6 ms·

Silicon Valley is one of the most polluted places in the country

318 points by nsnick 7y ago

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
A related example from last year, near Page Mill Road: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues-hp-companies-agilent-over-toxic-contamination https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues... And an entertaining rant by a UC Berkeley Health Physicist, on D&D (Decontamination & Demolition): http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousness-rant-on-dd-projects/ http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousne...
- paganel 7y ago
  Really interesting links, the second one probably should also be posted as a separate HN post.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  FYI, the location near Page Mill Road is where Facebook used to have their headquarters. Stanford did took various remediation measures when they converted the property into faculty housing, but IDK if the FB buildings were adequately protected/ventilated. My understanding is that the vapors are only harmful if they get into buildings and are not adequately ventilated. Stanford put vapor guards under each home they built, among other things.
penispooper 7y ago
do h1b workers from india open defecate or is it the crazy homeless people? i saw poop on the street when i was there 5 years ago.
DrScump 7y ago
One of the worst was right across 10th St. from Solar4America Ice (formerly the San Jose Ice Center, home training facility of the Sharks).
H8crilA 7y ago
I wonder how many such Superfund sites we already have in mainland China (I mean from a factual standpoint, not from a government reporting standpoint). The Chinese government is so out of control over the situation that, nominally, environmental pollution can be punished with death.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  It doesn’t make sense. Anything can be punished by death in China, and laws are only selectively enforced anyways, so death penalty with the excuse of pollution would probably only occur for deeper political reasons. China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.
  - H8crilA 7y ago
    I meant: how many sites are already de facto so polluted that they require deep cleanup. May be decades before we find out.
    - droopyEyelids 7y ago
      To be more realistic, you'll never find out. I'd challenge anyone who thinks we know all of them in the USA. It doesn't even take the corruption that a big employer in a small town automatically creates to have a 'hidden' superfund site. It only takes the lack of dedicated professionals testing everything all the time. Tracking sources and types of pollution is _not only_ difficult, highly technical work that requires a lot of infrastructure- but it also _requires its own R&D to keep up with new industrial chemicals_. This means it's fiercely expensive, manpower-limited, and that it takes a long, long time. What country is going to dedicate that amount of resources to find problems that'll cost even more money to clean up (or possibly can't be cleaned up at all)? Maybe Norway. Maybe.
      - throwaway2048 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_clusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_clusters This always gives me pause, plenty don't have any known cause.
sirroblyon 7y ago
How does it go? Kill 1 person, go to jail. Pollute millions, make millions?
jwr 7y ago
So, a story about SV being polluted has 156 points right now, and sits nicely in the middle of the front page. It's an important story, apparently. Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101 There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 7y ago
  That's a particularly uncharitable interpretation. It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).
  - endorphone 7y ago
    This would explain one post rising quickly while another fades. When people are actively flagging, however, that's an entirely different, much more insidious action.
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      > much more insidious action I'm missing something. What exactly is the agenda?
      - ryandrake 7y ago
        Climate Change Burnout. I don’t flag articles on CC but I’ve been tempted to. There’s a new one every two days and they all say basically the same thing. Regardless of one’s political views, the onslaught of constant alarm can be exhausting. The people who don’t think it’s a problem are not going to be convinced by the 215th news article published this year.
herostratus101 7y ago
This is still the best essay I have read on the topic: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-the-cookie-dough-tree/ http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-... I've left Silicon Valley since I read it. And having read it, I hope to never move back.
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  Page is not readable on phone
  - trenning 7y ago
    copy/pasted text https://pastebin.com/d63CwAtN https://pastebin.com/d63CwAtN
  - rad_gruchalski 7y ago
    Works pretty good in reader view.
- xvector 7y ago
  This is horribly frightening. What can I do at home to detect (or even continuously monitor) the presence of Superfund chemicals?
  - armitron 7y ago
    You can't, reliably. The entire geographical area is contaminated, so you should worry about living there and not just about your home. Now they are saying Google offices were breached and documenting one specific (but very prominent, easy to cover) instance, imagine what's going on in general in the background. I moved to Europe from SF bay area years ago, coinciding with the birth of my son, and this was one of the factors.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    There's a pretty good map here: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy-of-Silicon-Valley-258950021.html https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy... TCE has a distinctive smell - sweet, like cookie dough or donuts. You'll know if you're in an area contaminated by it - I've smelled it at the Google Quad campus and some of the residential areas around it. (The area around Evandale is particularly bad, I've smelled it just driving through some of the residential streets there.) Some of the other chemicals used in semicoductor manufacture are odorless, though. Most of the contamination is in industrial or office park zones, so I'd be more worried about your workplace than your home, and many of the spills are plain old gasoline (from service stations) which you can have anywhere.
natch 7y ago
Article does not even mention the Kaiser Permanente cement plant which has a dedicated train line bringing in coal for burning, is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in California, and is perched right over Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos, and very close to Palo Alto and San Jose, bathing them in a haze of emissions. All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant. It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.
- kayfox 7y ago
  This plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry Which is not owned by Kaiser Permanente?
  - goda90 7y ago
    It was founded by Henry Kaiser and named Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant after the Permanente Creek which flowed past it. It has since changed names. Kaiser Permanente the healthcare organization was named after the same creek. So calling it the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant is outdated, but it's not saying that the healthcare organization owns it.
    - foxyv 7y ago
      Yes! The KP HMO has history with but is not owned by the Kaiser industrial companies. It was essentially setup by Sidney Garfield at the behest of Henry Kaiser and the help of FDR to treat workers at the Kaiser shipyards, hence the name. It's a not for profit organization completely distinct from other Kaiser organizations. Funny enough I'm pretty sure at $79 billion yearly, it grosses more than it's industrial namesakes. https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how-it-all-started https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how...
gnicholas 7y ago
Fun fact: Facebook's old headquarters (between Page Mill Rd and California Ave) was located on top of a superfund site. After FB moved to Menlo Park, Stanford built a faculty housing development there. They claim that they have done adequate retrofitting so that it poses no risk to residents, but I know some professors in the sciences who decided against living there after reading the environmental disclosures. Also, if Stanford did this retrofitting, that implies that maybe FB did not do enough when they were there? The housing disclosures have more info on the contamination and retrofitting: https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures
chrisdhoover 7y ago
Oh no, I worked in two different offices located on superfund sites. Probably a third too but I haven’t found supporting evidence yet.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
Nobody remembers the Commodore Semiconductor Group? Commodore was a pioneer in personal computing, semiconductor and environmental accidents. In 1974, there was a massive leak of the 250-gallon underground concrete storage tank full of TCE, and today the site is still monitored by the EPA. Bill Herd, the chief engineering of Commodore 128, mentioned in his interview that the day he went to work, he didn't know the tank leaked and parked at the wrong side of the company, and his car was completely contaminated. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0301146&msspp=med https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...

