Semiconductor History | 101 Bernal Road — The Tank Under the Clean Industry

In December 1981 construction workers at Fairchild's South San Jose plant found that an underground tank of waste solvent had failed.

By the EPA's account the tank had been leaking into the ground for some time, and a public drinking-water well about 1,800 feet downgradient was already contaminated.

The well belonged to the Great Oaks Water Company and was shut off. The San Jose Mercury broke the story a month later, in January 1982, and the neighbourhood on the other side of the road learned what had been under it.

That neighbourhood was Los Paseos.

Residents there had spent years comparing notes about miscarriages, stillbirths and children born with heart defects, and had been told there was nothing to compare.

A 1985 California health department study found a higher-than-normal rate of birth defects and miscarriages in the area between 1977 and 1983, and found no conclusive link to the contamination. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing and neither should be dropped.

About five hundred residents sued. Fairchild and the other defendants settled in 1986 for an undisclosed sum in the millions.

The chemistry is worth stating precisely, because the accounts differ.

The EPA's own site record names the solvent as 1,1,1-trichloroethane; contemporary and later press coverage has usually said trichloroethylene. Press reporting put the total release at more than sixty thousand gallons over roughly two years, spreading more than half a mile.

What made this more than one company's bad tank was what the investigations found next.

Santa Clara County authorities examined 79 companies and determined that 65 of them had contaminated the soil beneath their own facilities. Of 29 sites the EPA assessed, 24 went onto the National Priorities List.

Santa Clara County now has more Superfund sites than any other county in the United States.

The industry that sold itself as clean — no smokestacks, white coats, bunny suits — turned out to have been storing its solvents in steel tanks in the ground, upstream of the wells that supplied the houses built for its own workers.

Fairchild's plant here operated only from 1977 to 1983.

The company that started at 844 East Charleston Road ended as a Maine subsidiary of ON Semiconductor, and this address ended as ordinary commercial development; the Mercury News noted in 1997 that a supermarket had been built on a Superfund site.

The plume has shrunk under decades of pumping. There is nothing to see at 101 Bernal Road, which is the point worth carrying away from it.

Photo: Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (night aerial of the Bernal Road crossing at US 101 and 85, San Jose, 2019 — the area around the site, about a kilometre away, not the plant, of which no free photograph was found).