Yea I was really surprised reading this that I know a few people who lived in that apartment complex. The complex holds 1800 households, and the whole city has ~50k, so that single complex accounts for 3-4% of Santa Clara’s total households. And only one woman has reported any issues, as far as we know.

That said, Santa Clara is basically a giant industrial superfund site already from the semiconductor industry, so I’m sure there are plenty of people being poisoned by the pollution in the area.

This is also what I wonder. So far the EPA has found a few faults, but with only one self reported case of humans affected among thousands of potential victims this whole story could still tip towards either "this is bad but all too common" and "this is a gigantic scandal of obscene proportions." The latter one makes for a better news story and twitter threads, but that also doesn't make every suspicion in there true by default.

Let’s imagine you suddenly feel bad at 3 am, how would you know you should file a complaint against a specific lab run by a specific company? How would you even know it exists?

You would go to the doctor and get some random incorrect advise. If you go online and check air quality you would not find anything obviously alarming. Maybe you decide you have asthma and move out of the city.

I personally had a condition with an obvious cause that took me 4 years to pinpoint and doctors were bloody useless.

If, hypothetically, I was being poisoned by some random industrial activity a mile away, I would never know