[georgeam]

The article mentions that there is a 500 gallon tank of some toxic material buried at a unknown location in the property. 500 gallons is very small -- 66 cubic feet, which is about 4 ft by 4 ft by 4 ft.

In my opinion, that makes it completely plausible that a problem relating to that tank could be so localized that it will only affect one tenant.

I'm not saying her problem was due to the 500 gallon tank. All I'm saying is that if it is, then it is not unbelievable that it affected only one (or a small number) of tenants.

[PragmaticPulp]

The site she’s referring to is almost 100 acres and the apartment in question is on the third floor. It’s exceedingly unlikely that a tank is located precisely in a way to leak into a single 3rd floor apartment.

> The Santa Clara Square project encompasses approximately 93 acres

The challenge with these stories is that they rely on vague details to create an appearance of plausibility. The fact that a tank containing some substance exists somewhere in a 93-acre property would not normally be credible cause to believe that someone’s symptoms in a 3rd story apartment are the result of the soil.

Again, to emphasize: I am not doubting that this person is suffering real symptoms. I think it’s a mistake to focus on the soil or mysterious tanks in unknown location as the cause to the exclusion of other possible causes.

[dehrmann]

> a single 3rd floor apartment

I haven't seen this particular complex, but a lot of new apartment construction in the area has a basement parking garage. You'd think it would have enough ventilation and have enough natural circulation that this would be even more unlikely. Unless they shut of the fan because no one was leaving during covid.

[nitrogen]

I lived in an apartment two floors above a pool and barbecue area for a year. I regularly had severe air quality issues that did not affect the floors below me. I could watch the smoke from the barbecue grills rise up to my level, then travel horizontally across and into my poorly sealed windows due to persistent local air currents.

I moved to another apartment building for the two years after that, and continued to have measurable AQ issues because the dryer, bathroom, and kitchen vents were flowing in reverse due to a poor building ventilation design that used a single central vent shaft and didn't adequately account for wind or the height of the building. I was on a side and floor of the building that had negative relative pressure much of the time.

Air isn't a perfectly homogenized uniform fluid -- there are very localized effects, and because it's often invisible, those local effects are often dismissed.

IMO the only sane and responsible way to develop apartments in a challenging environment (by a highway, by a fire or bbq environment, in an area where weed is legal, or on a toxic site) is for every single unit to have its own air handling system to maintain air quality and positive pressure in that individual unit.