So your wildly overvalued Mountain View real estate is contaminated with insanely dangerous carcinogens dumped by some of the leading tech firms in this Valley? Hey, no problem: ban plastic grocery bags and smoking on Castro Street.

You people crack me up. I can't wait to get out of this town.

@Old Ben .. Great point, agree 100%, and couldn't have said it better myself.

Uh-huh. See you tomorrow Old Ben...and the next day, and the next.

I feel for the people who live there and are getting exposed; it's no joke to them. At least today's software companies don't contaminate as much. And hopefully we have learned a lesson or two about toxic waste since the 1960s.

Ditto, Old Ben. I used to love the Bay Area; worked at Yahoo! back in the day, always had fun jobs, but now... life ain't so grand here. Google wealth, etc., is driving out many of the old timers. WE built this valley and deserve respect too!

It's too easy to be flippant using characterizations that unfairly blanket a community where people living and working in MV had absolutely nothing to do with the past, or have current occurences (elevated laboratory values)that are unrelated to current life (ie working at Google, fun jobs, wealth, etc.) Hey, if you don't like it here, but don't mind the income, access to modern ammenties and affluence for the short term, and your answer and level of participation is to threaten to leave and disparage property values, then take your NIMBY selfish mentality and move to pristine spot in the middle of Montana like the Unibomber, Uncle Ted. Civilization is about working through problems with some decorum, process, and intelligence vs criticism, consumerism, and abandoning for perceived greener psstures. Define greener pastures and who is attending to the problems of those greener pastures....good luck.

These comments are a perfect example of why I have no respect for the whining about newcomers. Somehow a story about toxic waste dumping 35 years ago has turned into an opportunity to complain about Google. There are many reasons that's absurd. Among them: Google has only existed for 15 years, has never done large-scale manufacturing in Mountain View, and has a phenomenal environmental record. Web Link (Full disclosure: I work for Google.)

This isn't a story about newcomers metaphorically destroying Mountain View; it's a story about old-timers literally destroying Mountain View. If you were here in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, you had far more responsibility for creating these superfund sites than the average Google employee, even if you didn't dump the chemicals down the drain yourself. A little humility might be in order.

Thank the lord they only do this in China now.

Hee hee..

Funny how people bash Google for something they had absolutely nothing to do with.

I say bring back the Company's representatives and rub some of the dirt in there faces and then make them pay for cleaning it all up, Intel, National Semiconductor, Raytheon and Fairchild.

What they lost the evidence, how typical.

"Unfortunately, Siegel believes the city records were destroyed which could help prove this."

My brother worked in the" Rust Bucket " ( the Fairchild Semiconductor Fab Area ), I worked at the 915 Bulding for AMD.
Our parent's house ( information the Voice already has ) is near Leong Drive.
My brother was one of the first " bicycle " commuters and worked graveyard.
There is no question that these FAB areas could do a better job of handling chemicals and disposing of them properly, when I got the job at Cray Rsearch, they were just finishing up the building of a completely SAFE Wafer Fab area for $5M. That was the CIVIC DUTY that Cray Research felt about having a campus in Chippewa Falls.

Meanwhile, all sorts of contamination issues were surfacing in the SFBA. Even the mighty IBM was doing it, so every other company felt justified in doing the same thing.

AMD had several " incidents " over the release of ARSINE gas in a fab area.

What needs to be clearly understood:

A POSSIBLE RELEASE OF TOXIC CHEMICALS IN THE AIR WAS THE PRIMARY CONCERN OF THE DIFFERENT SEMICONDUCTOR FAB SITES!

I'm talking BHOPAL type slaughters that could have happened if a " Big One " had actually hit the Left Coast.

Even just working in a FAB area was risky then. I called the gasses used " two step " gasses because that was how long you would live after a delivery tree malfunctioned or physically cracked.
At Cray Research, I was given the MSDS paperwork and was required to read it. I already knew about the SCUBA gear WE HAD ( and the Silicon Valley Fabs DIDN'T ) and the documents made it clear: You used the SCUBA gear TO DRAG THE DEAD BODIES OUT!!

Yes, Mountain View and the rest of the South Bay HAVE BEEN VERY LUCKY.
Groundwater Contamination was never thought about by Grove or Sanders. Not by Data General ( I worked at their Semiconductor Divison in SV too )

The real question: Why was Cray Research able to build a proper, self contained Fab area when Silicon Valley could not...or refused to do?

P.S. Every Cray employee associated with the Fab Area had to take a MONTHLY piss test...for exposure to the metals and gasses used to make our prototype ICs..and why wasn't the same thing done for the same workers in the SFBA Fab Areas...I guess the workers were more expendable....