Sounding the Tocsin for Toxins

Chemical pollution tarnishes an industry's clean image

High-technology entrepreneurs like to boast that their business is nonpolluting and environmentally sound. But every industry carries environmental risks, and electronics is no exception. The manufacture of computer chips, for example, requires acid baths (to etch microscopic circuits onto tiny ceramic wafers) and vats of industrial cleaning fluids (to wash away extraneous specks). And where there are powerful chemicals, waste-storage difficulties are not far behind.

Pointing up this problem, a recent California survey showed that 36 of 49 underground storage tanks in the high-tech Silicon Valley were leaking. The seepage contaminated surrounding soil and fouled pockets of ground water beneath such communities as Santa Clara, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose. The California assembly, following the lead of eight cities in Santa Clara County that have passed ordinances to prevent such spills, has approved a tough toxic control law. As the measure moves on to the state senate, the mellow industrialists of Silicon Valley, to their acute discomfort, find themselves accused of poisoning their own hot tubs.

"This was once a nice, typical California town," says Lorraine Ross of San Jose, one of 266 plaintiffs in a multi-million-dollar suit against the local plant of the Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp. She and her neighbors are charging Fairchild with negligent contamination of a public well serving 700 residents. They are also holding the company responsible for seven deaths in the past three years, as well as a number of miscarriages and birth defects. "People here were health conscious," says Ross, who blames the congenital heart ailment of her two-year-old daughter Juliana on toxins from the tainted well. "There were so many medical problems on our street we joked that maybe we were living on a toxic dump."

The area's problems first surfaced four years ago, when noxious gases from burning chemicals at a series of industrial fires felled both fire fighters and bystanders. There were also reports of workers who suffered adverse reactions to chemicals at microchip firms. One 19-year-old, hired to work around storage tanks at a semiconductor company, began vomiting uncontrollably after less than a week at the job.

The issue came to a head early last year, when Fairchild and Intel Corp., another local chipmaker, reported two major leaks in as many months. At the Fairchild plant in San Jose, workers discovered that a faulty storage tank had discharged some 13,000 gal. of a mildly carcinogenic solvent called TCA into the underground water supply. A few weeks later, Intel announced that a concrete vault had leaked, and that traces of a strong carcinogen, TCE, had turned up in a farmer's well near by. Fairchild has spent $10 million cleaning up its spill, and the company steadfastly maintains that no link between its leak and any specific maladies has been established.

The problem may not be California's alone. Last February a Motorola plant in Phoenix reported a "significant" TCA spill, and Massachusetts authorities are investigating a site near Route 128 for possible high-tech contamination. Meanwhile, the West Coast chipmakers are busy installing double-walled containers and automatic warning systems that can add $20,000 to the cost of a $40,000 tank. "You bet we're out to protect our image," says an Intel spokesman. "But we're also doing this because we should be." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.