Silicon Valley Tapped 1 Of Worst Polluted Places In U.S.: Report

SILICON VALLEY, CA — With all its positive reinforcement to the job market among other attributes, the birthplace of the information age has a dark, dirty side with its mass roll-outs of semiconductors and microprocessors cluttering the environment, according to a report from the Atlantic.

The major industrial center launched factories throughout the South Bay adjacent to San Francisco. Up through the early 1990s, Santa Clara County saw the rise and double-down of production coming out of Hewlett Packard, Intel, AMD, Apple, Atari, Fairchild and Xerox as a sampling of companies that have become household words in the technology world.

Through the mid 1980s, Santa Clara County added 203,000 manufacturing jobs, which amounted to 85 percent of them in tech, Atlantic reported. Silicon Valley companies progressed on the creating of software and those efforts gave way to a concentration on Internet-based applications. Fast forward to today, apps and software are the name of the game.

Now its notoriety falls on being a Superfund site — not a distinction an area wants to be associated with. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers those sites the most contaminated or polluted land in the country.

While Contaminants have been removed, more needs to be done in the cleanup, the report continues. For a few weeks at the end of 2012 and into 2013, toxic vapors got into two campus buildings at Google as it was reported in Forbes. The infiltration may have exposed the office workers there to levels of chemicals above the legal limit set by the EPA.

A spokesman for Google said that while the pollution levels required remedial action, the Mountain View-based company told the Atlantic the employees were out of danger. He added that the issue was resolved in less than four weeks.

According to the media investigation, Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites. This is more than any other county in the United States.

Read the full Atlantic story for more details.