It seems multiple generations have really downplaying the risk of some of these chemicals. The whole "man up" "osha is a joke" attitude really seems painfully helpless when there small amounts of chemicals that are undetectable by the senses that can kill you, damage your mind irreparably, damage your ability to have healthy children. Heck even our gender expression is controlled by a small amount of chemicals called hormones. I think some fragile egos hate to admit it, but we're entirely powerless to these chemicals unless we can detect and avoid them.

However when they are invisible and often odorless in dangerous doses, number in the 10s of thousands, and are very slow/expensive to detect (i.e. requiring $10k+ mass spectrometers), the only feasible answer I can think of is collective action (i.e. stronger laws, or perhaps unions if those fail). I think such events of pollution need to be investigated as criminal when they have credibly ended lives.

(P.S. I wonder if any women didn't have fullblown miscarriages, but had a baby with other issues that can't necessarily by tied to this exposure. This is something you see in other exposure cases)

There must be no shortage of integrity & knowhow.

The problem arises when the chemicals on site add up to a need for professional handling exceeding that which exists at the site.

The top person has to actually know what to do, and actually step up to the plate and do it in complete co-operation with the ones at the front lines handling the materials. And everyone in between. Another whole level of risk management needs to focus on exposure radius when it can extend beyond the confines of the recognized hazardous site. The degree of risk relative to proximity can build to where many off-site occupants are not informed when things escalate beyond a minimal amount.

Which almost never happens ideally, even when it's a purpose-built chemical facility.

In an "office" building it can be a real slippery slope. Soldering a few cables or treating PCBs may not seem like a problem for an occasional prototype. And then with growth pressure you get a dozen people doing it all day every couple months. Pretty rough, but at least it's not every day and at least it's not every month.

How you get there and where you go from there is really the defining characteristic.

This repeated pattern of illegal, safety-regressive behavior must be a fluke. Frankly, if the leadership creates cultures that harm their workers and where retaliation against workers was normal, then you would expect that to occur at other companies they run. Like, some kind of successful lawsuit where workers complained about their supervisors calling all their black coworkers the N-word and all the swastikas on the walls then were reprimanded for bringing it up [7] where the judge legally declared the companies "conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[8] and awards in excess of the standard maximum were "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla's repeated failure to rectify it"[9].

See, the rampant disregard for their workers and retaliation against workers is not at all in their corporate DNA all the way to the top. Just your regular old California Bay Area company where workers are called the N-word [10] and get retaliated against.

[1] https://payloadspace.com/spacex-back-up-to-its-neck-in-disch...

[2] https://www.sacurrent.com/news/federal-government-fines-elon...

[3] https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/boring-company-drilling-fluid...

[4] https://fortune.com/2025/11/12/elon-musk-boring-company-tunn...

[5] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26184164-tbc-state-l...

[6] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...

[7] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...

[8] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 29

[9] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 1

[10] I mean seriously, where do you even find people who will use the N-word in the Bay Area. Did they put all their job ads in the KKK and Neo-Nazi Bay Area Facebook groups? Is it like one of those anti-spy tests where you have people say: "Death to (insert country leader here)", but you have to use the N-word to get hired?