The lucky thing here, to the extent that anything involving a Superfund site can be lucky, is that the people and organizations affected are rich.<p>I have spent some time over the last couple of years working with a heavily polluted town in Central Illinois (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DePue,_Illinois" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DePue,_Illinois</a>). In this town, there are heavy metals in the soil of the school playground.[1] Property values have fallen to next to nothing, which prevents the residents from leaving. And these residents, who were working-class folks in the heyday of the town before all the jobs moved out, and many of whom are Hispanic immigrants who work the surrounding farms and are too scared of the government to raise a fuss, don't have the leverage of Palo Alto's Stanford and Berkeley grads. Cleanup happens at whatever pace the responsible polluters feel like moving at, which is to say: glacially.<p>These sites are all over the country, and as bad as it is being described here, what's happening in Palo Alto is a sort of best case scenario as far as these things go.<p>[1] It comes from a giant pile of ore refining waste product: <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HQPY7nT2L4c/UPc4_GK-VDI/AAAAAAAABAc/_-FdHmA2yAY/s1600/gabby-garcia-stands-in-front-of-the-slag-pile.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HQPY7nT2L4c/UPc4_GK-VDI/AAAAAAAABA...</a> (short video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au24-gdV2c0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au24-gdV2c0</a>). It's hard to get an idea of the scale, but the actual pile is a good ways away from the fence the girl is standing in front of and extends a ways in both directions out of the frame (see the video). It contains 750,000 tons of zinc slag. When it rains, all the heavy metals leach out of the slag.<p>EDIT: I don't mean to minimize the situation in Palo Alto by any means. Just trying to put it in the bigger context. The things you're seeing: local governments doing nothing, landlords looking the other way, regular people being the ones who get hurt--are standard operating procedure for these sorts of situations.
Here are the tox reports for 1,1,1-TCE and Trichloroethylene, respectively<p><a href="http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp70.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp70.pdf</a><p><a href="http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp19.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp19.pdf</a><p>1,1,1-TCE used to be a household chemical; it was a component of liquid paper, of floor adhesives, and spray-on shoe polish. It was phased out due to concerns about the ozone layer. It is not classified by the EPA or the WHO IARC as carcinogenic.<p>Unlike 1,1,1-TCE, Trichloroethylene is apparently still used in household products, like corrections fluids, and in a number of automotive solvent cleaners. You can smell it at 0.01% concentration in the air; it is indeed apparently smelly stuff, about twice as smelly as 1,1,1-TCE (I'm guessing this is a linear response). It <i>is</i> a probable human carcinogen based on mouse models; maximum routine occupational exposure over 8 hours is 200ppm (so about twice the level at which you start to smell it).<p>If you're my age and you remember the CFC media blitz of the late 80's: TCE/1,1,1-TCE are apparently archetypical examples of CFCs. TCE is an extremely common industrial chemical; it isn't (if you were wondering) in any way specific to electronics.
So I wonder, what would it take to create a low-cost gadget to sense & record pollutant levels and sell them on the market(maybe as an arduino plugin?).<p>It would be really great to be able to deploy your <i>own</i> sensor network instead of pleading with busy and underfunded governmental agencies to help you out.
<i>"The good news is that Palo Alto's water comes from the relatively pristine Hetch Hetchy reservoir."</i><p>It would be worthwhile to meditate on this while people work to remove the Hetch Hetchy reservoir from existence in the name of "restoring nature."
>The intersection of California Avenue and El Camino Real was about as reasonable a place to smell cake batter or cookie dough as Olympus Mons.<p>There's a bakery about 100 feet from that corner. They make 21 different kinds of cookies and various other assorted pastries. See: <a href="http://goo.gl/maps/DHFmn" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/maps/DHFmn</a>
My first thought at "Cookie Dough Tree" was this (NSFW-ish):<p><a href="http://www.thefrisky.com/2010-04-12/a-tree-that-smells-like-semen/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thefrisky.com/2010-04-12/a-tree-that-smells-like-...</a><p>OP's contaminants are a class of chemicals called dense nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs) and they have a nasty habit of collecting at the bottom of aquifers (they're denser than water), making them particularly hard to clean up. They eventually degrade into vinyl chloride, which is a carcinogenic and toxic gas with a (yup) sweet smell.<p>(This is probably glossing over a lot, but it's the summary I got from my boyfriend who does site investigation for soil and groundwater contamination—It could be summed up as "never live downgradient from a dry cleaning establishment").
