Is this why Facebook is such a toxic dump? HP, HPE sued for 'leaking chems' into office site

What the fuck did Stanford expect?

Everybody who lived in Palo Alto in that era knew that ALL of the manufacturing that happened in West Palo Alto, AKA "Stanford Research Park" (between California (Page Mill) and Arastradero) polluted the place. The rules & regulations BACK THEN allowed it. Stanford suing at this stage is silly ... They knew about the remediation issues long before they broke ground. Gut feeling is Stanford is fishing, hoping it'll be settled out of court with a largish payout.

If it were anybody but Stanford, building wouldn't have been allowed until AFTER the remediation ...

(I'm a Palo Alto native, Stanford alum in good(?) standing, and former HP employee.)

Get sued if you try and recycle

Didn't I just read an article about someone trying to deal with the "e-waste" issue getting sued?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/21/e_waste_lundgren_windows_dell/

I wonder

Where did they bury what they dug up ?

If it had been any other California school...

...I'd say go fsck yourself... Clean up the rad waste legacy left behind by your nuclear weapons labs... and then maybe we talk about a little PCBs in your dirt.

Stanford is a weird case though. In the 70's they supposedly eschewed profiting off of classified defense research. But then in the 90's they had to pay back US Navy for defrauding the Office of Naval Research throughout the 80's. Something doesn't compute?

Whenever I hear about PCB-pollution...

... I think of an office building in Binghamton, NY.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Plaza,_Binghamton

They had a transformer fire in the basement in Feb 1981, and the entire interior of the building was contaminated. The building was closed during multiple attempts to clean up the mess and finally opened in October 1994, albeit with some remaining doubt about whether it was really clean enough to let people work there.

Apparently cleaning up PCB contamination is really hard.

What's with the title

Why put Facebook in the title if it has nothing to do with them? yes they used the building for a year or two, but still. Did you think less people would read the article if it has "Is this why HP is just a toxic place to work?".

I don't mind a jokes or someone taking the p**s when it relates to the article, but when your just dumping another company in the article name your, just asking for people who have half the read the article jumping to conclusions.

But what about Theranos ?

I worked on this site , known in HP as building 17, for a couple of years at the start of the nineties. Scientific Instruments Division became part of Agilent when the split happened. I believe that after Agilent moved out, the site was taken over by Theranos, of testing scandal fame. Why do Stanford assume that Theranos bore no responsibility? Perhaps they don't have enough dosh to make them worth suing.

When you realize

that most "higher education" is actually becoming a Real Estate company, you tend not to feel sorry for them. Land granted by donors or State to further education, being leased and rented to larger companies or turned into rental or condo properties. No classrooms there,

What would you have them do?

They're given land with conditions that make it difficult to sell but they have no immediate use for it. Of course they're going to rent it out. The alternative is to spend millions that could be better used elsewhere to build classrooms (or whatever) where classrooms shouldn't be. That's not sound management in anyone's book.