
History of Silicon Valley and the Toxic Remnants of the First Computers - danboarder
http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-history-of-silicon-valley-and-the-toxic-remn-1743622225
======
vt240
I found the comments section following this article is especially funny. My
favorite, the thread claiming that lead poisoning is the _only_ statistic
correlated with the violent crime rate... The authors proof- a single academic
pre-print. I love the new internet science.

~~~
pja
IIRC the correlation between lead exposure & violent crime rates 20 years
later is fairly good: you can track it on a state by state level as each state
banned lead additives in fuel at different times.

But proving any cause with a with a 20 year delay in its effect is going to be
very difficult. At best it seems reasonable to believe that lead in fuel was a
sizable chunk of the problem, but it’s certainly not proven beyond doubt.

~~~
vt240
Yea, there have been a couple good summary articles I've seen here on Hacker
News. Personally I find it kind of mind boggling. It's like discovering the
cause of Alzheimer's, dementia, or autism.

I just find it funny, when discussing issues in comments, the depths people
will go to, to frame things in black and white.

------
userbinator
I suppose one of the reasons why they thought it was harmless for so long
could be that trichloroethylene really does smell good and not at all
repugnant, so people are less inclined to notice its presence or be concerned
about it. It's a pleasant, clean smell that somewhat resembles minty
chocolate.

------
kator
I was reading the article when I ended up taking a detour to watch the
embedded video promoting IC's:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z47Gv2cdFtA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z47Gv2cdFtA)

As sad as the pollution is it's still quite amazing to imagine that in 1967
they were on the cusp of a revolution driven mainly by efficiency. At one
point in the video they talk about magazine pages that have chips on the front
and a schematic for a "real industrial application" on the back. This was
literally the start of the "maker" revolution, it just took original makers
like Woz to see it and many years of evolution so that people with minimal
electronics training can build amazing things on the shoulders of giants
before them.

------
schiffern
> _“Twenty-three soil vapor extraction wells have been built, along with a
> carbon adsorption treatment facility,” the EPA reports. “Groundwater is
> being extracted, treated by air stripping, and discharged into Calabazas
> Creek.”_

What are the possible side-effects of transferring ground water in quantity to
surface waters?

The CIR report is also worth reading. [http://cironline.org/reports/cleanup-
silicon-valley-superfun...](http://cironline.org/reports/cleanup-silicon-
valley-superfund-site-takes-environmental-toll-6149)

> _Waste begets waste. At every step along the trail, treatment leaves behind
> a new batch of waste that needs to be shipped somewhere else. At one stop, a
> plant in Wisconsin creates more waste than it takes in._

I wonder if biological technologies can take some of the "zero sum" out of
this system? The technology doesn't have to be particularly 'high' either;
perchlorate rocket fuels (which btw are also present in lethal quantities in
the regolith of Mars) are broken down by... wait for it... _composting._
[http://www.denix.osd.mil/edqw/upload/GEOSYNTEC_BIO_P2.PDF](http://www.denix.osd.mil/edqw/upload/GEOSYNTEC_BIO_P2.PDF)

------
McGlockenshire
You can contrast this story with another Fairchild Superfund site, this time
in south San Jose on Bernal.

[http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/ViewByEPAID/CA...](http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/ViewByEPAID/CAD097012298)

I grew up a few miles from here, close enough that my parents were worried
about the contamination. Thankfully the well supplying our neighborhood wasn't
contaminated.

For years, I'd always wondered what the giant concrete sarcophagus was
whenever we'd drive out to the freeway, but it never occurred to me to look it
up. Only when visiting the Bay Area in the early 2000s and finding it
demolished and replaced with a freaking strip mall did I look things up and
realize both what a horrible thing it was (birth defects and all) and how
lucky we got that this site was clean enough to build on again.

------
modeless
I've been walking past a mysterious bunch of tanks and pipes in the middle of
a parking lot in Sunnyvale for the past year. It often smells terrible. I just
realized that it's almost certainly a Superfund water treatment site. I'll
probably give it a wider berth from now on...

------
tiredwired
Google silicon valley toxic plumes and you get some stories and maps like
this-
[http://whatsdown.terradex.com/#12/37.3674/-121.9649/](http://whatsdown.terradex.com/#12/37.3674/-121.9649/)

~~~
vitd
That may is extremely misleading. In it's default state, it's zoomed out so
that you can't tell San Francisco from Los Angeles. The markers are not scaled
with the size of the map, so a single marker, when zoomed out, covers several
miles, but when zoomed in is less than a single city block.

In other words, looking at it in it's default state, the entire coast of CA is
covered in toxic plumes, but when zoomed in, you see there are several areas
along a particular road but large areas in between that are unaffected.

It's a good idea, but the implementation is extremely misleading.

------
DrScump
Interesting that they don't mention one of the worst Superfund sites (Lorentz
Barrel and Drum), which lies right across Alma from Spartan Stadium _and_
right across 10th St. from Sharks Ice.

------
Grazester
Interesting. I do remember reading about this and the fact that at one of
Google's building they have to use special air filters to filter the air due
to where it was built.

~~~
sjg007
Google and Symantec and most of the offices in that area.

------
martin1b
The video is very interesting. Kator's comment is spot on.