Groundwater pollution is really tough.<p>In my area have an old Army depot where dioxins, PCBs, and other nasties were dumped in the 1950's and 60's have leached into the ground, and now form a underground plume that has resisted remediation efforts, and is moving with the groundwater to the playing fields of the local high school. Basically, they drill wells and try to suck up contaminated groundwater.<p>In other cases, remediation measures are not 100% effective and can be really disruptive. In coastal areas on Long Island where Hurricane Sandy smashed ships to shore and ruptured oil tanks, nearby property owners are not allowed to reoccupy the property for 15 or more years while the contamination disperses into the environment. So be careful what you wish for.
> When my company's office was located on Hillview Avenue in 2010, literally around the corner from Hewlett-Packard, I heard gossip about how the tech giant had polluted the area back in the day. Once a quick search confirmed that there was some truth to the rumor, it made me a bit nervous about drinking water straight from the tap at the office, so I bought a Brita filter, and didn't think much of it.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a Brita filter be completely useless for this kind of contamination?
One of the projects Terradex, my company, works on is the collection and mapping of various sources of publicly available environmental data. We're based in Palo Alto and actually spent a decent amount of time getting information on various groundwater plumes in Santa Clara County.<p>We paid extra close attention to this HP plume and a few others like the MEW plume around the Google campus, drawing them in manually from documents, but the vast majority are created based on convex hull calculations from the well information available on geotracker [1]. They are not perfectly accurate but provide a reasonable approximation of plume locations.<p>We pulled this data together last year during the summer and haven't done much with it since, but if anyone wants to click around and have a look here's a link that will bypass the login requirement: <a href="http://cleanupdeck.terradex.com/target/map_icplume/16/37.4249/-122.1472/paloalto%40terradex.net/paloalto2" rel="nofollow">http://cleanupdeck.terradex.com/target/map_icplume/16/37.424...</a>. You just need to click on the "groundwater plumes" layer on the left, and when you click on a blue plume it will bring up an info panel, most of which will have a link to the geotracker page which collates most of the useful information about the plume.<p>[1]<a href="http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/data_download_by_county.asp" rel="nofollow">http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/data_download_by_county...</a>
I'm considering a move to SF with my three young children and this gives me serious pause. I can research schools, crime, and "normal" pollution.... but how can I learn more about where these sorts of toxic environments are located? Especially if, like the OP states, the EPA are simply ignoring areas like his.<p>(I'm inclined to believe him too. But I'm biased against the EPA anyway... I'm still mad at them for telling us it was safe to go back to lower Manhattan days after the towers fell.)
I grew up near Matadero Creek. Spent a lot of time there, near the donkey pasture, and behind what was then Barron Park Elementary school. Used to catch polywogs, bring them home, watch them grow into frogs. Chewed on more than my share of anise growing on the banks.<p>I was a bit shocked a few years ago to discover it's now a superfund site, and most of the dumping in the creek was taking place while I was busy being a typical kid.<p>So far, I haven't grown any extra limbs.
640 Page Mill is now an ATT office. How fitting. Too bad De La Vega doesn't work there: <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=640+Page+Mill+Road&hl=en&ll=37.423171,-122.141841&spn=0.002209,0.004128&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb&hnear=640+Page+Mill+Rd,+Palo+Alto,+California+94306&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=37.423253,-122.141773&panoid=SLLDDS11en06cjk81sskYw&cbp=12,75.81,,0,4.21" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/maps?q=640+Page+Mill+Road&hl=en&...</a><p>What's across the street? Why, an old folks home, of course: <a href="http://www.sunriseseniorliving.com/communities/sunrise-of-palo-alto/overview.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.sunriseseniorliving.com/communities/sunrise-of-pa...</a><p>Also, luxury apartments and a VTA stop.
Has anyone got any idea about the contamination of water through pipes? Is it a real risk? I know it may be theoretically possible, but has this been documented? My attempt to search this are contaminated (sorry) by hits on stuff the pipes themselves contaminate water with.
Back in 1979, where the soccer field is now, was a pizza place called "The Antique" (though its official address was undoubtedly on El Camino). I preferred it to any other pizza in the area, so I sure hope they weren't using well water...
Superfund is an interesting term which I only came across recently in the context it is being used here. In Australia it means something very different - a shorthand for Superannuation Fund.
Oh fun! I lived for a decade next to Illinois's largest TCE leak, Lockformer. Nasty stuff, and it has some rather interesting properties when underground.
<i>On June 27, 2006, a monitoring well, which most people (myself included) would probably never notice among the carefully manicured flowers and shrubs, registered 85,000 µg/L of TCE, the same toxic industrial de-greaser that newspapers reported about in Google's buildings a few weeks ago. For the sake of comparison, the federally-mandated limit for one liter of groundwater in micrograms is pretty far from 85,000. It's 5.</i><p>The silicon part of "Silicon Valley. "
The golden age of groundwater contamination is just getting started. Fracking fluids are going to become part of our environment and bodies for eons to come.