I live across the street from one of Google’s many Mountain View campuses in California. My beloved home – a little farmhouse I bought and moved into with my family in 1975 – now lies above the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman Superfund Study Area (or MEW Superfund site), an area polluted by 11 Potentially Responsible Parties, well-known, multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies that are possibly to blame “for generating, transporting or disposing of the hazardous waste found at the site”.

How would you feel if, one day, you discovered that the air inside your dream house was contaminated by toxic vapors? How would you feel about living nextdoor to Google if you were also living on top of contaminated groundwater?

I was angry and betrayed. And I wasn’t alone. Recent reports, including a new investigation by the Guardian and the Center for Investigative Reporting, have shown that such toxic wastes are shipped across the United States to over 1,300 of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund cleanup sites.



As development in my area of Northern California took off in the 1980s, we found ourselves across the street from the 56-acre campus of the Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. But long before Google (the pollution problems in my neighborhood predate that tech giant’s existence), Fairchild was torn down and a chain-link fence erected around it. Except no one bothered to tell us that we were now living across the street from a Superfund, one of the EPA’s many programs to investigate and improve hazardous waste sites around the US that’s creating environmental problems of its own.

There was a tall building down our street – Whisman Road – that looked like a mini-rocket ship. It was an air-stripping tower, a facility that pumps contaminated water from the ground into a raised tank, from where chemicals – like trichloroethene, or TCE – vaporize directly into the air. At the time, we didn’t understand what this meant, but in the 1990s, reports began to emerge of Parkinson’s disease and cancer – both of which have been linked to TCE exposure – in people who lived downwind of the air-stripper.

We were all worried, of course, but we didn’t know what to do.

As our neighborhood grew, so did concern about the Superfund site. I began learning more than I ever wanted to know about TCE, about “vapor intrusion”. At one neighborhood meeting, I was elected to represent our district on a citizen advisory panel for the EPA’s Pacific Northwest region. As my participation increased, I began to grasp a whole new vocabulary: hydrology, bioremediation, parts per million, parts per billion, ambient air.

I wanted to get my indoor air tested. If my air was contaminated, perhaps my neighbors – many of whom were elderly or didn’t speak English – might have the same issue. But my home did not qualify for indoor air testing, as the border of the local plume study area was determined to be 20 feet from my front door. The Potentially Responsible Parties would not pay for the expensive tests unless I was directly over contaminated water.

But at one lengthy meeting, upon closer examination of our local MEW map, I discovered that the toxic plume, in fact, ran right under my house. Additional testing of wells had occurred, and the plume borders were now more clearly defined. While the plume hadn’t moved, our understanding of its boundaries had: it had been below my house all along.



By 2002, a pump-and-treat system had removed 75% of the TCE contamination from the groundwater at the MEW Superfund – that’s over 100,000 pounds of TCE. Yet even at 75% clean, my indoor air was nearly four times the protective risk, and tested high enough to qualify for a remediation system. My home was cut, butchered, vented and fanned with tubes and vents – like a terminally ill patient with a never-to-be-removed colostomy bag. My circuit breakers tripped so frequently that I needed an additional breaker box.

There is too much stress put upon people living over contaminated groundwater, or in a home under remediation changes. Neither their homes nor their lives will ever be the same again. They may feel guilty about choosing their home, about the constant anxiety over the health of their families, about isolation from friends who no longer visit out of fear of contamination. My home’s system runs 12 hours a day, and will operate until this house is torn down. The toxic trail is impossible to ignore.

And yet I’m very fortunate to have the EPA’s regional guidance in helping to champion this cause. My distrust of the agency took me about a year to turn around, but without the regulation, controls and oversight, corporate polluters would continue to get away with contamination. Because of the persistence of citizens like me, the EPA has changed the indoor air testing qualifications so that homes within a larger area of the plume boundary (pdf) can also be tested for toxins.

I wanted my air tested because I wanted to know my home was safe. And I wanted to share the information with others like me, so that they could understand the consequences of vapor intrusion and what they could do about it.

We need to hold polluters responsible, or we risk the mess being passed on to future generations. All over the US, ordinary people who have little political voice bear the environmental impact of non-regulation. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can find a way to clean up contaminated water.