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Emeryville, California, and the challenge of cleaning up poisoned land
- ng12 5y agoSame with a lot of neighborhoods in NYC, even trendy ones like Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Always research what your building is built on top of before you sign the lease.
- walrus01 5y agoI was shocked when I saw the asking rents for some "luxury" apartments built right next to the Gowanus canal.
- jeffbee 5y agoPerhaps it is true that the federal government has no standards for brownfield cleanup, but that does not mean no standards exist. The California Water Quality Control Board and the Department of Toxic Substances Control are responsible for coordinating cleanups of these sites to objective standards required for habitation, commercial development, schools, parks, or whatever. You can see the DTSC activities for the Sherwin-Williams site at https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/profile_report?global_id=60000189 https://www.envirostor.dtsc.ca.gov/public/profile_report?glo...
- watersb 5y agoEmeryville started as a mudflat on the Bay where they'd drive cattle to slaughterhouses and leather tanners. It smelled real bad so they did it way out in the middle of nowhere. It sort of became the place for messy industry, when just burying the bad junk was considered sufficient. Company I worked for had major construction project for their campus expansion, but it took a while to clear the PG&E transformer storage lot of decades of PCB leakage. Poly chlorinated biphenyls are nasty. Almost as nasty as the heavy metal contamination of the Sherwin-Williams Paint factory across the way. The merely-poisonous-at-quantity horseradish processing facility was a breath of fresh air... and is now part of the Pixar-plex. What with all the major construction over the past 30 years, there have been ongoing cleanup efforts. I don't know how realistic my optimism is, but it's way cleaner than it was in the 1980s.
- walrus01 5y agoSounds remarkably similar to the Love Canal in the history of dirty industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
- refurb 5y agoThe Love Canal story is such an incredible cluster. When the chemical company sold the land to the city, they mentioned the waste and indicated they take no responsibility for it once the city acquires the land. Then "Not long after having taken control of the land, the Niagara Falls School Board proceeded to develop the land, including construction activity that substantially breached containment structures in a number of ways, allowing previously trapped chemicals to seep out." Everyone knew what was there, but for some odd reason they still decided to build a new school and a bunch of housing there.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>but for some odd reason they still decided to build a new school and a bunch of housing there. The worst part about it is that it was then used to champion asinine legislation that hurts the people who want to do things right. So now every municipality who wants to buy some old poisoned dump on the cheap (because it's poisoned and that restricts development) and not be idiots with it (e.g. turn it into a park or a parking lot or some other use not involving serious excavation) can't actually buy the land and do so because no sane company will sell it to them because they could just go and do something stupid and then turn around and make the company pay. It's like the municipal equivalent of taking a free boat off someone's lawn in order to get an engine core and then acting like you got swindled when you find out it costs money or labor to get rid of a boat and then having the state pass a law making boat owners liable for disposal in perpetuity.
- mrguyorama 5y agoWhat a shame that companies are forced to pay for the poisons they produced while making profits off those same poisons. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses of course.
- olliej 5y agoKind of impressed that slate managed to call an incorporated city in a different county a “suburb in sf”.
- humanistbot 5y agoEmeryville is a 10 minute drive from SF, or 1 mile away from a BART station that gets you to SF in 15 minutes. It is a suburb of SF or a suburb in the SF Bay Area.
- olliej 5y agoI would have called it a suburb of Oakland :) No mention of the haunted IKEA either
- jeffbee 5y agoEmeryville is not a suburb of anywhere. It has 30k jobs and only 12k people. If anything all the cities that surround it are suburbs of Emeryville.
- xenihn 5y agoIt can be 30+ minutes in traffic. I did the Emeryville<->SF commute once when offices opened back up, then decided I needed to move back into the city.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoEmeryville is near the tunnel: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
- gkop 5y agoUnfortunately, the tunnel appears to have been a victim of Covid. It may never reopen.
- djbusby 5y agoI wish I had more to point at rn but, hemp crops can help pull toxins from soil. Other crops too , can help with a "brown zone" but hemp (and it's cousin) get more press.
