MOTOROLA

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Oh, brother. We definitely drank it. There’s no doubt,” says Lisa McNamara, who lived just four doors down from the Motorola plant. It just makes me sick that the city didn’t start testing the wells earlier.”

Lisa McNamara has reason to be angry. Various members of her family have been stricken with illnesses suspected to be caused by TCE-birth defects, cancer, autoimmune disease, kidney problems.

People in McNamara’s old neighborhood-and other neighborhoods in the two Superfund sites-have banded together to target Motorola in two separate class-action lawsuits now winding their way through two Arizona courts.

Among other things, the lawsuits allege Motorola (in one lawsuit, other companies are named as well) was negligent in releasing TCE and other chemicals into the environment. Both suits allege that people in the neighborhoods were exposed to TCE, and that TCE causes health problems. The plaintiffs ask for unspecified damages, and long-term medical monitoring funded by Motorola.

In court papers, Motorola denies negligence, denies dumping TCE and denies that TCE even causes health problems. ÔWe strongly deny all of the plaintiffs’ assertions of wrongdoing, and reaffirm our commitment to sound environmental practices that protect our employees, neighbors and others,” says a press release issued by Motorola shortly after the lawsuits were filed. ²BOTH OF THE TCE-contaminated aquifers beneath and near the Motorola plants have been targeted for cleanup under the federal Superfund law. And Motorola, while refusing to admit that it polluted, has spent nearly $30 million on cleanup efforts.

But cleanup has been painfully slow.
In January, Motorola began to clean a portion of the 52nd Street aquifer. It will be another year before substantial cleanup of Indian Bend Wash begins.

The contamination problem was exacerbated at different times by either state or federal regulators entrusted with protecting the groundwater.

Federal and state regulators contributed to substantial pollution of Indian Bend Wash by not cementing old wells that cascaded TCE-laced water into the drinking-water aquifer.

A federal official admits that the Environmental Protection Agency has chosen a slower cleanup remedy for Indian Bend Wash in part because EPA must take into account that Motorola and other companies might resist paying for more expensive remedies.

In the case of the Motorola 52nd Street plant, the City of Phoenix actually protested takeover of that site by the EPA, preferring instead to place the cleanup in the hands of the state, a regulatory entity less stringent than the federal government.

Without sufficient federal scrutiny, the state allowed Motorola to take over the cleanup reins. Until several months ago, when a new director assumed leadership of the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the state relied for all its data on reports supplied by Motorola’s consultants, without checking on the accuracy of the information. The quality of the data is now being questioned by a new generation of regulators and neighborhood groups.

A 1989 cleanup agreement between the state and Motorola is criticized by the EPA for allowing Motorola too many loopholes.

Today, 12 years after officials discovered the pollution, the damage is far more devastating than anyone expected. Today, the state and federal regulators cannot predict when the two aquifers will be cleaned up. They cannot say if the contamination will ever be completely cleaned up.

They cannot project the ultimate costs of the cleanup.
The public owns that water, and it has been taken away from us,” says Jim Lemmon, a public-health lobbyist and environmental consultant. In the early 1980s, Lemmon investigated the contaminated aquifers at Indian Bend Wash, and was one of the few state regulators who warned that the plumes were spreading rapidly and must be dealt with quickly.

To this day, Lemmon says, residents of Phoenix and Scottsdale still do not understand that they have lost a precious resource-two underground aquifers. There is even a state law, passed belatedly in the mid-1980s, that says all groundwater should be treated as potential drinking water. There is very little attention paid to the fact that this resource has been damaged, and will probably never be returned to its original state,” says Lemmon.

Motorola’s Don Netko says there is no loss of resource,” because all water, once it is pumped from the aquifers, will meet stringent federal drinking water standards. But no one, not even Netko, will say for sure that the aquifers themselves will ever be completely cleaned of TCE.

THE MOTOROLA STORY is a modern drama that is playing itself out across America. This nation pioneered the high-tech industry in the post-World War II years. Throughout the United States, communities that once welcomed the smokeless clean” semiconductor factories as the answer to their postwar economic malaise are now faced with groundwater pollution, especially by TCE.

About one-half of the 1,300 Superfund sites across the United States contain TCE.

In these communities, citizens’ groups voice frustration over the apparent ability of large companies to lead regulators around by the nose,” says Ted Smith, an attorney and a director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a group fighting massive groundwater pollution by high-tech industries in California’s Silicon Valley.

The evidence of anger over groundwater pollution by high-tech industries is found across the country.

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, legislators banded together to pass a law forcing high-tech companies to reduce their toxic emissions. Beneath bone-dry Los Angeles, the San Gabriel water basin is one of the most polluted aquifers in the United States, partly because high-tech companies dumped TCE and other solvents. And just 100 miles from Phoenix, at least two lawsuits alleging health problems from TCE-laced public drinking water have been filed against Hughes Aircraft. Hughes settled out of court with nearly 2,000 plaintiffs for $85 million in 1990. The other lawsuit is pending.

