The Silicon Valley Superfund: The Landscape Below the Circuit Board

The valley you are driving through, the one that produced the integrated circuit and the smartphone and the search engine, spent the nineteen eighties generating a different kind of product: contaminated groundwater.

By the early nineteen eighties, Santa Clara County had accumulated more federal Superfund hazardous waste sites than any other county in the United States. This was documented by KQED San Francisco and the California History journal. The source of the contamination was the semiconductor fabrication industry that had made the valley famous. Chip plants used chlorinated solvents and heavy metals in their manufacturing processes and stored these chemicals in underground tanks. The tanks leaked.

In nineteen eighty-one, trichloroethylene contamination was discovered leaking from an underground storage facility at a Fairchild Semiconductor plant into the groundwater serving water company wells in the south San Jose area. This was the first documented case of its kind in the valley, according to reporting cited by the California History journal. It was not the last.

The communities living nearest the fabrication plants, and drinking the water from the wells closest to the contamination, were disproportionately Latino and Vietnamese immigrant workers, many of them already employed in those same plants in assembly and testing roles. Studies published in the late nineteen eighties documented elevated rates of reproductive health problems in working-class neighborhoods near the fabrication sites. The specific statistics from those studies involve health claims that require verification from peer-reviewed sources not fully available in the current record, so this account notes the documented pattern without specifying numbers that remain single-sourced.

The clean room did not stay clean. The circuits it produced are everywhere. The landscape underneath them is still being remediated.