High fliers Tandem Computers Inc. and Rolm offered corporate campuses equipped not only with cafeterias and parking lots, but also with swimming pools, par courses, and volleyball courts, and in Rolm's case, a weight room, a gym, a whirlpool bath, racquetball and tennis courts, and aerobics lessons. Silconix Inc. in Santa Clara offered discounted gasoline to employees three days a week at the company self-service station. And in 1980, an assembly worker at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. won $240,000 in a company drawing.
But there were some people who started looking at the bigger picture, and they didn't like what they saw. In a survey by the Center for Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, corporate executives across the country ranked Silicon Valley behind Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and even Houston as a desirable place to locate a company. Larger companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel have spun off divisions in second-tier high-technology areas like Austin, Boise, the Research Triangle, and Phoenix for the last three or four years. Rolm purchased land for expansion in Austin and Colorado Springs. John Wensley left the Bay Area to start his company, August Systems Inc., in Salem, Oreg. Ramtek began testing a new twist on manufacturing at a remote location by setting up a unit to make custom systems in Napa, north of San Francisco. And there were entrepreneurs at companies too small to reorganize into divisions who began to wonder what was going on in the Valley but didn't want to move their companies away from the services and suppliers available there.
While the enterpreneurs were once again absorbed in their own aspects of the problems, Santa Clara County residents began to realize that the high-technology superstars were generating jobs and taxes but that the jobs attracted more people, and the taxes not only didn't make the communities rich, but sometimes failed to cover the costs of growth -- the roads, houses, schools, sewer systems, expanded police and fire departments, and public transportation system. Sunnyvale found itself facing a $15 million sewage system expansion and $6 million to $10 million in transportation expenditures. Fire departments had to add special equipment and people to deal with chemical emergencies. Hobbled by Proposition 13's limits on property tax revenues, the cities didn't know where the money would come from.
"I don't see the taxes and the economic growth," says Lorraine Ross, a native of San Jose. "I see the traffic, the congestion, the lack of police, the lack of firemen, the lack of libraries. We're lucky if a policeman makes it to our neighborhood once a week. We have the highest burglary rate in the entire Valley, and we don't live in a ghetto.
"Santa Clara was a delightful place to live," Ross continues. "It has the most temperate climate in the United States. Yet people who live here [and don't work for the high-technology companies] cannot afford to buy a home." The average price of a house in her neighborhood is $115,000 for a "tiny 1,300-square-foot house." Just six years ago Ross and her husband bought their three-bedroom house for $45,000.
Yet it was not the price of a house that caused the waltz between the entrepreneurs and the residents to end. The residents didn't like setting aside 50% or more of their income to buy a place to live, but they might have done it. They didn't enjoy idling in morning traffic, but they might have looked at that as a price of progress. They might have found a way around the lack of public services. But when toxic chemicals were found in public wells, the residents wondered what the hell the cities had done. They began to think that maybe they had been sold down the river. And they began to view their entrepreneurial neighbors with something less than the awe accorded them in the past.
On December 4, 1981, workmen were digging a hole for a new water tank at a South San Jose plant of Fairchild Semiconductor. They noticed rust-colored dirt around a chemical-storage tank that was already there. They dug deeper and found that industrial solvents were seeping through the bottom of the old tank, which had been in use since 1977.
Apparently, the aboveground gauge that was supposed to measure the volume of the liquid in the tank had failed. The system that monitored the balance of the chemicals as they came into the plant hadn't been checked. But the stain was extensive enough that Fairchild told Great Oaks Water Co., which had wells in the area, that there might be a problem.
Sure enough, there was. The well nearest the Fairchild plant was contaminated with one of the solvents that had been stored in the tank. A solvent containing 13,900 gallons of 1,1,1 trichloroethane (TCA) had leaked out, and concentrations of it in the well were nearly 20 times higher than what is considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency. Great Oaks Water closed the well the next day.But then, on the advice of the state health department, neither Fairchild nor Great Oaks Water disclosed anything to the public about the accident for 50 days, although such an announcement was legally required within 39 days.