In all of this, there is a dilemma. Citizens with health problems and environmentalists are outraged by the contamination, but community leaders-including regulators-often find themselves caught in a bind. What do they do with companies that represent so many thousands of jobs and are such an integral part of the economy? The pollution is there, but on a certain level the horse is out of the barn. What is the point of punishment? Stuck in the middle of this quandary, the people in the neighborhoods are turning to the courts.

MOTOROLA IS AN $11 billion worldwide high-tech corporation that manufactures things that we all need and use-semiconductor technology for cars, cameras, computers. The company also churns out car phones, two-way radios, pagers and the secretive military communications equipment.

Today, Motorola touts itself as an environmentally friendly company.
It has volunteered to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals by the end of this year, says Netko. Also by the end of the year, he says, it plans to reduce solvent emissions into the air by 90 percent at the 52nd Street plant.

The issue is that we want to be part of the solution,” Netko says.
In some cases, Motorola has substituted a product made out of orange and lemon peels, as well as simple soap and water, for the controversial solvents.

What is ultimately good for the community is ultimately good for us,” says Motorola spokesman Lawrence Moore.

Motorola still invests heavily in the Valley. Today 20,000 people-about a quarter of the company’s entire work forceÏearn their living at Motorola plants in the Phoenix area.

There are now entire families in Phoenix-mothers and fathers and their grown childrenÏwho work for Motorola.

In 1990, Motorola donated about $2.2 million to worthy causes in Phoenix. It was the largest local contributor to the United Way that year.

Motorola also received the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce, and it was cited for creating products of exceptionally high quality.

If Motorola has demonstrated a certain level of corporate responsibility, there are also signs that are less reassuring.

The same year that Motorola received the Malcolm Baldrige award, 1988, the Government Electronics division pleaded guilty to falsifying documents in a defense-contract scandal. Motorola paid the U.S. government approximately $17 million in penalties.

Knowing that Arizona’s regulators trusted Motorola to supply all of the environmental contamination data at the 52nd Street site without independent verification, it is disturbing to learn that Motorola falsified figures supplied to the federal government in another arena.

Even with Motorola controlling the information, there is ample evidence that the semiconductor firm was a major player in TCE contamination. There is the paper trail left by the company itself. There is documented government testing of TCE in drinking-water wells. In the case of Indian Bend Wash, there are quality-controlled data that map out the plume of TCE.

Motorola publicly claims there is no proof of dumping TCE or other solvents. No proof even that people were exposed to TCE. No proof that there are any health problems associated with TCE.

Valley residents who dispute Motorola’s claims feel they are up against a corporate giant of unusual clout. There are numerous reminders that the state’s largest employer has both respect and influence.

Phoenix named a well-traveled road in the Papago Buttes the Galvin Parkway-in honor of Paul Galvin, Motorola’s Midwestern founder. There is also a theatre at Arizona State University named after Galvin.

It was Paul Galvin who sent Daniel E. Noble to Phoenix to start up Motorola’s research lab.

Noble died in 1980, and today, the science library at ASU bears his name.
Shortly before he died, the patriarch wrote a reflective piece for the company in-house magazine, Motorola Monitor. As usual, a scenic photograph of Arizona graced the cover of the magazine.

I confess that I am shocked,” Noble wrote toward the end of his life, when I hear the simplistic suggestion that, in the future, engineers must weigh the social significance of the work they are doing.”

THE McNAMARA FAMILY and Motorola moved into the 52nd Street area at about the same time. The McNamaras lived in a small house on Brill Street, just a few hundred feet away from the new Motorola plant at 5005 East McDowell. Motorola’s tidy plant sat on 93 acres. The lawn in front of the plant was beautifully manicured. The architecture facing the McDowell building was elegantly modern.

Jeanine and Tom McNamara were active in the Mormon church; they neither smoked nor drank, and they figured the neighborhood would be a perfect place to raise their children. They didn’t particularly like the fact that their sewer sometimes backed up and smelled of industrial chemicals, or that the air was so thick on some nights with a chemical smell that a person couldn’t stay outside.

But they figured that, all in all, Motorola was a good neighbor.
Jeanine McNamara hadn’t lived in the area long before she started noticing that something was wrong with her family’s health. She herself had a miscarriage and a stillborn baby. One of her daughters, Lyla, was born in 1964 with two thumbs on one hand and webbed feet and suffered serious kidney disease that eventually necessitated a kidney transplant. Her six other daughters suffered from severe headaches and allergies, and often had bladder infections. Her daughter Leslie suffered from an autoimmune disease. Another daughter grew precancerous nodes on her thyroid gland.

Just down the street, Jeanine’s best friend gave birth to a child with four kidneys. The baby’s brother grew up to have liver problems.

A few blocks away, a young mother earned a little extra money by washing gloves used by workers at Motorola’s 52nd Street plant. Each week, her two children would help her sort the gloves for washing. Later, both kids grew into young adults and contracted virulent forms of cancer. part 2 of 4

MOTOROLA FOR DECADES THE PROMISE OF CLEA… v5-06-92