BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Tesla still hasn’t paid a $750 fine for spilling 916 gallons of a dyed water solution into Matadero Creek eight months ago, according to emails obtained by the Post.
Stanford officials asked the city to remove Stanford from Tesla’s citation, but Code Enforcement Supervisor Elisa Vargas denied the request because Stanford owns the property at 1501 Page Mill Road.
“You may want to reach out to the tenants to understand what the issues may be regarding non-payment,” Vargas said in an email on April 10.
Tesla’s Environmental Program Manager Bernardo Garcia has been working with the city to map Tesla’s private sewers and storm drain pipes.
The city is requiring Tesla to show the flow paths for all pipes, drains and connections to the city’s systems.
The company will use dyes, cameras and information from the old tenant HP to map the site, according to a plan submitted on March 21.
Garcia told the city that the issues that caused the spill have been addressed. Tesla plugged a storm drain and removed green dye from the water used to cool its AI supercomputer, he said in an email to the city on May 5.
“The system does not contain any chemicals in concentrations that make the stored water a hazardous substance,” Garcia said.
Fluid from a supercomputer
Residents first noticed the spill on Oct. 22 after seeing cleanup crews in a concrete channel across the street from Boulware Park, about a mile away from the Tesla property.
Crews were out with a bulldozer, tanker trucks, hoses and dumpsters filled with dirt to clean up a bright green fluid.
The city on Oct. 24 announced the spill was from a water-based solution used to cool down Tesla’s AI supercomputer. The solution had less than 1% sodium hydroxide and 1-2% borax and wasn’t a health risk, the city said.
Cleanup crews abruptly stopped working on Oct. 25 after a car hit a fire hydrant in front of McDonald’s at 3128 El Camino Real, sending a large volume of water flowing downstream.
The city had a community meeting on Nov. 1 and apologized for its slow notification, five days after the spill.
From 12 to 916 gallons
Tesla initially reported 12 gallons had spilled but later upgraded the total amount to 916 gallons, Fire Chief Geo Blackshire said at the meeting.
John King, president of the Barron Park Neighborhood Association, said the spill reminded him of when more than 200 gallons of diesel spilled from the VA Hospital into the same creek in May 2021.
“We’re kind of dealing with post-traumatic stress from the VA spill and containment, and how it happened, and the notification that didn’t happen then,” King said at the meeting.
City Manager Ed Shikada said the spill “was not in and of itself a serious incident” but will be a learning experience for the city.
“Notifications will be faster and broader,” he said.
Tesla representatives weren’t at the community meeting and haven’t returned a request for comment about the spill.
Vargas issued a “notice of violation” for the property on March 5.
Palo Alto city gov’t should be fined too, for covering this up. The moment they knew about the spill, they should have used their social media platforms to let people knew. Why not an alert in the Uplift email newsletter, in the space where the city’s recommended recipe is to be found. But they chose to sit on this, hoping nobody would discover what their little buddies at Tesla had done. Then they Tesla is hit with a puny $750 fine. Big deal.
Every company at the research park that deals with hazardous materials should be required by Stanford to also map their drains, etc., plugging any can carry toxics into our City system, into creeks and the Bay.
Prevention is needed or the decades long environmental harm to water, health, wildlife and habitat from Stanford Research Park will persist.