinarily polluted -- and I saw people fishing out of canals or waters near industrial sites as if they were in the Alaskan wilderness or something.

There's likely a huge under-reporting of pollution-related illnesses. I know that respiratory illness statistics are an actual state secret -- you can't get access to the actual data on pollution-related illnesses.

Chinese pollution is beyond crisis levels. All of this worry about the Paris agreement and CO2 -- that's nonsense: China has problems with actual pollution that kills people, such as benzene and other highly toxic chemicals and particulate pollution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tai#Pollution

> The entirety of China should be a Superfund site.

That would require a sizable expansion of EPA jurisdiction that might run into a few issues.

It might be a welcome change of pace from attempting to export “democracy” and “freedom” though.

This is why I won't buy food products from China. This includes almost any store brand or even name brand apple juice or juice blend that you'll find in the supermarket.

Large swathes of Mountain View are poisoned because of chemicals used at Moffett Field to clean the airplanes. They spread down into Mountain View such that some areas have higher cancer rates than others and was designated Superfund sites even 15 years ago when I lived in the area.

There's a common culprit between contamination from Moffett Field, old semiconductor sites, and even old dry cleaning sites: chlorinated solvents, trichloroethylene in particular. TCE is non-corrosive, non-flammable, cheap, a great solvent for many non-water-soluble compounds, and it evaporates cleanly and rapidly. It also has a relatively low acute toxicity to humans. It was commercialized in the 1920s as a surgical anesthetic, and still sees some medical use:

http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Jh2929e/4.5.html

I even found it sold by the can in a hardware store as recently as 2002.

Unfortunately, it's a carcinogen and can cause neurological problems with heavy or chronic exposure. It breaks down slowly in soil or water. (Though it breaks down rapidly once volatilized into the atmosphere - half life of one week.) It migrates easily through soil and into water. As of 2005, TCE was detected in 5% of American public water systems supplied by groundwater and in 15% supplied by surface water.

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp19.pdf

holycrap, is the soccer pitch the one on the corner of Page Mill & El Camino? That's nuts that I drive right next to a superfund site every day.

My rule of thumb, if its in SV, its a superfund site. I used to work by the VA hospital, there was a sign that said pregnant women shouldn't touch the grass.

Don’t forget all the Prop 65 earnings in apartment complexes! It’s mostly for asbestos in the case of apartments.

Looks like the one at Alma and El Camino, right across from Stanford Mall.

A great place for new luxury apartments and condos! I wish I was kidding.

The first paragraphs here are horrifying: https://www.mv-voice.com/morgue/2001/2001_01_19.supe19.html

> According to Alana Lee, the EPA project manager for the site, the air stripper on the Netscape campus was constructed in 1989, and because of a grandfather clause, is permitted to emit 24 pounds per day of toxic material. > > The current limit for air-strippers is 1 pound per day.

I worked in one of the buildings built atop this HP site[1]. It had a big water pump in the parking lot treating the ground water.

The story went that the HP instruments used to detect the ground water pollution levels were first built at the very site.

[1] https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fus...

what the essentially did in the 90s was to dig giant trenches around entire city block, way down to the impermeable clay layer ... then fill the trenches with a similar impermeable clay creating a giant block sized container which they are still now pumping water through to slowly clean out the polutants

I remember seeing a great post about this a few years ago: "In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree"[1] by Aaron Greenspan. It stands out all these years as a vivid, personal account of an issue I simply hadn't thought about before.

[1]: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

As someone who was born and raised in the SV, this is just something they trot out every once in a while to scare the newcomers.

Almost no one is on well water and the chemicals are relatively low toxicity in most cases. You are probably getting harmed more by the smog in the air than any leakage from these sites. Yes, bad stuff was happening in the 70's environmentally. SV is NOT an isolated case.

I'd love to understand more clearly the risks of these contaminated sites. Would just the mere presence of, say playing on a Superfund soccer field expose you to those chemicals? Or is it more around if you were to drink the water from these sites then you would be at risk? Same goes for any offices that happen to be sitting on Superfund sites.

Reminds me of this previously posted essay about contamination in College Terrace: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-...

Fortunately (with rare exceptions) nobody uses well water in Santa Clara county (see https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1182/pdf/05SantaClaraValley.p... ) and a lot of these chemicals are relatively low toxicity, the greatest danger seems to be vapors released from the soil.

As far as risks via things like gardening, I actually wonder about the levels of arsenic or mercury in the soil, compounds of which were used many decades ago on fruit trees (which were very common here).

>The world’s capital of tech innovation prefers to keep its superlatives, good and bad, under wraps.

Can anybody explain to me what "superlatives" means in that opening sentence? As it doesn't seem to match any of the standard definitions. [0]

[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/superlative

I read it as definition #4 on your link.

Basically, it's saying that SV likes to keep both it's very very good things (new life-changing tech) and it's very very bad things (these Superfund sides) under wraps.

Thank you, yes, that does make sense now!

There are far more superfund sites across the country than I would have expected. https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...

I always wondered what the empty lot next to an apartment complex I lived in was. Did some research and it was the Jasco superfund site. I read the entire lease agreement and it didn’t mention anything about it. We need a disclosure law for that. Ended up moving.

I grew up a couple miles from the fairchild site. Back then it was an abandoned building with a fence around it. Our parents always told us to stay out, but my friends and I used to jump the fence and explore the building. Fun times were always had.

The infamous Lorentz Barrel and Drum site is right across the street from Spartan Stadium and the ice center (now called Sharks Ice) at the southwest corner of 10th and Alma.

Nothing like a little externalization to boost the bottom line.

Does anyone care to comment on other countries and their handling of the hazardous waste from semiconductor manufacturing? Also are the unsafe practices long outdated?

"Superfund" seems to be what we call contaminated land from industrial waste?

That's a really stupid name (or maybe really smart if your a politician). Should be called Supertoxic.

Superfund refers to the super amount of funds spent to clean up the messes.

But they haven't cleaned them up?

With a lot of these substances, cleaning them up doesn't just cost a lot of money, it also takes a lot of time.

Some have been.

Once they're totally cleaned up they're no longer superfund sites.

This is like looking at my list of _open_ bug tickets and complaining that not a single one of them is done.

That said, it can be hard to get a lot of these sites all the way to 100% cleaned up, and there's a lot of non-engineering obstacles. There's landowners and neighbors with all kinds of differing incentives, as in a Queens, NY site where they want to dig up and get rid of some radiation but there are businesses who have already been built atop it and would have to be destroyed.

The "Superfund" is a set of regulations that allow EPA to force polluters to pay for long term chemical waste cleanups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

It's the colloquial term for the EPA program that registers and theoretically gets the polluters to pay for contaminated sites.

Maybe NY Times should check its own backyard first.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Superfun...

EDIT: What I meant was yes SV has a bunch of superfund sites, but they are far fewer than other parts of the country, especially the North East.

Is there some reason it’s unreasonable to look at sites throughout the USA?

The purpose of the article is not to make NY look better than SV. The purpose of the article is to point out the Superfund sites in SV that a lot of people who live here would be surprised to learn about.

I find it difficult to understand the impulse that would lead someone to see a news story about pollution where they live and attack the newspaper for publishing it.

It's a pretty ancient impulse. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg

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