318 points by nsnick 7y ago

A related example from last year, near Page Mill Road: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues-hp-companies-agilent-over-toxic-contamination https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/03/01/stanford-sues... And an entertaining rant by a UC Berkeley Health Physicist, on D&D (Decontamination & Demolition): http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousness-rant-on-dd-projects/ http://www.funraniumlabs.com/2019/05/a-stream-of-consciousne...

paganel 7y ago
Really interesting links, the second one probably should also be posted as a separate HN post.
gnicholas 7y ago
FYI, the location near Page Mill Road is where Facebook used to have their headquarters. Stanford did took various remediation measures when they converted the property into faculty housing, but IDK if the FB buildings were adequately protected/ventilated. My understanding is that the vapors are only harmful if they get into buildings and are not adequately ventilated. Stanford put vapor guards under each home they built, among other things.

penispooper 7y ago

do h1b workers from india open defecate or is it the crazy homeless people? i saw poop on the street when i was there 5 years ago.

DrScump 7y ago

One of the worst was right across 10th St. from Solar4America Ice (formerly the San Jose Ice Center, home training facility of the Sharks).

H8crilA 7y ago

I wonder how many such Superfund sites we already have in mainland China (I mean from a factual standpoint, not from a government reporting standpoint). The Chinese government is so out of control over the situation that, nominally, environmental pollution can be punished with death.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
It doesn’t make sense. Anything can be punished by death in China, and laws are only selectively enforced anyways, so death penalty with the excuse of pollution would probably only occur for deeper political reasons. China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I meant: how many sites are already de facto so polluted that they require deep cleanup. May be decades before we find out.
  - droopyEyelids 7y ago
    To be more realistic, you'll never find out. I'd challenge anyone who thinks we know all of them in the USA. It doesn't even take the corruption that a big employer in a small town automatically creates to have a 'hidden' superfund site. It only takes the lack of dedicated professionals testing everything all the time. Tracking sources and types of pollution is _not only_ difficult, highly technical work that requires a lot of infrastructure- but it also _requires its own R&D to keep up with new industrial chemicals_. This means it's fiercely expensive, manpower-limited, and that it takes a long, long time. What country is going to dedicate that amount of resources to find problems that'll cost even more money to clean up (or possibly can't be cleaned up at all)? Maybe Norway. Maybe.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_clusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_clusters This always gives me pause, plenty don't have any known cause.

sirroblyon 7y ago

How does it go? Kill 1 person, go to jail. Pollute millions, make millions?

