|
On April 27, 2026, I filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction in Gjovik v. Apple Inc., City of Santa Clara, Jenab et al., Case No. 25-cv-07360-PCP, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The hearing is set for June 4, 2026 at 10:00 AM, before Judge P. Casey Pitts in Courtroom 8 — 4th Floor, 280 South 1st Street, San Jose, CA. The hearing is open to the public.
The motion asks the Court to order all hazardous waste, hazardous materials, and toxic gases removed from Apple's semiconductor fabrication plant at 3250 Scott Boulevard within 30 days, to prohibit resumption of hazardous use during the case, and to prohibit the property owner from re-leasing the site to any operator for hazardous use above CalARP, RMP, or Toxic Gas Ordinance threshold quantities. Apple may continue to occupy the building for office or non-industrial use. The relief targets the chemicals — not the building. The full filings:
Since I served the sixty-day notice in June 2025 and filed my Opposition to the City's motion to dismiss in October 2025, the record has only gotten worse for the Defendants. In October 2025, EPA issued a Consent Agreement and Final Order documenting seven RCRA counts. The underlying April 2024 EPA Inspection Report identified 19 Potential Violations — 14 of which were still outstanding when EPA issued its Notice of Violation. Six BAAQMD air-pollution violations remain Pending as of April 26, 2026 — sixteen months after BAAQMD cited them. Santa Clara County's post-Bhopal Toxic Gas Ordinance permitting regime, which exists specifically to prevent catastrophes at facilities like this one, has zero records for this site. Apple's own sworn 2024 throughput report — signed under penalty of law by Apple's EHS Lead in February 2025 — confirms permit-cap exceedances of arsine at 84% over, phosphine at 61% over, and boron trichloride at 824% over. In September 2025, I offered all three Defendants a comprehensive menu of stipulated interim mitigation — air and sewer monitoring with auto-shutoff alarms, public warning signage, basic operator-identification signage (the building bears no public sign identifying Apple as the operator), completion of unfiled hazardous-substance permits, independent professional-engineer assessments, monthly compliance reporting. None of it required admission of liability. All three Defendants refused every measure and offered no counter-proposal. The engineers said it in writingThe most important document in the motion is Apple's own. In its September 2020 Process Hazard Analysis Revalidation, Apple's retained consultant identified specific failure modes — toxic gas leak, fire, explosion, sabotage, truck fire — and assigned to each consequence column the same phrase: "personnel exposure resulting in injury and/or fatality (site personnel or neighbors)." That phrase appears across at least eleven distinct nodes in the document, covering arsine, phosphine, chlorine, ammonia, diborane, silane, and the pyrophoric organometallics like trimethylaluminum and diethyl zinc — chemicals that ignite violently in air or water. Apple's own RMP*Comp dispersion modeling places its arsine worst-case toxic endpoint at 1.1 miles. Inside that envelope: 5,343 residents (a number that excludes the apartment complex across the lot line, which Apple just left out of the count), 1,787 housing units, an amusement park, a college, places of worship, the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, VTA Light Rail, and Highway 101. The Santa Clara Fire Department — the CalARP Administering Agency that received the modeling — has formally written that Apple's plume models are "not favorable for this area" and on June 17, 2025 withheld approval of an adjacent 166-unit residential project pending environmental review. The Granada Islamic School, with up to 900 pre-K through 8th-grade students, sits inside the arsine plume. In a chemical emergency, the school's Shelter-in-Place plan directs the children to evacuate to Meadow Park — directly across the street from the facility. The evacuation route runs the children toward the source. The failure modes Apple's engineers predicted have already materialized. Between June 2016 and May 2024, there were at least eleven toxic gas incidents at the facility, including:
Five chemical-release events in the past three years alone. Santa Clara has been withholding additional incident records since May 2024. Apple's facility sits directly on top of a pressurized artesian aquifer at about 35 feet below grade. Documented head pressure has been increasing since 1988 — a Honeywell monitoring well next door went from 19 feet depth-to-water in 1988 to zero by 1995, with water rising 100 feet up the well shaft. The 2015 Geotechnical Investigation for the apartment site documented four pressurized springs with measured pressure sufficient to drive the water column 10 to 13 feet above grade if uncapped. Apple stores silane, dichlorosilane, silicon tetrachloride, trimethylaluminum, diethyl zinc, and 49% hydrofluoric acid — chemicals that ignite or react violently with water — directly above this system. The geotechnical engineers' only mitigation recommendation was, essentially, don't dig down into it. Apple has known about the increasing aquifer pressure since 2015 and has done nothing. The City has been here before. The Sixth District Court of Appeal held in LSI Logic Corp. v. City of Santa Clara (1995) that the City of Santa Clara was unlawfully negligent for approving sensitive receptors next to chip fabs, and rejected the City's "shelter-in-place safe room" mitigation as inadequate. Current Mayor Lisa Gillmor was on the City Council at the time. The City was on direct, judicially-noticeable notice — thirty years ago — that doing this in this very City violated the duty owed to the surrounding community. The City did it again here, concealed Apple's CalARP-regulated status from the 2015 EIR, and continues to conceal the danger. Apple is also judicially estopped. In my prior personal-injury case before this same District (3:23-cv-04597), Apple won a statute-of-limitations dismissal on the position that, on notice that Apple was operating a semiconductor manufacturing plant at this address, I and any other victims should have immediately suspected the facility as the cause of severe chemical injuries. Apple cannot now turn around and tell this Court the same facility presents no extraordinary risk to anyone living next door. The fab is either ultrahazardous activity or it isn't. What I'm asking forThe motion asks the Court for what the Defendants would not agree to voluntarily:
What comes nextI'll post updates here as briefing develops. Apple, the City, and the property owner have their oppositions due in the coming weeks; my reply follows. If you want to support the case, you can sign the Change.org petition and share it. The community right next door has been kept in the dark about this for nearly a decade, and the people inside the 1.1-mile arsine plume — the residents, the children at the playground across the street, the 900 schoolkids whose evacuation route goes toward the source, the worshippers at the Family Prayer House nursery, the urgent care patients, the workers who have already been hospitalized — deserve to know. The chemicals at this facility can kill thousands of people in minutes if released. Apple's own engineers admitted that in writing under penalty. It's time for the chemicals to come out. -Ashley
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorUpdates from Ashley Gjovik about her whistleblower battle against Apple Inc. Archives
April 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed