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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

This is in line of when I worked in a semiconductor lab in suburban UK in the 90s. We had a couple of local residents report problems immediately even though we hadn't even started fabrication at that point. They eventually sent out a press release saying that we had moved manufacturing to Scotland. The complaints stopped instantly. The lab was running until at least 2017 with no complaints and regular inspections from local authorities.

YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.

Edit: to be clear I'd expect the EPA to install independently maintained monitoring equipment which is not subject to the bias of Apple or the reporter. Then collect more data!

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> YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.

To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.

There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.

Well it would require more data which is the problem, and something I outlined elsewhere. Is she the only person complaining? The case is put forward as if that is the case. If that is the case then there is little evidence to discard the null hypothesis that there's nothing wrong and either alternate hypothesis that it's the Apple facility or the previously contaminated site seem very unlikely.

> many confounding factors

Indeed. May 2022 TechCruch [0] about sexism at workplace:

"Privacy watchdogs in Europe are considering a complaint against Apple made by a former employee, Ashley Gjøvik, who alleges the company fired her after she raised a number of concerns, internally and publicly, including over the safety of the workplace." "At the time, Gjøvik had been placed on administrative leave by Apple after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, and a hostile and unsafe working environment which it had said it was investigating."

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/gobbler-complaint-europe/?...

She better hope she wins one of her lawsuits because she probably will never get a career job again.

I'm honestly surprised the area is zoned for residential; the central expressway corridor has lots of industry nearby, including Intel. Plus that apt complex is right next the intersection of a major highway and major expressway, which won't be helping anyone breathe.

But she's not the only resident and I haven't heard any indication of a class action.

It’s not zoned for residential. This one apartment building got an exemption.

I’m sure the area being so desperate for housing is part of why this was allowed. Adding 1800 housing units is a huge deal in a city that size.

EPA isn't the only governing body. It says right in their report the facility is being properly managed by the city of Santa Clara and the state of California.

Also, they weren't doing chip fab there. It was R&D for Titan and MicroLED. There's a reason she's litigating her case against Apple pro se and without any expert witnesses and other lawyers. She's a basket case who went from almost fainting one time to now saying she almost died. She scared a lot of people at work who live in the same apartment building with this: https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart... We all bought equipment thinking we were being poisoned. TL;DR, we weren't. I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve... https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/apple-tech-layoffs-...

> I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.

If the source of the chemicals was actually the emissions from the other facility and not the soil below the building, you would expect none in the lower floors where you were and more on the higher floors where this person was.

That's because in 2020 she said it was vapor intrusion from the Superfund the apartments were built on.

None of the rest of us got sick, including the people who worked in that building and the one next to it (we have 2).

I'm not an environmental policy enforcer or scientist, but I can read from this report that the issue was mislabeled/unlabeled containers and haz waste treatment w/o EPA-required permit. None of that is going to make 1 single person in the entire area sick.

Similar hysteria surrounds the 5G rollout as well. I remember anecdotes of people reporting health issues, when the already erected tower wasn't even on, but unfortunately I can't find the source for this again.

In general, I find that people are hit or miss regarding their observations. Sometimes they are so on point that they seem like a savant, and sometimes they miss the mark so hard that I find believing anything further impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_misinformation#List_of_prot...

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

5G was a fun one. When they built the 5G tower near me they didn't put any equipment in it. People complained about it at local planning meeting saying that it was giving them migraines, then someone burned it down. I moved and I have 5G but they still don't.

This is exactly the type of story I remember reading about too.

I feel the best type of public education would have been the listing of the many electromagnetic radiation sources we already have. Taking a sample person, say, from inner London, and enumerate just how many of the radiation gets to them already, from the 4G and previous sources, radio, the different equipment that a city has, and so on. I feel like people are missing the historical context is these cases, same with the COVID vaccine. We were already subject to many of the vaccines, and in many cases, the COVID vaccine wasn't anything different.

https://www.immunize.org/official-guidance/state-policies/re...

We should provide science teachers in public schools a little SDR receiver so they can show kids all of the RF in the air around them, pretty much everywhere all of the time. If RF radiation caused health problems, it would easily be the most widespread and persistent condition known to medicine simply because of how steady and ubiquitous RF radiation has been for the last 80 years.

> But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.

Yeah, the reports quoted with scary big red boxes seem to be... mostly minor or procedural stuff?

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