MOTOROLA

DANIEL E. NOBLE was hardly a charismatic patriarch. He was bald and soft-bellied, with a thin, stiff smile. His favorite conversations centered on transistor design.

Nobody paid much attention in 1949 when he opened a research lab on North Central Avenue called Motorola.” But it wasn’t long before folks renamed the stone-faced entrepreneur the Father of Arizona Electronics.” With Noble in charge, the Phoenix branch of the relatively obscure Midwestern car-radio firm boomed in the postwar years. In its first decade, the company opened several electronics manufacturing plants in the Valley. By 1970 Motorola had become the state’s largest employer, a distinction the firm holds to this day with its 20,000 employees.

Doctor Dan,” as admirers referred to him, often noted that Motorola was a good corporate neighbor. Phoenix and Motorola had matured together, paving the way for other electronics firms to move to Arizona. The vision, he said, was to create in the Valley of the Sun one of America’s foremost high-tech centers.

Arizona’s low taxes, nonunion labor force, dry climate (less investment was necessary to control humidity in the sensitive electronics plants) and a plentiful supply of clean water so essential to electronics manufacturing all combined to make Noble’s vision a reality.

He was proud of Motorola’s two flagship plants. The first, located at 52nd Street and McDowell in Phoenix, was for decades the world’s largest semiconductor firm. The second was a fortresslike compound-the Government Electronics complex on the lush Indian Bend Wash, near Hayden and McDowell roads in Scottsdale. The secretive Government Electronics plant manufactured high-tech military and aerospace equipment.

As the Valley’s role in the high-tech industry grew, Noble liked to point out that Motorola provided clean” plants, unlike the factories blowing sour smoke in the manufacturing cities of the northeastern United States.

If only he’d been correct.
The image pushed by Noble that Motorola represented a clean high-tech future for Arizona was just that, image.

Shortly after Noble’s death, his beloved Motorola would be directly linked to groundwater contamination of such massive scale that no government agency-municipal, state or federal-can accurately map the extent of it. In fact, his two showpiece Motorola plants would eventually end up on the nation’s Superfund list.

The Indian Bend Wash aquifer in Scottsdale was once considered a potable drinking water source for 350,000 people. Today, its untreated waters are no longer safe for drinking. The other aquifer beneath the 52nd Street semiconductor factory had never been used for public drinking water. But like all Arizona groundwater, it was valued instead as a precious resource to help carry the growing desert city through future periods of severe drought when runoff is depleted.

Today, all drinking water in Scottsdale and Phoenix is safe, largely because the cities abandoned the polluted groundwater sources in favor of water supplied by manmade desert lakes designed to catch mountain runoff.

This doesn’t allay the fears of those people who live in Scottsdale and Phoenix and are certain that they drank and bathed in contaminated water for an unknown number of years.

The aquifer pollution, though still not completely charted, is better understood than suspected health effects in the neighborhoods surrounding the Motorola plants. The contaminated drinking water was laced with trichloroethylene, or TCE, a suspected carcinogen. Although the health effects of TCE are hotly disputed, the chemical also has been linked by some experts to kidney, liver and central-nervous-system illnesses. Valley residents who suspect that their health was ruined by Motorola are now beginning to speak out.

BACK IN DANIEL NOBLE’S heyday, no one, least of all the people who lived near the Motorola plants, could have guessed that Motorola wasn’t the good neighbor it made itself out to be. No one but Motorola, that is.

As early as 1965, Motorola knew it might be endangering the environment by pouring industrial solvents-health-threatening chemicals-from several of its plants into unlined lagoons in the backyard of the Government Electronics property on Indian Bend Wash.

A 1965 internal Motorola memo obtained by New Times details how 30,000 gallons of solvents gathered from all the Motorola plants had been, as the memo itself states, dumped” into the lagoons in the past year. The Motorola memo concludes that such dumping could result in serious consequences from a contamination standpoint.” According to the memo, three times as many solvents-about 90,000 gallons-have gone down the drain…and could complicate matters in event of an incident involving sewer vapors.”

A year later, in 1966, the concern over solvent dumping in the unlined lagoons on Indian Bend Wash is underscored in a second interoffice communique. Solvents are dumped into leaching beds [lagoons] to evaporate” at the Government Electronics plant, which is worrisome because of local ordinances governing soil contamination, fire hazards, water-table contamination and the legal problems which might well arise,” the second memo says. ²It is unclear from records when the dumping ended. Motorola did not fill in its lagoons until 1980, 15 years after the first memo on dumping was written.

Today, Motorola denies that the unlined lagoons were ever used for the disposal of solvents. We never dumped anything,” says Donald Netko, Motorola’s environmental director for the Government Electronics division.

There might have been some potential in the wastewater for small amounts of solvents, but none that we’re aware of.”

Lagoons weren’t Motorola’s only environmental problem, according to federal, state and county documents obtained by New Times during a months-long investigation.

Motorola also illegally dumped solvents in the City of Phoenix sewer, a 1968 letter from the City of Phoenix charges. Adults and children in the neighborhoods around the 52nd Street plant claimed the fumes from the wastewater in the sewer made them ill. At one point, the sewer overflowed, backing its combination of human and industrial waste into nearby homes.

