Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 7 No. 3 | Fall 1985 (Seattle) /// Issue 13 of 24 /// Master# 61 of 73

1970s, rents and prices in the Valley were among the highest in the nation. By and large, the unemployed, the service workers, and the Valley’s low-paid production workers—who have always earned a fraction of the professionals’ salaries—were driven from the centers of employment. San Jose, the county’s traditional urban center and home to half its residents, became a bedroom community for the production workforce. Palo Alto, which receives property and sales tax revenues from the Stanford Industrial Park, easily provides municipal services to its relatively affluent citizens. San Jose, on the other hand, has a much smaller tax base from which it must serve the county’s poorer residents. Production workers from San Jose spend their days in the north county, generating wealth for electronics companies to pay into suburban treasuries. They then return to homes protected bt San Jose’s underfunded police and fire departments and streets poorly maintained by its public works department. Nowhere are the two worlds of Silicon Valley further apart than in education. Palo Alto’s public school system is considered among the best in the nation. In fact, that is a major reason why high-tech professionals move to the area. In 1983, however, the San Jose Unified School District, the largest of several districts in the city, became the first American school system since 1943 to declare bankruptcy. Despite the protective clothing, equipment, and vents found at a typical semiconductor plant, in the pressure to meet production quotas many Silicon Valley workers are frequently exposed to hazardous liquids and fumes. A#%few years back, several women on the morning shift at Verbatim, a Silicon Valley manufacturer of memory disks for computers, complained of dizziness, shortness of breath, and weakness. Some even reported seeing a haze in the factory air. More than 100 people were quickly evacuated from the building, and the company sent 35 of them to a nearby industrial clinic. Hours later, inspectors from the California Occupational Safety and Health1 Administration could not find fumes intense enough to explain the complaints, and they termed the episode “mass psychogenic illness,” also known as assembly-line hysteria. In the stressful world of high-volume electronics assembly, mass hysteria is not unknown. But chances are high that the Verbatim workers’ bodies had detected the presence of toxic chemicals at a level below the threshhold recognized by health officials. High-tech industry’s environmentally controlled “clean rooms,” in which electronics workers must wear surgical gowns and gloves, are not designed to protect the workers; they are built to protect microelectronic products against particulate contamination. Despite the protective clothing, equipment, and vents found at a typical semiconductor plant, in the pressure to meet production quotas many Silicon Valley workers are frequently exposed to hazardous liquids and fumes. The hazardous materials used in semiconductor production include acids, cyanide compounds, organic solvents, and silicon tetrachloride, which turns into hydrochloric acid when its fumes are inhaled into the lungs. Arsine gas, a lethal form of arsenic, can cause serious damage to the liver, heart, and blood cells, even when inhaled in small quantities. It has been used extensively for years in the production of silicon chips. Now, as the Pentagon is promoting the development and production of chips based upon gallium arsenide instead of silicon, the likelihood of workers being exposed to arsenic is growing. The manufacture of chips, printed circuit boards, and other high-tech products uses some of the most dangerous materials known to humanity. And the accidental release of those toxins into the air, the ground, and bodies of water poses a significant threat to public health. It is possible that communities and regions which study the lessons of Silicon Valley can substantially reduce the risk high-tech production poses to the environment and public health. Unfortunately, high tech’s environmental record has not leaked out to the rest of the country. Officials who promote high tech as a solution to local or regional economic ills paint a picture of the industry as shiny as the surface of a silicon wafer. They call high tech a “sunrise industry,” clean and light in contrast to “smokestack” industries like steel and auto production, known for their drab, monstrous factories and ever present plumes of vapor and smoke. It isn’t hard to see where high tech got its reputation. Electronic products— chips, computers, switchboards, and so on—don’t breathe exhaust or drip oil. The factories are rambling, well-landscaped buildings, resembling modern college libraries; no smokestacks protrude above their facades. Many production steps take place in so-called clean rooms, where the air is fanatically filtered and production workers wear surgical gowns. But the industry’s vast investment in cleanliness is designed principally to protect microelectronic components from the dust particles that could prevent them from functioning properly. It does not protect high-tech’s workers nor the residents who live in the communities that surround the plants, from the toxic chemicals and metals essential to high- tech manufacturing. One of the greatest ironies of microelectronics technology is that the transformation of America into an information society relies, at its core, upon a technology from the industrial era: chemical processing. The manufacture of chips, printed circuit boards, magnetic media, and other high-tech products uses some of the most dangerous materials known to humanity. And the accidental release of those toxins into the air, the ground, and bodies of water poses a significant threat to public health. High-tech pollution is a fact of life