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President Donald Trump’s promise to bring back jobs by axing regulations is targeting environmental protections on Mountain View’s contaminated, yet still valuable, real estate. In recent days, a chemical industry lobbying group is nudging federal officials to gut safety standards for trichloroethylene (TCE), citing the high costs associated with one of Mountain View’s Superfund sites.
A March 31 letter sent by the American Chemistry Council singles out Mountain View’s Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman (MEW) Superfund site as an example of environmental remediation that has become a money pit. The letter criticizes 2014 guidelines by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to expand the area being monitored for TCE vapor intrusion in Mountain View, estimating it will cost $19 million over the next 30 years. By scaling back these standards, the letter argues, contaminated land could more easily be redeveloped and brought back into productive use.
But local environmental advocates say the call to deregulate TCE, a carcinogenic chemical that is contaminating groundwater in parts of Mountain View, is a ruse that won’t bring back manufacturing jobs. They suspect the real motive is to reduce costs for chemical manufacturers and companies obligated to clean up toxic sites.
“This is not about manufacturing jobs, this is about liability,” said Mountain View Councilman Lenny Siegel, who is also the executive director for the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. “This is part of an overall effort by polluters and producers of toxic substances to roll back progress that’s been made over many years.”
Although produced only in limited quantities these days, TCE was widely used as an industrial degreaser at thousands of military and manufacturing sites throughout the last century. In Mountain View, it is the leading contaminant in a string of Superfund sites near the Moffett Field area, many resulting from former semiconductor plants.
EPA officials have long classified TCE as a carcinogen by any route of chronic exposure. Mountain View’s contaminated ground water plumes can result in exposure to TCE vapors, especially in poorly ventilated buildings. TCE is known to cause cancer, among other health problems, including heart defects in children born to mothers who were exposed during critical stages of heart development, according to the EPA.
The American Chemical Council letter does not dispute chronic exposure cases, and instead it takes aim at a more recent push by EPA officials to monitor the short-term health risks of TCE, particularly for pregnant women in the first trimester. Starting in 2011, the agency issued guidelines warning that even a single day of TCE exposure could pose health risks for early-stage fetuses. These guidelines became the basis for a regimen of indoor air monitoring throughout hundreds of offices and residences in Mountain View. In 2013 it was discovered that a building housing Google employees, including some pregnant ones, had been exposed to elevated TCE levels.
The American Chemical Council urged the Trump administration to scale back TCE guidelines to monitor only long-term health risks. The short-term dangers were based on “flawed” toxicity studies on rats that assumed individuals had already experienced long-term exposure, representatives said.
“The EPA has developed potential cancer risk estimates for lifetime exposure to TCE which are a more appropriate basis for evaluating indoor air levels,” wrote Steve Risotto, American Chemistry Council senior director, in an email to the Voice.
The chemistry council is not the only industry group to criticize these short-term health risks. In 2015, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group sent a letter to local EPA officials urging further evaluation of the costs and benefits of mitigating short-term health risks, noting it would cost more than $100 million to implement. Like the chemistry council, the SVLG also was skeptical of the testing data linking TCE to birth defects.
The new letter from the American Chemical Council was sent to the U.S. Department of Commerce in response to a request for regulations that could be cut specifically to restore domestic manufacturing. It remains unclear exactly how Trump administration officials intend to act on any submitted suggestions.
Siegel said a formal reversal of established guidelines would take time, but the EPA policies could be revised through alternate means. Staffing and budgeting could easily be redirected away from TCE monitoring to other priorities, he said.
“By mentioning our local sites, this is a reminder that our environmental protections are severely threatened,” Siegel said.
The EPA has already become a main target of Trump’s push to curb government regulation. The president’s proposed 2018 budget calls for wiping out $2 billion of the agency’s $8.1 billion budget.
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Can’t California just secede from the United States so we won’t be subject to the irrational whims of this train-wreck of a presidency? Then these polluters would have to comply with California regulations.
California already contribute more to the Federal government in taxes than we take in, and for that we get disproportionately low representation in election delegates and in the House of Congress (we have 12% of the population but 10% of the congress members).
This is what happens when special interest groups demand the payback from their political donations. This is big money buying the government and putting their profits above the health of the citizens. Some call it corruption.
Can Mountain View or Mountain View citizens respond with a class action lawsuit?
Most residents weren’t here during the manufacturing days, and don’t realize how badly polluted it was in some areas. The entire area between Ellis, Whisman and Middlefield road is one big hot spot. I noticed they eventually built over a lot on Middlefield that had a dozen or more montoring wellheads.
Symantec has a fitness center on Ellis that sits on an old Raytheon site that was so bad they dug a trench 20 feet or so deep all the way around the building and filled it i with cement or something to pen it i and keep it fro spreading. I hope that building is well sealed.
A little historic reading:
https://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/ViewbyEPAID/CAD982463812
https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0901680
Why don’t we suggest some of these people come live in the area for a while. See if they change their tune when it comes to their own personal health??
Let have the EPA put their offices right in the center of the MEW superfund site, and let these corrupt idiots stew in TCE vapors day in and day out until they fix the pollution. If they think TCE is good for humans, let’s see them literally drink it down and tell us how it tastes. This TCE pollution is decades old and the very idea that it hasn’t yet been cleaned up in Silicon Valley where land and housing values are the highest in the nation is ridiculous.
EPA’s oversight at the Mountain View Superfund sites is a regional and national model. What this article describes is an effort by the chemical industry to undermine the cleanup standards that are driving EPA’s program.
The current approach at Mountain View contamination sites is to ensure that building occupants are protected from subsurface vapors while cleanup is accelerated. However, even under the best of circumstances it will take decades or longer to restore our groundwater resources. Still, people should be aware that no one here is drinking water contaminated by industrial pollution.
Certain factions of the federal government don’t consider California to be part of the United States and are punishing us for the way the state votes. From provoking North Korean nuclear attacks, to cutting Caltrain, to cutting superfund cleanup, to going after sanctuary cities, to cutting H1B… the list will continue to grow.
SteveD, the trench around the former Raytheon site was 70 to 100 feet deep (to get below the levels that TCE had reached) and it was filled with a clay slurry. Then wells were put in, some to inject water into the enclosed volume and some to extract water bearing TCE. The subsurface there is quite jumbled and it was very hard to get much TCE out. The effort was designed to continue long term.
Hey Donald – how about creating jobs to clean up the mess once and for all instead of just covering it up?
Let’s demand Trump come deliver the news of his decisions and the effects on people here in person. We (and probably be) knows what would happen. Until he comes to all affected sites that are effected by his policies, he is merely a shadow of the idea of a leader.
So how much TCE is still in the ground? How bad is the health risk? This article doesn’t provide a single number.
Is there anything on property titles that let buyers know they are moving into a chemistry dump? I would think this should be a tile insurance worthy claim if buyers did not sign off that they were informed. It is amazing to me that a property could be considered contaminated, and unfit for building then a few short decades later buildings appear on the property, usually high density housing, built by short term profiteers. I would think local regulations should require anyone who lives there to sign a paper that they were completely informed of what was in the area, and its risks.
when I bought my house I got documentation of polluted sites in the area. I’m assuming buying around the MEW area means you get disclosures for sites in that area
What jobs are going to “come back” to Mountain View by relaxing these regulations? For that matter, we need housing far more than we need more jobs!