- simulate-me 5y agoWhat do you do with the hemp once it has absorbed the toxins?
- mschuster91 5y agoDump it either on a toxic waste landfill or at a high temperature incineration site [1]. [1] https://www.novus-environmental.co.uk/blog/why-is-hazardous-waste-incinerated/ https://www.novus-environmental.co.uk/blog/why-is-hazardous-...
- d4mi3n 5y agoIt depends. Some plants will break certain elements down into less toxic components. In the best case, the components are non-toxic and you can do whatever you want with it.
- muchtest 5y agoBlaze it
- openthc 5y ago
- jerkstate 5y agoand here I am, wondering if it's safe to eat stuff grown in my yard because there was a fire at a nuclear weapons production facility 30 miles from here, 50 years ago.
- grebly 5y agoI suspect we live in the same area. I go mountain biking around there often, and I'm a little paranoid when the Santa Ana winds come through and stir up a lot of dust :\
- kadoban 5y agoYou can probably just go around a bit with a geiger counter while kicking up some dust, right? Seems like it'd give you a good idea. *not medical advice
- iancmceachern 5y agoRocky flats?
- pomian 5y agoIf you collected a soil sample (a few spoons of dirt from 5-8 places in your garden, put in s plastic baggie.) Then get it tested - ask for a 32 element ICP. It's fairly cheap, 10-20$USD, gives you a run down of those 32 elements, and then you can see if there are any anomalies. They give you an answer in ppm (parts per million.) For example. Then you look at the published standards for soil quality. For example in your case, residential criteria. In your state. Find online. If you are more than a factor of 10 or 100 above that, in one element, you may have an issue. If there was a fire, and ashes blew your way, there could be detectable amounts. If there are, especially if those elements are suspected to originate from the fire. You can worry about further tests. Some organic compounds- by products of the fire may be there, and be measurable. And that gets more expensive.(~ $500) But you'll probably find everything is ok.
- hef19898 5y agoWe build on a patch of land that used to be small workshop removing paint from furniture and the like. The shop operated way back in the 70s and 80s, as far as I know. Well, at least long enough ago that just dumping all the chemicals used in the backyard. That backyard is now our garden. We were obliged to conduct soil analysis. So, overall the soil was: 1. Super expensive to get rid of, the only "recycling" site willing to take it was 150 km away. Luckily, we managed to convince the construction company to only transport the bare minimum. The reminder was moved to the front and is now sitting under the car port 2. The contamination is bad enough to be illegal for a kindergarden or play ground, but good enough for a general park 3. covering it up with 50 cm of clean stuff gets it "kindergarden" legal, 75 cm get it good for growing crops. So we have a front half of the garden where we plant flowers and such and a back half were vegetables and herbs and so grow. Depends on how much you want to grow, this is potential solution. And it also more gentle for your back: a Hochbeet (German, that's what t looks like:https://www.amazon.de/s?k=hochbeet&adgrpid=1199567838429561&hvadid=74973091016502&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=127603&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-74973191524133%3Aloc-72&hydadcr=12241_1904168&tag=hyddemsn-21&ref=pd_sl_36ahbyv39v_e https://www.amazon.de/s?k=hochbeet&adgrpid=1199567838429561&...) Damn easy to build yourself in any size you desire, it's basically an open box, on the bottom and top, of weather resistant hard wood (so don't buy on Amazon!). You fill the bottom with old branches and other pieces of wood, then you multiple layers of earth. You have to top it up so every other spring. And put it some stones to get the wood away from the moisture of the ground.
- kmonsen 5y agoMountain View (location of Google HQ) has playgrounds where it is most likely unsafe to let your kids play. This is across the road from Google offices at Fairchild. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0901680#bkground https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fus...
- otherotherchris 5y agoYeah, there's also a rubbish dump converted to a amphitheater next door that randomly and spontaneously catches fire. VOC contaminated soil at Fairchild, Intersil and Intel sites should be safe except after flooding from exceptionally heavy rain. Presumably there's a plan to shut the playgrounds, but it's America so who knows...