Maybe the document is from a FOIA request or something similar (and therefore not public)?
> The US EPA notified her they finalized the report but are currently unable to share it with her as Apple apparently declared the report of their (assumed) numerous environmental violations is Apple Confidential. Gjovik has a pending FOIA request as well.
The author of this has been on a crusade against Apple for years, stemming from an incident that was probably hypochondria. They've outright lied about multiple incidents (see https://twitter.com/shantinix/status/1433297575914971136), and I would very strongly doubt any new claims made. For example, a spot check of one of the claims has them currently saying "Still, Gjovik’s limited testing returned results showing a number of the chemicals in use by Apple at ARIA including Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene."
But, in 2021 (at https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...), "I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive."
This is in line of when I worked in a semiconductor lab in suburban UK in the 90s. We had a couple of local residents report problems immediately even though we hadn't even started fabrication at that point. They eventually sent out a press release saying that we had moved manufacturing to Scotland. The complaints stopped instantly. The lab was running until at least 2017 with no complaints and regular inspections from local authorities.
YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
Edit: to be clear I'd expect the EPA to install independently maintained monitoring equipment which is not subject to the bias of Apple or the reporter. Then collect more data!
> YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.
There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.
EPA isn't the only governing body. It says right in their report the facility is being properly managed by the city of Santa Clara and the state of California.
Also, they weren't doing chip fab there. It was R&D for Titan and MicroLED. There's a reason she's litigating her case against Apple pro se and without any expert witnesses and other lawyers. She's a basket case who went from almost fainting one time to now saying she almost died. She scared a lot of people at work who live in the same apartment building with this: https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...
We all bought equipment thinking we were being poisoned. TL;DR, we weren't. I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.
Similar hysteria surrounds the 5G rollout as well. I remember anecdotes of people reporting health issues, when the already erected tower wasn't even on, but unfortunately I can't find the source for this again.
In general, I find that people are hit or miss regarding their observations. Sometimes they are so on point that they seem like a savant, and sometimes they miss the mark so hard that I find believing anything further impossible.
> and I would very strongly doubt any new claims made
And I would very strongly doubt the word of a People Team member as the conclusive evidence of any lying.
People Team are there to reduce the liability for the company, the company in this case are the very company in question for alleged environmental issues.
What actually happens vs what a trained People Team member knows to document are seldom the same thing, and people on the receiving end of the consequences of this seldom have their full wits about them at the time and are almost never lawyered up at that time.
If you had other receipts I'm sure people might consider them, but if your main gripe is based on what a People Team / HR person says... yeah, that's not conclusive either.
The one party I would trust most here are the EPA, and the author didn't fabricate (pun intended) the reports made by them.
I've seen non-redacted versions of what she's shared on Twitter versus her redacted versions which tell a completely different story, and she puts her own spin on it that is detached from reality. I've seen her lie directly on at least one occasion (and play the victim card about it), and when combined with everything else makes me trust her 0%.
I'm still looking into this and forming my opinion. It's very curious how at the end of her YouTube video she mentions other residents in her building came forward and said they too were sick (numerous ER visits over 2 years), and they DIDN'T KNOW WHY, until they saw her expose in the newspaper. That seems to counter your hypochondria theory, no?
There are many situations where people assign causality when there is no true evidence or mechanism. One of the best examples are cancer clusters. There have been examples of well-understood (almost certainly causal) cancers caused by industrial occupation, but cancer is common enough that some things that look causal are purely coincidental. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls was almost certainly causal, while "high voltage electrical lines cause cancer" probably is not (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/health/long-after-an-80s-...)
So no, it doesn't counter the hypochondria theory.
People get strange symptoms all the time. I currently have a chronic scalp condition that doctors haven’t really identified and a really stiff neck. Of course I’m going to go ‘aha!’ If someone gives me a plausible explanation
As someone who lives in that building and works at Apple, I don't believe her. We were all pretty mad that she caused us to panic about being poisoned and gettin cancer.
It's really hard to "catch" these things in the moment. I work in chemical plants and there are tons of huge releases of extremely toxic gases all the time, which I can often smell from my apartment. I know what they are by smell because I manufacture them myself. Proper continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station and we'd need to build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. That sounds expensive, but really isn't that much added cost for a $100 million to $10 billion manufacturing site.
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. That's not including nearby housing - that's just how big the manufacturing facilities themselves are! This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they typically show no increased pollution at all, which proves that it's woefully inadequate even during big emergencies that very obviously affect breathing air quality. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica[3] is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem.
