5 ms·

Some of the most populated zones of the Bay Area are built on top of superfund sites, which have high concentration of TCE underground. https://www.epa.gov/sup

by gabaix 3y ago

Some of the most populated zones of the Bay Area are built on top of superfund sites, which have high concentration of TCE underground. https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-reuse-california https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...

bilbo0s 3y ago
Well one problem is that "Some of the most populated zones of" everywhere are superfund sites. Another, I learned long ago in the real estate business, is that superfund sites are just the sites they've taken the trouble to bother "cleaning up". As the article alludes to, it's not the documented TCE sites we need to worry about, it's the undocumented TCE sites that will likely get the average person. This same rule applies to real estate development. One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought. I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
- walleeee 3y ago
  I can't help but think we've gone too far in limiting liability Doing so may be an effective way to catalyze invention and economic activity but ignoring externalities becomes existentially risky as our capacities develop If we prefer human arbitration to nature's blind and brutal judgment, we had better put toothy disincentives in place Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy? It feels wrong, but so does perishing because the species can't deploy technology in the long term interest
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    Really well said, gets to the heart of the issue truly.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy? It's not even about punishing. If you cause a car or home accident because of a mistake, your insurance rates will go up, and if the damage exceeds your coverage, you'll pay out of pocket. There's nothing punitive about it, you're just responsible because of fault. That shouldn't feel wrong. It should evoke pity, but not a feeling of wrongness. For the heirs of the stockholders of these polluting companies we need a special tax to clean up the "accidents" of those companies. These taxes could be limited to the maximum value of the company, or better yet the proportion of the total wealth of the heirs that the company stock represented at the time they sold or dissolved the company. That's still limiting liability, but in the original sense of the term (clawback of sold and wipeout of retained shares). For the heirs of anyone who made a purposeful decision to pollute despite knowing the harms, then the limited liability should be pierced to allow taxation of the fraction of the total wealth of the heirs that derive from the polluter.
culi 3y ago
This map (from 2015) shows sites with the most TCE groundwater contamination. Bay Area is actually quite clean. LA is completely fucked though https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2018-tce/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2018-tce/
- xeromal 3y ago
  Thanks for this. Kind of happy my state of GA has none!
  - radlad 3y ago
    It's not clear to me where this data comes from - do spots that are unmarked have none, or are they unmeasured?
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      The data says it comes from public water systems. The EPA requires testing and reporting of water supplies for lots of things. That being said, if you run your own private well, you’re not subject to this.
  - hindsightbias 3y ago
    https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/7/4009 https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/7/4009 http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/10/csx-groundwater-contamination-in-waycross.html http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/10/csx-groundwater-contamin...
- uoaei 3y ago
  https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/toxic-chemical-found-oakland-mcclymonds-high-school-campus-closed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/toxic-chemical-fou... > The Oakland Unified School district announced the temporary closure of the McClymonds to test for the chemical tricloroethylene (TCE), which was found in groundwater under the campus. > "This is West Oakland and so there is a history of environmental injustice, of racial injustice that happens in this community. So these are places where there are leaks, there are dumps, there are things like that that are not healthy for our community," said Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Oakland Board of Education District 3 Director. > McClymonds has recently seen a handful of students and former students develop cancer, including the high-profile cases Darryl Aikens, a McClymonds football player who died of leukemia a month after graduating in 2017, as well as 2018 graduate Ramone Sanders, who died of cancer last fall. Sanders was playing football at Laney College when he broke his leg and it was discovered he had bone cancer that spread to his lungs.
baremetal 3y ago
I lived near the Fairchild superfund site for many years. I remember when it was a hollow husk of a concrete building. And then the paved it over and put a supermarket and whatnot there. Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild". I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jeffbee 3y ago
There are small TCE plumes virtually everywhere in urbanized California. Every dry cleaner in history was just dumping waste TCE and PCE into holes in the ground. If you click around on this map, half of these sites are TCE/PCE (the other half are usually gas, diesel, and MTBE). https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL600192746 https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...
kelnos 3y ago
Curious, Treasure Island (in the San Francisco Bay between SF and Oakland) is absolutely a Superfund site, but isn't marked on that map. Oh huh, apparently it avoided getting classified as a Superfund site[0]. Really makes me think that designation isn't all that useful anymore. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Island-poised-for-building-boom-14451339.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...

