News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree.

Re:In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree by OGinparadise on Friday April 05, 2013 @03:48PM (#5500622)
On June 27, 2006, a monitoring well, which most people (myself included) would probably never notice among the carefully manicured flowers and shrubs, registered 85,000 µg/L of TCE, the same toxic industrial de-greaser that newspapers reported about in Google's buildings a few weeks ago. For the sake of comparison, the federally-mandated limit for one liter of groundwater in micrograms is pretty far from 85,000. It's 5.

The silicon part of "Silicon Valley. "

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree by rayiner on Friday April 05, 2013 @04:29PM (#5500863)
That's a shit-ton of TCE too. 85,000 micrograms per L is 85 milligrams per L. In comparison, there is about 100 milligrams of caffeine in a liter of coke and about 400 milligrams of caffeine in a liter of coffee. So we're talking about containment levels at about the same order of magnitude as beverages that intentionally contain an active specific ingredient.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree by tptacek on Friday April 05, 2013 @06:07PM (#5501383)
That is a shitload of TCE. I can't find any Superfund site with a similar concentration.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree by rayiner on Friday April 05, 2013 @06:14PM (#5501407)
I found 29,000 uG/L at this petrochemical distribution facility: epa.gov/tio/download/remed/rse/mattiace.pdf (page 13 of the text, section 4.3.2).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree by philsnow on Friday April 05, 2013 @07:56PM (#5501801)
Click the red triangle near 101 / 237 interchange in Sunnyvale on the google maps link from the footer of the article, you'll get this page:

http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/gama/gamamap/public/clu...

It's sorted in descending order by max level of TCE detected at each well, ever. The top three wells are 140k (ca 2006), 110k (ca 2009), and 100k (ca 2007) micrograms / liter.

There's a similar site by the Sunnyvale Fry's on Arques, but that one's peak detection was 74.7k ug/L.

[ Parent | on HN ]