We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.
ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]
>per continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station
This seems a bit high, closer to $100k installation cost for fairly basic real time regulatory monitors seems about right. CEMS (automated stack testing) monitors should be somewhat cheaper if the engineers didn't screw up the housing location on the stack/vent.
Otherwise, your prose very much matches my experience with air quality monitoring in Australia. It's an absolute mess and very much amateur hour compared to water monitoring or meteorology.
News articles about the user behind this twitter account have gone through a few rounds on HN in the past: [1][2][3][4][5] and she has a personal blog documenting her various legal battles with Apple: [6]
I don't know anything about this... I'm curious how small could the monitoring station be. Could it be something that could be mobile, like in a trailer or cargo container format, and dropped off at a site temporarily and moved.
Did you read the report and specifically the areas of concern the EPA had? They seem minor at best. More than half of them are mislabeled containers that are too broad.
I'm naturally inclined to be suspicious of people claiming pollution is the cause of a disease. It's certainly possible, and it certainly happens, but every individual case is a sample size of one, and the best we can say is it's likely an environmental factor played a part. On top of this, it seems the claimant has either through frustration or with malicious intent exaggerated or fabricated some of the claims. So, I'll agree with you to be highly skeptical.
On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to assume that a large corporation would maximize its profits: it has a duty to. If the expected profits exceed the expected costs of breaking the law, guess what's going to happen. Probably the fairest outcome here is better enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, this outcome leaves both parties worse off in exchange for an improvement to society.
> (...) Apple engineer “accidently” turning on lethal fluorine gas. Similarly, another incident, the TEOS leak, was root caused to an Apple engineer accidently installing the gas for a tool “backwards.” Further, less than two weeks following the April 30 2021 phosphine leak, Apple’s manifests included sixty pounds of “vacuum filters contaminated with glass dust,” implying there may have also been a phosphine explosion.
What the absolute @#$% is this??? Would I be wrong in assuming this should've made national news but was probably kept low thanks to Apple's deep pockets/connections?
I think not because all the concentrations were pretty low. The problem that Ashley faced was that she was exposed 24/7. But to me it looks like almost all of the gas concentrations would have been considered an A-OK working environment for up to 8 hours of exposure.
And while it's not wrong that fluorine is a lethal gas, it is heavily used in many industries and in medicine.
Her documentation shows a careless attitude on Apple's side. And there are enough independent parties documenting accidents that she can sue and win. But overall, this doesn't look worse to me than how many other industrial companies operate.
Isn't a bigger factor here, in addition to their careless attitude, the fact that they've started manufacturing semiconductors on land specifically only zoned for light industrial use, when, at least per her article, fabricating semiconductors is work that is required to be zoned heavy industrial?
The issue being, of course, the proximity of residential to a "light industrial" vs. "heavy industrial" plot sure changes things for the people moving into those residences...
> The problem that Ashley faced was that she was exposed 24/7.
She never faced to industrial chemical exposure, let alone 24/7. She didn't work in that building. She worked as a program manager for a software engineering team in an office building in Sunnyvale.
Inside industrial settings I would presume stuff like this happens all the time. In fact, people even die sometimes. Even when a refinery blew up in Texas a few years back it barely made the news.
On a side note, Fluorine is bad stuff but I believe it doesn't have a long lifespan so any impact would be immediate or not at all
One of the test samples he opened (unexpectedly) had a flourine compound in it that strips calcium from bones… he jumped in the lab shower which sets of an alarm when activated, which leads to lab evacuations and an emergency team in hazmat gear arriving
I'm not surprised that such stuff happens often, I myself know people who've worked in such factories and lost colleagues. What I find odd/unusual is more about how this occurred (occurs?) in an urban area where regulations should've done something.
Factory workers working in dangerous conditions and losing their lives is unfortunate, but their effects hurting/killing the general population (a-la Bhopal Gas Tragedy) should not be legally possible.
I've done some work with the public data from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA does a great job of making detailed data on inspections and accidents public. If memory serves me correctly, it turns out there are about two deaths per day from work-related causes in the US...
Helpful context on the validity of this heavily editorialized site. Seems like Apple definitely is not in the right here but very unclear if it has anything to do with this persons claims. If you follow her history of forming complaints it is hard to take her serious as most of her complaints get dropped and these are complaints filed against different agencies.
She also filed a 650 page complaint which so irritated the legal system that new case law was formed to bound the permissible lengths.
It seems she originally got fired by Apple, where she was a product manager, for leaking NDAed info. It also seems she's been on an anti-apple tear since.
