High-Tech Spinoff: Toxic Materials

The Golden Triangle and San Diego’s flourishing northern frontier have become home to some of the city’s most exotic high-technology industries--and to an extraordinary variety of exotic chemicals on which those industries depend.

Behind the shimmering surfaces and landscaped parking lots, the area’s proliferating electronics and biotechnology firms handle a wide range of hazardous materials, and generate a significant share of the county’s hazardous wastes, county records show.

Three times in the last year the area has experienced serious accidents and near-misses, including the crash of a Navy jet near a Sorrento Valley plant where nerve gas experiments are conducted. Several dozen lesser incidents have occurred in the area since Jan. 1.

The accidents have raised a disturbing question: Is San Diego courting high-tech trouble? Skeptics look nervously northward to Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley, where storage tanks associated with the electronics industry have contaminated drinking water supplies.

City and county officials insist they can minimize the risks: Firms here are newer, more sophisticated, and closely watched. Furthermore, they say San Diego does not rely on ground water. They say they will not repeat Silicon Valley’s mistakes.

But other observers wonder if that is possible.

“You’re in the never-never-land of rapidly emerging new technologies,” said Joseph LaDou, acting chief of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at UC San Francisco School of Medicine. “There are no standards, or very few standards. There are certainly no standards that have proven the test of time. . . .

“Most of us feel that’s the simplistic attitude that cities and counties are buying--that Santa Clara County was a mistake, that their problems were unique. We don’t think that at all, because there weren’t just a few mistakes made and a few corrective measures not instituted. It’s a much broader problem.”

The concentration of electronics firms in San Diego County is now one of the largest (estimated by different groups to be either the fourth- or seventh-largest) in the country, with an estimated 200 to 300 electronics companies. Firms are scattered throughout the city and county, but the hub of activity is the Golden Triangle and Sorrento Valley.

The same area has drawn firms specializing in biotechnology, genetic research, pharmaceuticals and cancer research. Attracted to the area by UC San Diego, they have clustered around the triangle bounded by Interstates 5 and 805 and California 52.

As a result, lists of companies read like a sci-fi phone book: Electron Vision Corp., Hybritech Inc., American Technical Labs. One small street houses Synthetic Genetics, Immunetech Pharmaceuticals and Molecular Bio Systems Inc.

Many of these firms handle a broad spectrum of gases, solvents, acids and other chemicals, according to information filed under the county’s hazardous-materials disclosure ordinance. Stored in glass bottles, gas cylinders and aboveground and underground tanks, quantities range from ounces to thousands of gallons.

For example, General Dynamics Electronics on Kearny Villa Road listed 3,000 gallons of liquid acids, 550 gallons of cyanides and 550 gallons of non-flammable solvents such as trichloroethane. American Clinical Laboratory listed small quantities of nine materials ranging from benzene and carbon tetrachloride to chloroform and lead--all identified as carcinogens or hazards to reproduction.

Lee Biomolecular Research Laboratories listed 39 materials, including chloroform, toluene, xylene and lead acetate. Others listed formaldehyde, mercury, hydrochloric acid, lead and arsenic, and numerous other materials they assert to be trade secrets.

“I think in comparison to some of the old, traditional industries--smelters, steel mills, that sort of thing--certainly it’s a ‘clean industry,’ ” James H. Jones of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said, referring to electronics.

“But clean is relative, and they certainly do handle many toxic materials,” the federal official added. “I think you have to go into it with your eyes open.”

But others suggest that some risks are simply too great.

“Some industries use materials that are so hazardous, there might not be a way to manage them safely within a dense residential or commercial area,” said Diane Takvorian of the Environmental Health Coalition, a San Diego group raising questions about industrial siting.

“That’s not saying the industry isn’t trying,” she said. “All I’m saying is we might have to face facts that some hazardous chemicals are so hazardous they don’t belong in the marketplace or belong in a densely populated area.”

Over the last year, a series of accidents and close calls raised concern about the proliferation of toxics in San Diego’s northern quarters, and the ability of the city and county to handle a toxic emergency.

In March, a Navy plane from Miramar Naval Air Station crashed in the parking lot of a Sorrento Valley high-tech industrial complex, miraculously injuring only two people. The plane exploded less than a block from S-Cubed, a defense contractor experimenting with nerve gas.

Four days later, a water-filtration firm in Scripps Ranch was rocked by an explosion. One employee died, hundreds of people were evacuated, and 24 people were hospitalized after exposure to the poisonous plume of smoke.

