When Lorraine Ross opened the San Jose Mercury on January 20 and saw the story about the leak, she was at home with her three small children. She could see the Fairchild plant, which was about a quarter of a mile from her house. Her family got its water from Great Oaks Water.
She remembered the neighbors who had complained that the water tasted funny but who thought it might be the pipes. She recalled the times she smelled chlorine or ammonia in the air. But mostly she wondered about the four children with birth defects, the two miscarriages, and the one stillbirth on her block within the past three years and the multiple congenital heart defects of her youngest child, then nine months old. She wrote to the president of the water company and asked for an investigation.
Ross had grown up in San Jose, but she had never had much to do with the electronics industry. The technological revolution that was taking place in the low-lying buildings that had sprouted around the Valley like toadstools after a spring rain just didn't have much of an impact on her life.She missed the orchards she used to walk through as a kid, and didn't particularly care for the congestion, but she never thought of herself as being anti-industry, or even antigrowth. The birth defects in her neighborhood had made her nervous, but she hadn't known enough about the chemicals used to make semiconductors to attach her fears to anything concrete.
By the end of January, Lorraine Ross had a lot of questions. Her daughter had nearly died and still needed open-heart surgery. Maybe the chemicals in the water had caused the problem. Who, she wanted to know, let Fairchild build a semiconductor plant 2,000 feet from a public well? Who decided the storage tank was safe for industrial solvents? When trace amounts of other chemicals were found in other public wells, who decided it was all right for people to drink the water? Why had 50 days passed before the public was informed about the TCA in the well her family's water came from? Why was it that the Food and Drug Administration spent years researching drugs, but industrial chemicals were virtually unregulated? And why was it that people like herself, untutored in chemicals and completely outside the industry, had to complain before investigations were made?
Ross's questions attracted a lot of public attention. The San Jose Mercury News wrote a story about her. She got phone calls from the Associated Press and even the National Enquirer. People in her neighborhood called. They had problems too. Thirty-one birth disorders were reported to the Great Oaks Water district within days.
The residents discovered in a hurry that not only did the industry not regulate itself, but nobody else did either. Drinking water had been contaminated for months, maybe years, before the problem was discovered, and then only because workers were putting in a new tank nearby. Fairchild was not legally required to check its tanks, and, in fact, only after the spill was it obligated to reveal to a public agency the types and amounts of toxic chemicals being used.
There is a feeling of betrayal among the residents. They had trusted Fairchild, but the company had been so wrapped up in making faster and less costly chips that maybe it hadn't taken the safety of their neighborhood seriously enough. The residents were understandably even less enthusiastic about their corporate neighbors when they found that there were at least 36 other leaks of hazardous chemicals stored or dumped in the Bay Area. The seven that were found in Santa Clara County were solvents used in making semiconductors. In one case, a tetrachloroethylene (TCE) leak from a tank used by Intel was recently discovered, even though the company had stopped using the chemical in that location in 1977.
The implications of the findings were frightening. Although most of the leaks did not contaminate water supplies, the chemicals were being used by high-technology companies all over the Bay Area and across the country.Scores of new chemicals were being developed and marketed every year. People began to think harder about some of the other "isolated incidents": The fire at Lockheed in Palo Alto that had required evacuation of 400 people in a residential area because of the possibility of a chemical explosion. The 24-year-old woman who had begun to lose her hair after working with a chemical called antimony trioxide at Advanced Micro Devices.
The Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health gets 30 to 40 calls a week from workers who think they have problems somehow related to the chemicals they work with, and 60% of those callers are employed by the electronics industry. Amanda Hawes, a San Jose attorney who has specialized in chemical-related health problems since 1979, says she has been involved in about 100 such cases, and only recently have they been taken seriously. Initially such complaints were treated as "female hysteria," she says, or, in the case of men," a bad attitude."
When the residents started asking questions, they found that the handling and disposal of toxic chemicals is supposed to be regulated by the state's Department of Health Services. Although industry and government experts have questioned the wisdom of regulating nationally used chemicals by 50 different legislatures, most federal laws and regulations are aimed at controlling "pollution," not at the handling or storage of potentially hazardous substances. And cutbacks in federal spending and President Reagan's policy of reducing federal involvement in what he considers areas of state and local responsibility have limited the enforcement of the federal restrictions that exist.
