[CPEO-BIF] "Silicon Valley’s Toxic Past Haunts Sunnyvale [California] Neighborhood"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Silicon Valley’s Toxic Past Haunts Sunnyvale Neighborhood

By Beth Winegarner
KQED Science (San Francisco, CA)
June 15, 2017

Sunnyvale’s San Miguel neighborhood, with its leafy trees and modest houses, is home to hundreds of families and four schools for young children. Underneath these quiet streets lies a shadow of Silicon Valley’s past: groundwater contaminated with a solvent once used to make computer chips, and known to cause cancer and birth defects. 

That chemical, known as trichloroethylene or TCE, was as crucial to chipmakers in the 1960s and 1970s as yeast is to a bakery. TCE is a powerful solvent used to clean silicon wafers before the chip design is etched onto them. And it’s responsible for nearly half the federal Superfund sites in Santa Clara County. These are areas the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designates as the nation’s most toxic.

Santa Clara has 24 Superfund sites, more than any other county in the nation, according to former EPA regional director Jared Blumenfeld. The neighborhood of San Miguel is located within one of them.

When TCE is present in groundwater, it can turn to vapor, seeping through cracks in building frames and into homes and classrooms. Short-term exposure can cause slowed breathing, light-headedness and headaches; over the longer term, TCE exposure causes cancer, particularly kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. And in 2011, a study appeared to show that fetuses exposed to TCE in the first trimester have a higher risk of heart defects at birth. Socioeconomic differences could have influenced the results, though researchers tried to account for that.

…

For the entire story, see
https://ww2.kqed.org/futureofyou/2017/06/15/silicon-valleys-toxic-past-haunts-sunnyvale-neighborhood/

See also my October 2015 report at http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/TripleSite.pdf.


--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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