A guardian for Mountain View businesses A guardian for Mountain View businesses (September 24, 2004)

Palo Alto company helps companies navigate local toxics problem

By Jon Wiener

Monthly public meetings and ongoing testing make it unlikely that businesses in northeast Mountain View will forget about the contamination in their neighborhood any time soon.

But Bob Wenzlau will be ready when they do.

Wenzlau was working for Fairchild Semiconductor more than 20 years ago when he went below ground to take the first soil samples that revealed the company's toxic solvents were polluting Mountain View's ground water.

"It was filthy," he said.

Now Wenzlau is trying to make sure that anyone else digging in the area remembers that. Wenzlau founded Palo Alto-based Terradex, Inc., two years ago. The company tracks land uses in northeast Mountain View and alerts business owners if they are about to dig into contaminated ground water or otherwise cause an environmental health hazard.

Terradex is currently engaged in a pilot project at 16 South Bay sites, including the area bounded by Middlefield Road, Ellis Street and Whisman Road (known as MEW) and the ARCO gas station at the corner of Shoreline Boulevard and Middlefield Road.

Terradex uses geographical technology to keep tabs on the area's toxic plume of trichloroethene and catch people before they dig wells, do utility work or build "sensitive" uses such as the temporary senior center proposed by the city in 2002.

Wenzlau called the maps "a memory bank around where the pollution used to be."

The objective is to make sure that someone keeps paying attention to these sites long after they change ownership, and to prevent any further damage from land uses. Those responsible for the pollution include companies such as high-tech heavyweights Fairchild and Intel, but new businesses such as Netscape and VeriSign have moved into the area. Neither company returned phone calls for this story.

"The institutional memory is really very short. Currently, there's no tool or even a requirement to monitor whatever's out there," said Peter Biffar, Wenzlau's business partner.

Contaminated and abandoned commercial land -- also called brownfields -- can present a host of liability problems that hinder redevelopment, even after they have been deemed safe. New federal and state regulations take businesses off the hook for pollution that former occupants caused, as long as they take "appropriate care" to protect workers and residents.

Alana Lee, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's project manager for the MEW site, said there are between 50 and 60 businesses in the site alone. She said that everyone, from business owners to employees wishing to remain anonymous, call her with questions about safety or liability issues. Lee said all of the business owners in the area seem to be aware of the pollution.

In that sense, the companies located there now are more alert than they were more than two decades ago, when Wenzlau first went crawling underground with empty beakers.

"No one really realized how this all could have happened," Wenzlau said. "They didn't bother to look at the [storage tanks]; they were too busy making their semiconductors."

Before leaving town last week to promote his company at a brownfields conference in St. Louis, he said he hoped that his proactive approach could prevent the same mistakes made in the past.

"A huge amount of activity occurs on these sites and on this one (MEW) in particular. The question is, 'did you know what you're about to dig into,'" said Wenzlau.

E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com

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