Re: chips

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Poison Valley

Is workers' health the price we pay for high-tech progress? First of two
parts.

By Jim Fisher, salon.com

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(clip)

If you make a U-turn at the check gate to IBM ARC and follow the run of
Calero Creek as it flows along Camden Avenue, the pepper trees and
flowering plums thin and shift from the creek bed to the center divide.
After approximately five miles you reach the stoplight at Blossom Hill
Road. To your right is the parking lot for the Santa Clara Valley Water
District, and behind it are the Alamitos Groundwater Recharge Ponds,
where the joined creeks of the eastern New Almaden hills (Alamitos and
Calero) meet the Guadalupe River, flowing in from the west side of
Almaden Quicksilver County Park. The combined water is then spread
across the ponds, seeping through the earth's porous layers until it
reaches underground aquifers, where it is stored until tapped by the
county. Signs posted around the pools warn again of poisoned fish.

You are now officially in Silicon Valley. A few blocks ahead is the West
Valley Freeway. Go east on the West Valley Freeway and after five miles
you'll have driven over one of the largest plumes of poisoned
groundwater in the United States, over 3 miles long and 180 feet deep,
contaminated with xylene, toluene and other volatile organic compounds,
including the chlorinated solvent trichloroethane (TCA). Pump-and-treat
groundwater cleanup operations continue to this day. The original source
of this poison? Underground Tank Farm No. 1 of IBM's Cottle Road Disk
Drive Manufacturing Facility.

Built just three years after the disk drive was invented at IBM ARC in
1956, the Cottle Road plant was the first among dozens of manufacturing
facilities -- including those operated by Intel, Hewlett-Packard,
Applied Materials and National Semiconductor -- discovered in the early
1980s to have collectively leaked tens of thousands of gallons of
organic solvents and other toxic contaminants into the groundwater of
Silicon Valley. Today, the valley is home to more EPA Superfund sites
(29) than any other county in the nation, with the most notorious of
those sites -- from a leaking tank at a Fairchild Semiconductor
fabrication plant -- poisoning a well that served the south San Jose
neighborhood of Los Paseos. A subsequent study by the state's Department
of Health Services found 2.5 to three times the expected rate of
miscarriages and birth defects among pregnant women exposed to the
contaminated drinking water, leading to a lawsuit and
multimillion-dollar settlement in 1986 with over 250 claimants.

The toxic details of Silicon Valley's mercury-laden streams and
contaminated aquifers are relatively well known. But another, even more
troubling potential vector of deadly pollution has required more time to
come to light -- the "clean rooms" in which high-tech workers come into
direct contact with a vast array of chemicals as they manufacture
semiconductor-laden circuit boards and computer hard drives. According
to a lawsuit filed in 1998 in Santa Clara County Superior Court on
behalf of four cancer-stricken IBM employees and the families of five
deceased workers -- the number of plaintiffs has since quintupled to 45
-- Big Blue and its chemical suppliers, including Union Carbide, Shell
Oil and Eastman Kodak, fraudulently concealed from their employees the
risks of adverse health effects, including fetal toxicity and cancer,
arising from chronic, low-level exposures to chemicals used in the
manufacture of disk drives and related circuitry. Solvents named in the
complaint include many of the toxic compounds leaked into the
groundwater two decades before.

full: http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/30/almaden1/index.html

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