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The Santa Clara County District Attorney has opened an investigation into Tesla Motors’ spill of chemicals into the storm drain near its engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, city officials said Friday.
The city is still investigating the exact amount and composition of the chemical, which the company discharged on Oct. 17, but preliminary results showed that the fluorescent green liquid included bright dyes that are used for leak detection and Meras 1020, a chemical that is composed of disodium tetraborate pentahydrate and sodium hydroxide. City officials determined shortly after the spill that the chemical poses no danger to health or the environment.
Even so, the city’s failure to promptly notify residents about the spill prompted concern from residents in the Barron Park and Ventura neighborhoods, about 30 of whom attended a Nov. 1 community meeting at Ventura Community Center. Most residents didn’t learn about the spill until Oct. 23, when large trucks with industrial hoses arrived to flush out the chemical as part of the cleanup effort. The cleanup concluded on Oct. 25, when someone hit a fire hydrant near Matadero Creek, releasing thousands of gallons of water that further diluted the chemicals, Fire Chief Geo Blackshire said at the meeting. The driver behind the fortuitous hit-and-run got away and the city doesn’t know who that person was.
While further testing is ongoing, city officials currently believe based on Tesla’s reporting that the company released about 12 gallons of the substance, which is used to cool its AI supercomputer, into the storm drain. The rest of the roughly 916 gallons that was discharged was water that was used to dilute and flush out the chemical, city officials said.
City Manager Ed Shikada said that the city has already taken some steps to ensure that spills of this sort won’t happen again. This includes physical changes to the area where the spill occurred.
“The drain that was used, that caused the spill, has been plugged so that that can no longer be a source within that building,” Shikada said.
But the city is still working to determine whether to fine Tesla for storing sodium hydroxide without a permit. According to Shikada, the chemical was stored in the indoor garage space of the company’s campus at 1501 Page Mill Road. The city will determine whether to fine the company once it completes its investigation, officials said.
“We are checking back on the permitting of the facility itself to make sure it is appropriate for the use and the method of containment in order to prevent something like this from happening,” Shikada said.
The city also learned that the District Attorney’s Office is also investigating the spill. Shikada said that he doesn’t know when or why the office decided to open its investigation.
“We just received the notice,” Shikada said.
Fire Marshal Tamara Jasso told this publication after the meeting that it’s not uncommon for the Fire Department to share information with the district attorney. That said, the district attorney was not involved in the 2021 diesel spill into the Matadero Creek by VA Palo Alto Health Care System. The DA’s office couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
“We will sometimes contact the District Attorney’s office and provide them information, and sometimes they will contact us,” Jasso said. “In this case, they heard about it in the news and then they reached out.”
Valley Water, which has jurisdiction over the creek, has also reached out for information about the incident, which the state Office of Emergency Services attributed to “human error.”
The city scheduled the Nov. 1 meeting in response to community frustration with the public outreach. Many of the roughly 25 residents who attended the meeting expressed concern about the city’s — and the contractors’ — failure to inform residents what’s going on.
John King, president of the Barron Park Neighborhood Association, said residents still have “post traumatic stress” from the VA spill. Jonathan Brown, who lives on Fernando Avenue in Ventura, lauded the Fire Department for its quick response but wondered whether the city is too reliant on Tesla’s word.
“It sounds like we’re still conducting testing, and we still don’t know what was in the substance that was spilled,” Brown said. “When we first went over to ask the cleanup crew, they said it was water with dye in it and the cleanup was just there for the ‘warm and fuzzies,’ Then it came out that that it was coolant that was spilled a few days later, then it came out that it was sodium hydroxide. Then it came out that it was sodium hydroxide and disodium tetraborate pentahydrate.”
Jasso said the initial field test was conducted by Tesla, with the Fire Department witnesses. Blackshire said that the test was effectively a pH test to gauge the acidity of the chemical. Later, the company’s contractor, Clean Harbors, conducted further tests.
“We don’t necessarily know what it is, but we know what it isn’t from the field test,” Blackshire said of the initial response. “It was just to determine how hazardous is it, or is it not, so that we can start to bring people in and mitigate that.”
Shikada said that the city had established a new protocol around notifications so that “any significant potentially hazardous material release will initiate our notifications, as we are already doing in cases such as power outages or major police incidents around town.” This means that residents could expect to see an email blast next time something hazardous is spilled into the creeks.
“Our next steps are to take that basic understanding and turning it into operational protocols so in the Fire Department and the city manager’s office we can be clear on how notifications can happen,” Shikada said.
Tasso said that the city frequently visits the Tesla facility for regular inspections for various projects that are going on.
“And we’re probably going to increase that,” she said.