Personally, I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years, and it was by far the most ethically run and conscientiously run place I've ever seen, so her sequence of Apple complaints originates in a non core division, so is not like the engineering core world I was in, but sets off my "wait, what?" sense honed from experience.
I find it surprising that apparently she's suing Apple not only for dumping toxic chemicals into the air directly next to her apartment, but also for an unrelated case of Apple's security videotaping the women's toilet rooms.
That chemical court case seems very strong to me, with multiple indipendent parties having measured the gas in the air. (Edit: and multiple government agencies reporting chemical accidents at Apple) So it doesn't seem like she's trigger happy to sue, which would imply that there might also be merit in her other case.
Good thing Apple never had "don't be evil" as their slogan ;)
Reminds me of Minamata, Japanese company was dumping mercury into the nearby lakes and hushing everything up. Movie is great BTW, thank fk I don't live near a chemical plant.
Apple started to clean up only after getting tipped off of an EPA raid. They also didn't test or analyse chemicals. And conveniently stopped having weekly inspections.
Truly a case of ignorance is bliss. Huh, toxic what now? No no it's NOT toxic, we marked it as non hazardous so it's OK.
This is what's so strange to me. They weren't testing for the presence of hazmats and seemed to not care. This lab clearly isn't a prod lab, likely just research, and maybe that's why they were so comfortable leaving everything where it was.
The one thing I found most disgusting, though, was the open tank in the basement. They said the tank would explode if they left it closed, so VOCs must have been venting out. But they left it open in... the basement... without any REAL ventilation. This belongs on r/OSHA.
This is pretty awful. And if Apple, with all their supposed green credentials, are the ones dumping toxic industrial chemicals into the environment in the middle of Santa Clara, you can only imagine what the rest of the industry is like.
This person seems unhinged and not of sound mind. I had to skim through this…article because it jumped around too much.
The problem is really most of her examples seem like she is forcing the connection. Like her 3am dying spells and one of the times it happened her VOC measurements went up. It could very well be there is an issue with the plant exhaust but it could also be the land the apartment was built on or any number of issues with the new construction.
Readit News
We merged half a dozen of these threads. Related URLs follow. If there are others, let me know here and I can add them.
https://twitter.com/ashleygjovik/status/1805006150410162322 and https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1805006150410162322.html
https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
https://www.ashleygjovik.com/3250scott.html
https://echo.epa.gov/detailed-facility-report?fid=1100011682...
Maybe the document is from a FOIA request or something similar (and therefore not public)?
> The US EPA notified her they finalized the report but are currently unable to share it with her as Apple apparently declared the report of their (assumed) numerous environmental violations is Apple Confidential. Gjovik has a pending FOIA request as well.
Deleted Comment
But, in 2021 (at https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...), "I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive."
YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
Edit: to be clear I'd expect the EPA to install independently maintained monitoring equipment which is not subject to the bias of Apple or the reporter. Then collect more data!
To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.
There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.
Also, they weren't doing chip fab there. It was R&D for Titan and MicroLED. There's a reason she's litigating her case against Apple pro se and without any expert witnesses and other lawyers. She's a basket case who went from almost fainting one time to now saying she almost died. She scared a lot of people at work who live in the same apartment building with this: https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart... We all bought equipment thinking we were being poisoned. TL;DR, we weren't. I was on the bottom floor and 0000000000 VOCs.
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/03/19/apple-secretly-deve...https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/apple-tech-layoffs-...
In general, I find that people are hit or miss regarding their observations. Sometimes they are so on point that they seem like a savant, and sometimes they miss the mark so hard that I find believing anything further impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_misinformation#List_of_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony
Yeah, the reports quoted with scary big red boxes seem to be... mostly minor or procedural stuff?
And I would very strongly doubt the word of a People Team member as the conclusive evidence of any lying.
People Team are there to reduce the liability for the company, the company in this case are the very company in question for alleged environmental issues.
What actually happens vs what a trained People Team member knows to document are seldom the same thing, and people on the receiving end of the consequences of this seldom have their full wits about them at the time and are almost never lawyered up at that time.
If you had other receipts I'm sure people might consider them, but if your main gripe is based on what a People Team / HR person says... yeah, that's not conclusive either.
The one party I would trust most here are the EPA, and the author didn't fabricate (pun intended) the reports made by them.
see: https://youtu.be/pGK4_sR1CvY?si=KEK9xh0mUEStV76-&t=2680
So no, it doesn't counter the hypochondria theory.
