Mountain View's toxic cesspool has been leaking for decades. The city knows it is there but is doing little to clean it up. Meanwhile, people are living on top of it and how many cases of cancer has it caused? What the city needs to do is clear the land and dig out all of the toxics once and for all. This can be done much more quickly than the cheapskate decades long process that has been going on so far. Yes, the people living there now will be inconvenienced if the land is stripped, but better that than die of cancer, right?

Hi Dig it out,
The city is not the responsible polluting party. The way this works is that the polluters pay for the clean-up. The decades-long leaking i.e. the MEW Site, is a contained plume and the nine responsible polluting parties pay for the clean-up. The newly-discovered contamination is logically the result of these same parties disposing of the chemicals into the sewers. It seems like it should be an easy answer of digging out the toxics once and for all, but water tables/hydrology and other factors complicate such a solution. Sigh.

I agree, more testing please. And I'm sure the guilty parties can team up with a developer and homeowners and come up with a sensible solution i.e. rebuild from the ground up.

The 9 companies may be financially responsible, but the city is responsible to its citizens. The company accountants are encouraging the companies to do whatever is cheapest, hence the cleanup is dragged out for decades. The city should just take over and use whatever method will clean up the toxics the quickest, then send the companies the bill. How many cancer cases has this mess caused already? Don't tell me zero, that is not believable.

Sadly enough when I was a teenager, I worked for C&Z Circuits - long since gone now. It was at the site where the adult education facility now stands on Moffett. The owners used to make us clean circuit boards with TriClor and then dump our used chemical outside the roll up bay doors and directly in to the sewer grate. Last I heard the owners fled the state, filing bankruptcy on the way out.

dig it out, tell me what you know about the remediation of chlorinated solvents. I actually worked in this area of TCE and DCE remediation in the 1990's and find your comments about "Just dig it up" astoundingly ignorant of the process.
I think this is one of those "Better to be silent and thought the fool than to speak up and remove all doubt" situations.

Do you have any better solution, at least dig it up is offering some type of solution. Or should we wait till more deaths and cancers happen because of this?

I lived on Whisman back in the early 80s and I had a brain tumor the size of a baseball. Coincidence?

Before you put someones comment down, how about offering better solutions.

(sigh)
First of all, if its just dug up, it vents uncontrolled to atmosphere, so yah, that's not a bright idea bulb popping over someone's head, and its dangerous to suggest.

Without seeing any specifics at all (apparently supported here):
Air stripping in conjunction with carbon filters would be the most neighborhood friendly method IMO for large scale areas.
Soil venting is an option, but I don't like the idea if they do not treat the VOCs before venting to atmosphere.
For the smaller pockets, Bio-remediation, though still new technology, could prove very beneficial, of an air well, again only of not left to vent untreated.

Oh and besides apologies for the typos, apologies if I didn't go into detail about the technologies and how they work, but that info is readily available to you via a Google search. Its actually pretty interesting. There's probably even newer tech now-a-days.

Well the EPA told a group of military families in a meeting they held, April 2013, that we did not have to worry about getting cancer because we wouldn't live here long enough, and just PCS out in a few years anyway. That's not true for people in the Guard. Certain Nasa official were ordered not to go to the meeting, and no one from the housing office showed up either.

Some of us feel trapped by the situation and live in fear of what it's doing to our health. There's a lot of short term effects of TCE that no one seems to be mentioning, and some of us feel like we may be living with them. We don't trust the EPA to look out for us and do the right thing. And most of us just don't feel plain good enough to do much about anything. So we suffer in silence, mostly, and pray we won't regret living at Moffett Air Field.

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