have to mix up this chemical in i used to call it green go. and get the consistency and then put it into a spray gun and i would have to heat that up after a glued on together that was just all day that i had to. yvette didn't know the material she was using turns out to be probably in the vicinity of fifty percent lead uk size she didn't know she was exposed to lead in tell her that i got pregnant with mark in one thousand seventy nine and that was full term my months and we're just really happy about it. now he doesn't even know to cross the street and not know a car is coming to stop going to the restroom you know i have to go with him in there so i have to a system where everything is number one or you better know and if i knew what i know now i woulda ran out of spec or physics at the time

it was unnecessary it just. breaks my heart that i could avoid it this. oh we're filing this lawsuit against your employer and it's a lawsuit for his son who was born with severe developmental disabilities and is a suit concealment of systemic chemical poisoning and case of a vet and for the direct injuries to mark. marks condition isn't like a cold take antibiotics and you're going to be fine in five days this is life. your love just overrides all that and you do what you gotta do to stay i still do that. i'm sorry getting. i discovered my b.m.

had corporal mortality. which they kept for thirty years and it kept track of the causes of deaths of their floyd's the most dramatic findings were about cancer for the company as a whole this was thirty three thousand deaths that were in this corporate mortality file so included people who had worked all over the u.s. . but then when you look at specific plants like the i.b.m. plant in san jose there was some extraordinary excess costs of deaths one was brain cancer the other was not hard to conceive the foma another was melanoma the skin and in the women breast cancer was three and four fold higher than expected. that was the heart of this settles a lawsuit. in a similar a courtroom today the first trial out of more than two hundred similar lawsuits filed against i.b.m. former i.b.m. workers jim bore and a lighter hernandez say they developed cancer from exposure to toxic chemicals at i.b.m.

san jose facility in the late seventy's or early ninety's i mean literally tried to prevent the results of the tally analysis from ever seeing the light of day in fact they went to the judge and said this can't be used in this case a lot of hernandez's not dead she's going to be in the court room and not only was it not relevant the judge said it it might prejudice the jury if they saw what these excess cause deaths were and so he denied the use of it in the court many of the brands will respond questions by saying no one has ever proved to me that a single person has died from exposure to these chemicals either within inside their factories or outside of the factories and of discussion but that's not the way that we approach environmental or occupational health in the world. we are not flying blind here at all especially on the chemicals at issue here in the electronics industry actually and most of the common chemical used in all industrial

manufacturing we've been at this work for forty years. if you look at the publicising generated by again you would think that we lost everything and that's simply not going. after the trial i.b.m. matters were resolved for hundreds of people whose claims did not go to trial. what can you tell us about the settlements. i'm not going to be able to talk about any of the resolutions of the cases and. can you give any details at all did you have to agree not to reveal the details as part of the settlements all i can say is that the matters were resolved that's what i'm allowed to say.

i mean. here in silicon valley chip companies and the other electronics production companies used hundreds if not thousands of toxic chemicals and the most of the chemicals once they're used in making the components needed to be disposed of as waste the company's ended up storing them in underground storage tanks all over the valley. but what the brilliant people who are designing these systems didn't quite think through all the way was that the solvent swer really good at dissolving things and so when you put them into a tank eventually they're going to eat their way through the tank. solvent that the electronics industry used in production in silicon valley in the seventy's and eighty's are now on in the groundwater and if you think about putting

a drop of ink in a bathtub. that spreads really quickly and it's really hard to get that dropping back that's what we're dealing with except we're dealing with multiples of gallons of the stuff that is in the groundwater. in late one thousand nine hundred one there were over one hundred families in one little neighborhood who had serious problems and the state health department discovered that the families that were drinking the most heavily contaminated water had significantly higher rates of miscarriages and birth defects then did people in other neighborhoods with the chemical industry will often say if i had not a dime for every time i heard this but even water can kill you then those non toxic thing of course it can but only if you stick your face down in the bathtub or fall into a you know fall into a large body of water. so that has the traditional approach to toxicology is that

the more stuff you're exposed to the more harm it causes you but what we're seeing in particularly around cancer and around hormone disrupting chemicals is that it's when you're exposed to it the time of exposure so if you're in third trimester and you get even a perp or billion or part for truly an exposure it can actually cause significant damage. we formed this silicon valley tuxes coalition and we did a summer organizing project getting people to sign petitions asking the e.p.a. step in with their authority and of a superfund program yesterday. yes. yes. and i went to a meeting in washington and presented these thousands of petitions saying we need e.p.a. to come in it's time for e.p.a. to exercise your authority and to everybody's great surprise they agreed to do that . so hewlett packard became a superfund site until became

a superfund site national semiconductor advanced micro devices i.b.m. you name it they were there and they were all superfund sites. the cost of cleanup for i.b.m. as well as all the other companies has been tremendous it's an enormously slow and tedious process. if you look right over here also this is a major residential neighborhood just directly across the street from this industrial site. most of the people living here today are unaware of this huge toxic plume. and those same chemicals that are still right under where we're standing are now beginning to seep back up out of the groundwater through the soil and are actually coming into the offices of these software engineers a google. and this is the one that e.p.a.

said might take three hundred years to clean up. this is so complicated the devastation is so enormous that we're really talking centuries of cleanup not just years or decades. the problem is that it just keeps reoccur. please when companies started moving away from silicon valley to china i think that they were the only too happy to have the government off their backs and. their chinese government made an offer to multinational corporations that they couldn't refuse. you need a land and you need money and you need government approval and you need lots of people to put it all together well they have all of that in china. it's. just.

one of the primary purposes of outsourcing is to enable companies like apple to make what are essentially an reasonable demands on manufacturers that they wouldn't and couldn't make if they actually had to employ the workers directly apple doesn't have to worry about what it means to workers when they insist on a tripling of the pace of i phone production. to go to the glue and sons of those who. come in the new. ball.

anyway focused on this is. how you can see as you go by the one you don't we see you know some of the. from a single example last year. this one gains here. it's not. played against. the us was needed and will. cause the yeah.

yeah if. you don't want. to live ill enough to. take him do you have to tell it you know we. do they will sit and have. to do for jennifer how much all responsibly acquired. then let me go. so we might have a. good teaching good to go do. you put in the towel no. snow. in the sun sun do consoli. sorry about this world and. is. good to know that you. know it's easy to do

so because that is so. basic. so good about themselves. there's some. of them. are you would think i'm going to be able to. do more in the order changing toward him and. you can see more. people doubting in general. didn't move a bottle through injury them cost him. and he turned over to the land of

the late. eighteenth sure. he laid. he told me only. just him.

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