by gabaix 3y ago

bilbo0s 3y ago

Well one problem is that "Some of the most populated zones of" everywhere are superfund sites. Another, I learned long ago in the real estate business, is that superfund sites are just the sites they've taken the trouble to bother "cleaning up". As the article alludes to, it's not the documented TCE sites we need to worry about, it's the undocumented TCE sites that will likely get the average person. This same rule applies to real estate development. One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought. I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.

walleeee 3y ago
I can't help but think we've gone too far in limiting liability Doing so may be an effective way to catalyze invention and economic activity but ignoring externalities becomes existentially risky as our capacities develop If we prefer human arbitration to nature's blind and brutal judgment, we had better put toothy disincentives in place Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy? It feels wrong, but so does perishing because the species can't deploy technology in the long term interest
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Really well said, gets to the heart of the issue truly.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > Is it possible that occasionally punishing an honest mistake or absence of forethought may be the price we have to pay to prevent poisoning by diffusion of sociopathy? It's not even about punishing. If you cause a car or home accident because of a mistake, your insurance rates will go up, and if the damage exceeds your coverage, you'll pay out of pocket. There's nothing punitive about it, you're just responsible because of fault. That shouldn't feel wrong. It should evoke pity, but not a feeling of wrongness. For the heirs of the stockholders of these polluting companies we need a special tax to clean up the "accidents" of those companies. These taxes could be limited to the maximum value of the company, or better yet the proportion of the total wealth of the heirs that the company stock represented at the time they sold or dissolved the company. That's still limiting liability, but in the original sense of the term (clawback of sold and wipeout of retained shares). For the heirs of anyone who made a purposeful decision to pollute despite knowing the harms, then the limited liability should be pierced to allow taxation of the fraction of the total wealth of the heirs that derive from the polluter.

culi 3y ago

This map (from 2015) shows sites with the most TCE groundwater contamination. Bay Area is actually quite clean. LA is completely fucked though https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2018-tce/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2018-tce/

xeromal 3y ago
Thanks for this. Kind of happy my state of GA has none!
- radlad 3y ago
  It's not clear to me where this data comes from - do spots that are unmarked have none, or are they unmeasured?
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The data says it comes from public water systems. The EPA requires testing and reporting of water supplies for lots of things. That being said, if you run your own private well, you’re not subject to this.
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/7/4009 https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/7/4009 http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/10/csx-groundwater-contamination-in-waycross.html http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/10/csx-groundwater-contamin...
uoaei 3y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/toxic-chemical-found-oakland-mcclymonds-high-school-campus-closed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/toxic-chemical-fou... > The Oakland Unified School district announced the temporary closure of the McClymonds to test for the chemical tricloroethylene (TCE), which was found in groundwater under the campus. > "This is West Oakland and so there is a history of environmental injustice, of racial injustice that happens in this community. So these are places where there are leaks, there are dumps, there are things like that that are not healthy for our community," said Jumoke Hinton Hodge, Oakland Board of Education District 3 Director. > McClymonds has recently seen a handful of students and former students develop cancer, including the high-profile cases Darryl Aikens, a McClymonds football player who died of leukemia a month after graduating in 2017, as well as 2018 graduate Ramone Sanders, who died of cancer last fall. Sanders was playing football at Laney College when he broke his leg and it was discovered he had bone cancer that spread to his lungs.

baremetal 3y ago

I lived near the Fairchild superfund site for many years. I remember when it was a hollow husk of a concrete building. And then the paved it over and put a supermarket and whatnot there. Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild". I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jeffbee 3y ago

There are small TCE plumes virtually everywhere in urbanized California. Every dry cleaner in history was just dumping waste TCE and PCE into holes in the ground. If you click around on this map, half of these sites are TCE/PCE (the other half are usually gas, diesel, and MTBE). https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL600192746 https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...

kelnos 3y ago

Curious, Treasure Island (in the San Francisco Bay between SF and Oakland) is absolutely a Superfund site, but isn't marked on that map. Oh huh, apparently it avoided getting classified as a Superfund site[0]. Really makes me think that designation isn't all that useful anymore. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Island-poised-for-building-boom-14451339.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...