In 1988, after dozens of wastewater violations were logged in city records, Phoenix sued Motorola. Motorola, without admitting guilt, agreed to clean up its wastewater to safe standards.

Motorola also emitted into the air tons of chemicals from its 52nd Street plant, which is just 100 feet away from homes and apartments. In addition to the contamination suspected in the unlined lagoons, the sewers and the air surrounding the plants, thousands of gallons of industrial chemicals were poured into dry wells, leach fields and down the drain, records say.

The chemicals that the high-tech plants dumped into lagoons and dry wells sank into the two aquifers, forming plumes of contamination.

The industrial solvent TCE is the most abundant and worrisome pollutant in the plumes. ²Motorola admits using TCE in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to clean electronic parts, but says the chemical was phased out in the 1970s.

One of the highest TCE measurements in the western United States, and the highest TCE measurement ever recorded in Arizona, was detected beneath Motorola’s 52nd Street plant in 1982. The reading was more than 280,000 times the allowable federal health standard for water used for human consumption. Fortunately, no human drank that water. But officials worry that the severe contamination, which travels underground, might one day infect drinking-water supplies.

At Indian Bend Wash near the Government Electronics complex, TCE had already infected drinking-water supplies, water testers for the cities of Scottsdale and Phoenix discovered in 1981. ²The City of Phoenix reservoir on 64th Street and Thomas contained five times the allowable health limit of TCE. Seven additional drinking-water wells also tested high for the chemicalÏone exceeded federal health limits by 50 times. Scottsdale officials would later estimate that their water supply had been contaminated for 10 to 30 years.

Today, after the contamination of the municipal water supply and troubling claims of TCE-related health problems, Motorola will not take responsibility for polluting the groundwater beneath its own plants. ²ÔWe all acknowledge that Motorola used it [TCE],” says Motorola’s environmental director Netko. But he points out that TCE was used by many other industries, including gas stations and dry cleaners. Therefore it is unfair to blame Motorola for the pollution.

All of us who used it may have somehow contributed. I think what is really important is the fact that we’ve moved forward as a good corporate citizen to…correct the issues.”

TCE IS A STUBBORN chemical that is not easily removed from aquifers.
It is also classified by the federal government as a probable human carcinogen and is suspected of causing a number of other health problems, ranging from headaches and dizziness to kidney and liver disease. A recent University of Arizona study has linked TCE in drinking water with cardiac birth defects.

The federal government is sufficiently worried about TCE to set up a registry for long-term health monitoring of thousands of Americans who were once exposed to the chemical.

Some experts say that from 10 to 15 percent of the people who are exposed to the chemical report a sensitivity to it.

When asked what one might expect from long-term TCE exposure, a federal public-health official says he suspects the most significant health effect from TCE would be leukemia.” If you are only exposed to TCE for a little bit at very low levels you might have drowsiness, or some eye, nose and throat irritation,” says William Nelson, regional representative for the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the U.S. Public Health Service. If you are exposed to that same amount over a long period of time, you might find mild nervous-system effects. If you’re exposed to higher levels, you might have liver and kidney damage. Some of that may be permanent. Some of that may be repairable. Of course if you are exposed to higher levels, you might have very specific central- nervous-system toxicity…and possible cancers such as leukemia,” Nelson says. ATSDR’s position on health problems caused by TCE remains guarded, simply because human beings cannot be substituted for white rats in studies that would conclusively prove or disprove such links.

The public-health agency has conducted two cursory statistical studies of the 52nd Street site and the Indian Bend Wash site.

In 1989, ATSDR, without visiting the 52nd Street neighborhood, concluded that no health study of the area was necessary. Using environmental data provided by Motorola, ATSDR concluded that there was no danger because the polluted aquifer did not supply drinking water to the neighborhood. This report did not take into account the fact that people from the 52nd Street area drank City of Phoenix water that may have been contaminated.

In a study of Indian Bend Wash, Nelson himself concluded that since human exposure to site contaminants may have occurred in the past, and may currently be occurring, this site is being considered for follow-up health studies.” Today Nelson has no idea when, if ever, the overworked agency will revisit Indian Bend Wash. While ATSDR research remains incomplete, the Department of Health Services in 1988 came up with confusing information.

First, the health department said children in the east Phoenix area, including the neighborhoods around the 52nd Street plant, had a high death rate from leukemia from 1970 to 1981.

Next, the health department said children in that same area did not contract leukemia at a high rate during those years.

The Indian Bend Wash Study area had no elevated rates of cancer deaths, it concluded.

In any case, the health department decided that the people near the plants were not in need of further study.

Instead, the state investigated the present environment and concluded in a risk assessment” that was recently released that neighborhoods near the Motorola plants now pose no health risks.

In short, neither state nor federal nor city officials have conducted in-depth long-term monitoring studies of people living near the plants.

In part this is because Motorola and regulators contend that there is no absolute smoking-gun proof that residents actually drank the contaminated water, despite the City of Scottsdale’s estimate that its drinking water had been polluted for 10 to 30 years.

For many people who lived in the area at the time that the wells were discovered to be contaminated, this official posture makes no sense. part 1 of 4

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