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by inferiorhuman 1189 days ago
It's not just Mountain View. All of Silicon Valley is dotted with superfund sites. Years ago IBM got sued by former employees about exposure to carcinogens at their San Jose factories. IBM won, but, yeah, I'd still be careful.

And then there's the military waste…

1 comments

Yes good point about the military waste. Hunters Point in SF comes to mind. A highly contaminated radioactive site that required extensive soil remediation.

A lot of the radioactive soil was just sent to regular state landfills.

Then after they had started building multi family homes on top of the site, they found out the cleanup company was falsifying soil samples and the site was still highly radioactive.

I hope that situation is not typical of how Superfund sites are handled

What Lennar did in BVHP ought to be criminal. Treasure Island (also an ex-military Superfund site) is a mess of radioactive waste on its way to becoming luxury condos as well. Oh well, it will be a fun cancer cluster in a couple decades.

AMD, Intel, Fairchild, IBM, HP, Nat Semi, Raytheon, Teledyne, Westinghouse, and LLNL all gifted the Bay Area with Superfund sites with most concentrated in Santa Clara county. Even stuff that doesn't rise to the level of a Superfund site can still be far too polluted to develop (e.g. Brisbane).