Some of the most populated zones of the Bay Area are built on top of superfund sites, which have high concentration of TCE underground.
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought.
I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
Doing so may be an effective way to catalyze invention and economic activity but ignoring externalities becomes existentially risky as our capacities develop
If we prefer human arbitration to nature's blind and brutal judgment, we had better put toothy disincentives in place
Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy?
It feels wrong, but so does perishing because the species can't deploy technology in the long term interest
It's not even about punishing. If you cause a car or home accident because of a mistake, your insurance rates will go up, and if the damage exceeds your coverage, you'll pay out of pocket. There's nothing punitive about it, you're just responsible because of fault.
That shouldn't feel wrong. It should evoke pity, but not a feeling of wrongness.
For the heirs of the stockholders of these polluting companies we need a special tax to clean up the "accidents" of those companies. These taxes could be limited to the maximum value of the company, or better yet the proportion of the total wealth of the heirs that the company stock represented at the time they sold or dissolved the company. That's still limiting liability, but in the original sense of the term (clawback of sold and wipeout of retained shares).
For the heirs of anyone who made a purposeful decision to pollute despite knowing the harms, then the limited liability should be pierced to allow taxation of the fraction of the total wealth of the heirs that derive from the polluter.
The vast majority of the Bay Area population gets its water either from the Hetch Hetchy (SF, South Bay, Peninsula) or the Mokelumne River watershed (East Bay). This is surface water that is mostly clear of VOCs which is why nothing shows up on the map for the Bay Area that you shared.
For a more accurate representation of the state of the groundwater in the Bay Area, see this map of chemical plumes (hint they're everywhere) [2].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/vaporintrusion/what-vapor-intrusion
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20141120123953/http://www.nbcbay...
> The Oakland Unified School district announced the temporary closure of the McClymonds to test for the chemical tricloroethylene (TCE), which was found in groundwater under the campus.
> "This is West Oakland and so there is a history of environmental injustice, of racial injustice that happens in this community. So these are places where there are leaks, there are dumps, there are things like that that are not healthy for our community," said Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Oakland Board of Education District 3 Director.
> McClymonds has recently seen a handful of students and former students develop cancer, including the high-profile cases Darryl Aikens, a McClymonds football player who died of leukemia a month after graduating in 2017, as well as 2018 graduate Ramone Sanders, who died of cancer last fall. Sanders was playing football at Laney College when he broke his leg and it was discovered he had bone cancer that spread to his lungs.
Honestly I am quite disgusted at this take. How many readers want to bet this take is informed by more than a little implicit racial bias, these being Black men at a primarily Black high school in a primarily Black neighborhood?
See this doc, including the section "Some important points to consider".
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-...
You can be disgusted all you want but I think you're making an error.
But note there was more than TCE at those superfund sites.
That being said, if you run your own private well, you’re not subject to this.
https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...
Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild".
I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...