Finally, fire broke out last summer in a section of TRW, the electronics firm located in the Golden Triangle near Scripps Hospital. County officials ordered two buildings evacuated and the food in a company cafeteria dumped. One material common in chemical fires escaped.

In each case, officials say they were blessed with good luck.

“It was incredible,” Battalion Chief Michael Burner of the San Diego Fire Department said of the Sorrento Valley plane crash. “If you’d planned it, you couldn’t have put that plane down by hand in a better place.”

Burner said the nearest building contained radioactive materials, flammable liquids and compressed gases. Similarly, David Merk, a county hazardous-materials specialist, said TRW handled materials much more worrisome than the one that escaped.

Lesser incidents have been more common: Merk’s office counts 33 other complaints, incidents and emergency responses in the Golden Triangle area since January. Those have involved barrels of infectious waste, spilled oils, and reports of chemicals in storm drains.

Merk says they do not represent a disproportionate share of the 750 reports his office has responded to this year.

Other concerns center on the nature of the wastes generated by high-tech firms and the manner in which they are handled and stored. In Silicon Valley, the widespread ground water pollution was traced to acid and solvent wastes leaking from underground storage tanks.

No statistics are available on the percentage of the county’s hazardous wastes that comes out of the Golden Triangle and adjacent areas. The electronics industry is the county’s largest-volume generator, said Larry Aker, chief of the county’s hazardous-materials program.

Also unclear is the condition of the area’s underground storage tanks, which until recently went unregulated. In Silicon Valley, officials unearthed rampant leaking through systematic checking. In San Diego, the checking is just beginning.

The county’s tank-inspection program and the city Fire Department’s industrial inspection program are among the safeguards that city and county officials believe will enable San Diego to avoid the disasters experienced elsewhere.

Under the tanks program, mandated by a state law, all of the county’s estimated 10,000 underground tanks must be monitored for leaks. All new tanks must have some form of double wall that allows detection before anything leaks into the ground.

So far, about 30% of the nearly 200 tanks the county has checked appear to have been leaking, said Vicky Gallagher, in charge of the county’s tanks program. Yet she said there is only one instance of contaminated drinking water, in Santa Ysabel.

In that case, officials are still attempting to determine who is responsible for the contamination, Gallagher said. Elsewhere, polluters have been held liable for the damage and cleanup, and have even in some cases bought the homes of people who have lost their water supply.

Meanwhile, the city Fire Department plans to begin on Jan. 1 a comprehensive annual inspection program covering the estimated 2,555 establishments citywide that handle “combustible, explosive and dangerous materials.”

Among the factors to be considered are electrical problems, safeguards against spills, and how firms separate problematical materials. The county also will require contingency plans outlining how a facility would be evacuated in the event of explosion or fire.

“You can’t eliminate all the risk factors, but you do your best to eliminate the most serious ones, the obvious ones, and you try to eliminate all the potential,” said Burner, who is in charge of the program. “ . . . What you can’t control is some sort of catastrophic type of thing. Like a plane coming out of the sky.”

Burner and others say the Golden Triangle area is not unusual: Dangerous materials are used countywide. And whereas some communities have hazardous facilities near neighborhoods, he said the homes closest to Sorrento Valley are nearly a mile away.

(However, there are firms handling hazardous materials in the Golden Triangle that are not far from mushrooming residential communities. County hazardous-materials officials suspect that they will be asked shortly to address the question of zoning to keep hazardous and residential uses apart.)

Indeed, other large industries in San Diego list more hazardous materials than the electronics and biotechnology industries, and often in larger quantities. Perhaps the most obvious is the aerospace industry, whose facilities line Pacific Highway in the flight pattern of Lindbergh Field.

In the end, officials argue that there are risks inherent in most industrial activities. They insist these risks can be controlled.

David Morell, special assistant to the Santa Clara County executive for toxics management and formerly the head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s risk-assessment project for Silicon Valley, said he believes that electronics firms can be “very good neighbors, if properly regulated and properly required to spend some money up front.”

That regulation requires assiduous monitoring, which can be labor-intensive; careful worker training and supervision to minimize spills; random checking of hazardous-materials delivery systems, and “real penalties” for violations, he said.

In addition, Morell said aboveground storage must be carefully constructed to ensure that any leaks are contained within a concrete lip. Attention must also be paid to air pollution, transportation risks and recycling of used solvents, he said.

“The more you have of these facilities that have these things on site, the more chance of an explosion or fire or gas leaks,” Morell said. “We have to be vigilant, there’s no reason for complacency. On the other hand, there’s no reason for panic and chemophobia.”