jwr 7y ago

So, a story about SV being polluted has 156 points right now, and sits nicely in the middle of the front page. It's an important story, apparently. Meanwhile, Nature's story about climate change (The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers) got flagged and disappeared quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042101 There is no better way to show what "tech bubble" means.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 7y ago
That's a particularly uncharitable interpretation. It's much more likely is that everyone's well aware of climate change (I'm sure I've read many hundreds of articles over my lifetime), but this is the first many people have heard of SV pollution (it certainly is for me).
- endorphone 7y ago
  This would explain one post rising quickly while another fades. When people are actively flagging, however, that's an entirely different, much more insidious action.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    > much more insidious action I'm missing something. What exactly is the agenda?
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      Climate Change Burnout. I don’t flag articles on CC but I’ve been tempted to. There’s a new one every two days and they all say basically the same thing. Regardless of one’s political views, the onslaught of constant alarm can be exhausting. The people who don’t think it’s a problem are not going to be convinced by the 215th news article published this year.

herostratus101 7y ago

This is still the best essay I have read on the topic: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-the-cookie-dough-tree/ http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20130404/in-search-of-... I've left Silicon Valley since I read it. And having read it, I hope to never move back.

cryptozeus 7y ago
Page is not readable on phone
- trenning 7y ago
  copy/pasted text https://pastebin.com/d63CwAtN https://pastebin.com/d63CwAtN
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  Works pretty good in reader view.
xvector 7y ago
This is horribly frightening. What can I do at home to detect (or even continuously monitor) the presence of Superfund chemicals?
- armitron 7y ago
  You can't, reliably. The entire geographical area is contaminated, so you should worry about living there and not just about your home. Now they are saying Google offices were breached and documenting one specific (but very prominent, easy to cover) instance, imagine what's going on in general in the background. I moved to Europe from SF bay area years ago, coinciding with the birth of my son, and this was one of the factors.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  There's a pretty good map here: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy-of-Silicon-Valley-258950021.html https://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Map-The-Chemical-Legacy... TCE has a distinctive smell - sweet, like cookie dough or donuts. You'll know if you're in an area contaminated by it - I've smelled it at the Google Quad campus and some of the residential areas around it. (The area around Evandale is particularly bad, I've smelled it just driving through some of the residential streets there.) Some of the other chemicals used in semicoductor manufacture are odorless, though. Most of the contamination is in industrial or office park zones, so I'd be more worried about your workplace than your home, and many of the spills are plain old gasoline (from service stations) which you can have anywhere.

natch 7y ago

Article does not even mention the Kaiser Permanente cement plant which has a dedicated train line bringing in coal for burning, is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in California, and is perched right over Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos, and very close to Palo Alto and San Jose, bathing them in a haze of emissions. All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant. It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.

kayfox 7y ago
This plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanente_Quarry Which is not owned by Kaiser Permanente?
- goda90 7y ago
  It was founded by Henry Kaiser and named Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant after the Permanente Creek which flowed past it. It has since changed names. Kaiser Permanente the healthcare organization was named after the same creek. So calling it the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant is outdated, but it's not saying that the healthcare organization owns it.
  - foxyv 7y ago
    Yes! The KP HMO has history with but is not owned by the Kaiser industrial companies. It was essentially setup by Sidney Garfield at the behest of Henry Kaiser and the help of FDR to treat workers at the Kaiser shipyards, hence the name. It's a not for profit organization completely distinct from other Kaiser organizations. Funny enough I'm pretty sure at $79 billion yearly, it grosses more than it's industrial namesakes. https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how-it-all-started https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/how...

gnicholas 7y ago

Fun fact: Facebook's old headquarters (between Page Mill Rd and California Ave) was located on top of a superfund site. After FB moved to Menlo Park, Stanford built a faculty housing development there. They claim that they have done adequate retrofitting so that it poses no risk to residents, but I know some professors in the sciences who decided against living there after reading the environmental disclosures. Also, if Stanford did this retrofitting, that implies that maybe FB did not do enough when they were there? The housing disclosures have more info on the contamination and retrofitting: https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures https://universityterrace.stanford.edu/disclosures

chrisdhoover 7y ago

Oh no, I worked in two different offices located on superfund sites. Probably a third too but I haven’t found supporting evidence yet.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago

Nobody remembers the Commodore Semiconductor Group? Commodore was a pioneer in personal computing, semiconductor and environmental accidents. In 1974, there was a massive leak of the 250-gallon underground concrete storage tank full of TCE, and today the site is still monitored by the EPA. Bill Herd, the chief engineering of Commodore 128, mentioned in his interview that the day he went to work, he didn't know the tank leaked and parked at the wrong side of the company, and his car was completely contaminated. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0301146&msspp=med https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0...