The mine is also the single greatest source of mercury pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. After the mining companies sweated the quicksilver from the rock, they dumped an estimated 800,000 cubic yards of burnt cinnabar into nearby Alamitos Creek: To this day, drops of liquid mercury and cinnabar slag are readily found in samples collected anywhere between New Almaden Mine and the city of San Jose. If you follow that creek into Silicon Valley you'll pass signs showing a fish on a poker, and the warning:

FISH IN THESE WATERS ARE CONTAMINATED WITH DANGEROUS LEVELS OF POISONOUS MERCURY. DO NOT EAT FISH CAUGHT IN THESE WATERS.

The creek flows down through the serpentine foothills, through blue oak and California laurel, until it passes under McKean Road at the valley floor. A couple of hundred yards northeast on McKean takes you past a walnut orchard and across Calero Creek, also flowing down from the New Almaden hills and contaminated with mercury, until you hit the foot of the Santa Teresa Hills and the checkpoint for IBM's Almaden Research Center. IBM ARC, the first computer research lab west of the Mississippi, is the birthplace of a host of technological innovations as valuable as mother lode gold, and, according to a wave of recent lawsuits, as toxic as New Almaden Mine mercury.

If you make a U-turn at the check gate to IBM ARC and follow the run of Calero Creek as it flows along Camden Avenue, the pepper trees and flowering plums thin and shift from the creek bed to the center divide. After approximately five miles you reach the stoplight at Blossom Hill Road. To your right is the parking lot for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, and behind it are the Alamitos Groundwater Recharge Ponds, where the joined creeks of the eastern New Almaden hills (Alamitos and Calero) meet the Guadalupe River, flowing in from the west side of Almaden Quicksilver County Park. The combined water is then spread across the ponds, seeping through the earth's porous layers until it reaches underground aquifers, where it is stored until tapped by the county. Signs posted around the pools warn again of poisoned fish.

	Living Downstream By Sandra Steingraber Vintage Books 374 pages Buy it Imperial San Francisco By Gray Brechin University of California Press 428 pages Buy it Print story E-mail story

You are now officially in Silicon Valley. A few blocks ahead is the West Valley Freeway. Go east on the West Valley Freeway and after five miles you'll have driven over one of the largest plumes of poisoned groundwater in the United States, over 3 miles long and 180 feet deep, contaminated with xylene, toluene and other volatile organic compounds, including the chlorinated solvent trichloroethane (TCA). Pump-and-treat groundwater cleanup operations continue to this day. The original source of this poison? Underground Tank Farm No. 1 of IBM's Cottle Road Disk Drive Manufacturing Facility.

Built just three years after the disk drive was invented at IBM ARC in 1956, the Cottle Road plant was the first among dozens of manufacturing facilities -- including those operated by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Applied Materials and National Semiconductor -- discovered in the early 1980s to have collectively leaked tens of thousands of gallons of organic solvents and other toxic contaminants into the groundwater of Silicon Valley. Today, the valley is home to more EPA Superfund sites (29) than any other county in the nation, with the most notorious of those sites -- from a leaking tank at a Fairchild Semiconductor fabrication plant -- poisoning a well that served the south San Jose neighborhood of Los Paseos. A subsequent study by the state's Department of Health Services found 2.5 to three times the expected rate of miscarriages and birth defects among pregnant women exposed to the contaminated drinking water, leading to a lawsuit and multimillion-dollar settlement in 1986 with over 250 claimants.

The toxic details of Silicon Valley's mercury-laden streams and contaminated aquifers are relatively well known. But another, even more troubling potential vector of deadly pollution has required more time to come to light -- the "clean rooms" in which high-tech workers come into direct contact with a vast array of chemicals as they manufacture semiconductor-laden circuit boards and computer hard drives. According to a lawsuit filed in 1998 in Santa Clara County Superior Court on behalf of four cancer-stricken IBM employees and the families of five deceased workers -- the number of plaintiffs has since quintupled to 45 -- Big Blue and its chemical suppliers, including Union Carbide, Shell Oil and Eastman Kodak, fraudulently concealed from their employees the risks of adverse health effects, including fetal toxicity and cancer, arising from chronic, low-level exposures to chemicals used in the manufacture of disk drives and related circuitry. Solvents named in the complaint include many of the toxic compounds leaked into the groundwater two decades before.

In January, IBM and two chemical suppliers (Union Carbide and Ashland Chemical) settled a separate case in a similar wave of lawsuits involving about 200 current, former and deceased IBM employees, most of whom worked at a huge chip-making plant in East Fishkill, N.Y. But the amount of the settlement was not made public and IBM admitted no guilt.

And yet, IBM's own corporate mortality statistics, charges the Santa Clara lawsuit, record a death rate from brain cancer among its employees about 2.5 times that of the general public. Did the chemicals involved in high-tech manufacturing cause the cancers? No one, not even experts who have long been critical of the potential safety hazards associated with clean-room workplaces, can say for certain. But numerous scientific studies have established that certain chemicals used in manufacturing semiconductors are statistically associated with increased rates of reproductive problems and various types of cancers. And the heart of the Santa Clara suit is the assertion that IBM repeatedly assured its workers that those workplaces were safe.

To the handful of experts occupied with the dismayingly difficult challenge of assessing the health threats of semiconductor manufacturing, IBM's alleged confidence could not possibly have been merited. There simply hasn't been enough testing and research into the health hazards posed by low-level exposure to combinations of toxic chemicals. If anything, the experience of the semiconductor industry should be sobering -- the complexity of the chemical cocktails at use in modern high-tech industrial manufacturing is mind-boggling, and it is always getting more so. There is little chance, warn these experts, of ever catching up with the public health challenges inherent in new advances in technology, especially when the rate of change continues to accelerate. We may know that mercury is deadly, we're pretty sure that drinking water contaminated with trichloroethane isn't a good idea and we may finally be waking up to the dangers of making clean-room workers breathe the same recirculated air, laden with complex chemicals, all day long. But what do we know about the explosion of research in biotech, and microelectronic machines, or the next wave of advances in semiconductor manufacturing?

Is the price of technological advancement, and its consequent economic growth, to be paid in workers' health? The legacy evident in Silicon Valley, since at least the 1850s, might hint at such a conclusion, although it also raises an obvious question: What alternatives do we have, if we are intent on technological progress? The lawsuits against IBM -- the consummate symbol of high-tech prowess -- might also give pause to the Silicon Valley's more ardent advocates of high-tech progress. But instead of attempting to help public health officials and their own workers keep up with the challenges of accelerating technological change, for years the semiconductor industry has been more interested in investing its dollars in pretending that problems don't exist.

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