Deleted Comment
I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. That's not including nearby housing - that's just how big the manufacturing facilities themselves are! This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they typically show no increased pollution at all, which proves that it's woefully inadequate even during big emergencies that very obviously affect breathing air quality. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica[3] is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem. We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.
ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]
: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...
3: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/visualizing-toxic-air
This seems a bit high, closer to $100k installation cost for fairly basic real time regulatory monitors seems about right. CEMS (automated stack testing) monitors should be somewhat cheaper if the engineers didn't screw up the housing location on the stack/vent.
Otherwise, your prose very much matches my experience with air quality monitoring in Australia. It's an absolute mess and very much amateur hour compared to water monitoring or meteorology.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28477392
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811746
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830236
4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778735
5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35179170
6: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/apple-legal-battle.html
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
If someone else is wrong, the thing to do is either (1) respond with correct information and better arguments; or (2) let go and move on.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable to assume that a large corporation would maximize its profits: it has a duty to. If the expected profits exceed the expected costs of breaking the law, guess what's going to happen. Probably the fairest outcome here is better enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, this outcome leaves both parties worse off in exchange for an improvement to society.
What the absolute @#$% is this??? Would I be wrong in assuming this should've made national news but was probably kept low thanks to Apple's deep pockets/connections?
And while it's not wrong that fluorine is a lethal gas, it is heavily used in many industries and in medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine#Inorganic_fluorides
Her documentation shows a careless attitude on Apple's side. And there are enough independent parties documenting accidents that she can sue and win. But overall, this doesn't look worse to me than how many other industrial companies operate.
The issue being, of course, the proximity of residential to a "light industrial" vs. "heavy industrial" plot sure changes things for the people moving into those residences...
She never faced to industrial chemical exposure, let alone 24/7. She didn't work in that building. She worked as a program manager for a software engineering team in an office building in Sunnyvale.
On a side note, Fluorine is bad stuff but I believe it doesn't have a long lifespan so any impact would be immediate or not at all
One of the test samples he opened (unexpectedly) had a flourine compound in it that strips calcium from bones… he jumped in the lab shower which sets of an alarm when activated, which leads to lab evacuations and an emergency team in hazmat gear arriving
Factory workers working in dangerous conditions and losing their lives is unfortunate, but their effects hurting/killing the general population (a-la Bhopal Gas Tragedy) should not be legally possible.
I've done some work with the public data from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). OSHA does a great job of making detailed data on inspections and accidents public. If memory serves me correctly, it turns out there are about two deaths per day from work-related causes in the US...
It's a bit weird that most of discussion seems focused on the person sharing the report rather than it's contents.
Edit: OK, dang's comment sort of clears things up but the "thread consolidation" really results in some confusion.
Helpful context on the validity of this heavily editorialized site. Seems like Apple definitely is not in the right here but very unclear if it has anything to do with this persons claims. If you follow her history of forming complaints it is hard to take her serious as most of her complaints get dropped and these are complaints filed against different agencies.
It seems she originally got fired by Apple, where she was a product manager, for leaking NDAed info. It also seems she's been on an anti-apple tear since.
Personally, I worked as an engineer in Apple for several years, and it was by far the most ethically run and conscientiously run place I've ever seen, so her sequence of Apple complaints originates in a non core division, so is not like the engineering core world I was in, but sets off my "wait, what?" sense honed from experience.
That chemical court case seems very strong to me, with multiple indipendent parties having measured the gas in the air. (Edit: and multiple government agencies reporting chemical accidents at Apple) So it doesn't seem like she's trigger happy to sue, which would imply that there might also be merit in her other case.
Good thing Apple never had "don't be evil" as their slogan ;)
Apple started to clean up only after getting tipped off of an EPA raid. They also didn't test or analyse chemicals. And conveniently stopped having weekly inspections. Truly a case of ignorance is bliss. Huh, toxic what now? No no it's NOT toxic, we marked it as non hazardous so it's OK.
Or "we fired the guys who complained until we stopped receiving complaints."
The one thing I found most disgusting, though, was the open tank in the basement. They said the tank would explode if they left it closed, so VOCs must have been venting out. But they left it open in... the basement... without any REAL ventilation. This belongs on r/OSHA.
And their oft lionised 60B$ cash reserves.
Deleted Comment
The problem is really most of her examples seem like she is forcing the connection. Like her 3am dying spells and one of the times it happened her VOC measurements went up. It could very well be there is an issue with the plant exhaust but it could also be the land the apartment was built on or any number of issues with the new construction.