wherever the industry has operated for any length of time, from Malaysia to Massachusetts. Yet nowhere has the growing threat that electronics production poses to public health been clearer than in Silicon Valley, where the concentration of high-tech production has greatly magnified the industry’s environmental problems. The hazards of high tech have become increasingly clear during the past few years, but it may be decades before the full impact on public health is known. The electronics industry uses thousands of different toxic materials, yet the volume is small compared to chemical-intensive industries such as petroleum and pesticide production. Still, a Bhopal-like incident, in which hundreds of people are killed immediately from a single leak, is a serious possibility. Even without such a catastrophic accident, however, the long-term toll from high-tech pollution may be enormous. High-tech toxics have been slowly entering the environment of Silicon Valley for decades. Though widely used chemicals such as hydrocarbon solvents are known to cause ailments ranging from headaches and birth defects to cancer, it is difficult to demonstrate that any particular person is a victim of a particular leak or spill. But there is no doubt that industrial chemicals are affecting the health of growing numbers of people. s •^an Jose attorney Amanda Hawes is one of a handful of Silicon Valley activists who warned for years that high tech was indeed a hazardous industry. She has built up her reputation by representing electronics workers injured by chemicals on the job. Today she also represents residents of the Los Paseos neighborhood in southern San Jose. A new, comfortable, working-class suburb typical of Silicon Valley, Los Paseos is distinguished by the presence of a chip manufacturing factory built by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1975. Hawes carries with her a large zoning map of the area surrounding the Fairchild plant. On every block in the surrounding neighborhood there are several colored pins and flags. Each triangular red flag represents a child born with heart anomalies; each blue pin marks a miscarriage; each yellow flag signals a cancer case. Black flags, superimposed on the other markers, note recent deaths. Hawes also carries with her a supply of pins, and she must frequently add one to the display. She charges that Fairchild is responsible for the area’s high incidence of disease. Most of Hawes’s clients believed that electronics was a pollution-free industry until January 1982. At that time, officials disclosed that six weeks earlier they had shut down a drinking water well operated by the Great Oaks Water Co., just 2,000 feet from an underground chemical storage tank at Fairchild. Solvents from the tank, including suspected carcinogens trichloroethane and dichloroethylene, had entered the water supply. When residents learned of the leak, they quickly concluded that the company was to blame for the area’s alarmingly high incidence of birth defects and miscarriages. Since then, Fairchild has spent at least $15 million to reduce the concentration of solvents in the aquifer, but the water will never be as clean as it was before Fairchild set up shop there. Now the factory stands empty, a monument to the dying myth of high tech as a clean, light industry. The Fairchild leak exploded onto the local front pages and six o’clock news, breaking through a long-standing barrier of silence on high-tech pollution. The Bay Area press, public officials, and electronics corporations themselves have all been forced to investigate environmental hazards that nobody wanted to believe existed. Today, scarcely a week passes without the revelation of a new leaking storage tank, poisoned well, or pollution law violation. As soon as the extent of the Fairchild leak was known, other companies started to test the ground water around their underground chemical tanks, and the Bay Area’s Regional Water Quality Control Board ordered a comprehensive testing program. Most of the Valley’s large production sites were checked— and most came up dirty. Even firms with a reputation for environmental concern, like Hewlett-Packard, had been leaking dangerous toxics used in their manufacturing processes. Leaks were found at scores of industrial locations within Santa Clara County, but many small facilities have still not been tested. Nineteen high-tech sites have been placed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Superfund” list. Nine public and more than sixty private wells have been shut down; many others contain legally allowed levels of contamination. Luckily, Silicon Valley residents have thus far been spared an outright environmental disaster. The Valley’s largest source of drinking water is protected by a 200-foot layer of clay, which separates polluted ground water from deep aquifers. Though Fairchild and nearby IBM began the task of clean-up soon after pollution from their facilities was discovered, many Valley electronics firms have not done much more than sink test wells to determine the extent of their leaks. Pools of hazardous chemicals drift around underground, poisoning shallow private wells and possibly finding a route—for example, via an abandoned agricultural well—to the public water supply. Unless the toxic chemicals are removed or neutralized before they percolate through the clay, the primary water supply of several hundred thousand people will be permanently poisoned. Silicon Valley is sitting on a toxic time bomb. No one knows when it is set to go off; certainly, not enough is being done to defuse it. Lenny Siegel is Director of the Pacific Study Center in Mountainview, California. John Markoff is currently technology writer at the San Francisco Examiner. The High Cost of High Tech will be available in November from Harper and Row. Tim Braun is an artist living in Portland. Clinton St. Quarterly 9

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