Selected By : Ajendra rathour
This post by Lynne Peeples was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement
When Jane Horton bought her dream 800-square-foot farmhouse in 1975, she thought little of the semiconductor manufacturing plant across the street. Even after the company’s buildings were demolished and a chain-link fence went up around the campus, she still had no knowledge of the toxic dangers lurking beneath her feet — let alone of the fact that they were invading her home.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Horton and other residents of Mountain View, California, heard about the underground plume of trichloroethylene, or TCE — a cancer-causing liquid used at the facility to clean silicon chips. Horton learned that vapors from the TCE were seeping up from the groundwater and soil into local buildings. When investigators tested the air inside her family’s house in 2004, they found concentrations of TCE exceeded a site-specific threshold set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And that was after approximately 75 percent of the contamination had already been cleaned up.
