5 Shocking Facts About Erin Brockovich
How a Single Mother Took On a Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation
Twenty years after its release, the Oscar winning film, Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts and directed by Steven Soderbergh, remains an impactful and inspiring story. The film details the experiences of the real-life eponymous character in her fight against Pacific Gas and Electric, a company that had knowingly polluted the town of Hinkley’s groundwater supply with a carcinogenic compound and had shockingly attempted to cover it up. Her triumph and bravery in uniting a force against this multi-billion dollar conglomerate provides hope and evidence for what standing up for the right thing and uniting a community can do.
To give a brief overview of the true story, Hinkley is a town in the Mojave Desert, approximately 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In 1952, PG&E built a pumping station near the town, using chromium to prevent corrosion on its water-cooling system. The runoff from this went to wastewater ponds, which for a few years were unlined, causing the chromium to leak into the town’s groundwater supply. When PG&E discovered this in 1987, they reported the findings to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, which ordered them to clean up the damage. In an effort to do this, PG&E approached farms and houses in the local area and offered to buy their properties. One of the people PG&E approached was Roberta Walker who initially refused to sell her house, when they pressed her for a figure she would accept she asked for $250,000 and a few weeks later they agreed to it. Her house was worth a tenth of this. Finding it suspicious, she approached Masry & Vititoe a personal-injury law firm to express her concerns.
At the time, Erin Brockovich had begun working as a clerk at the firm after she had negotiated a job with Ed Masry, who had unsuccessfully represented her as her lawyer after she was the victim of a car accident. Following a hunch while completing some administrative work on the case, Brockovich went to UCLA’s library to read about hexavalent chromium finding article after article that claimed it was carcinogenic. Brockovich continues doing her research, bending the rules where she has to, and when Masry asks her, ‘what makes you think you can just walk in there and take whatever you want?’ she retorts with arguably one of the best lines in film history, ‘they’re called boobs, Ed.’
But seriously, what is hexavalent chromium?
Without getting too deep into the science before your eyes start glossing over, chromium is a naturally occurring metallic element found in plants, soil and rocks and takes multiple different forms. The harmful type we’re focusing on here is hexavalent chromium or chromium-6 and it is generally produced through industrial processes. Hexavalent chromium is used in stainless steel production, textile manufacture and electroplating, which is where a metal coating is applied to another metal and in the case of hexavalent chromium this is to prevent or delay corrosion.
Hexavalent chromium is a known human carcinogen and has been shown to have consistently caused lung cancer in workers who were exposed to the compound through working with objects that contain it, such as welding metals like stainless steel. As a result of exposure to chromium-6, extreme health effects occur such as asthma, kidney and liver damage, respiratory cancer, skin ulcers, eye irritation and damage.
Back to the story, Brockovich informed the families who lived locally and suffered from serious medical ailments, where these strange and seemingly untraceable illnesses were coming from and they eventually banded together to create a force of over 600 plaintiffs to build a case against PG&E. In 1996, the residents, Brockovich and Masry won an arbitration against PG&E for $333 million, the largest settlement ever in US history at the time.
If this isn’t shocking enough for you, I’ve compiled 5 more facts from the film and the true story that are sure to surprise you.
1. In real life Brockovich herself became ill from the hexavalent chromium
Although not seen in the film, Erin Brockovich was actually hospitalised because of ingesting the hexavalent chromium. Soderbergh decided to cut a deleted scene showing this from the final cut because he didn’t like the direction that having the main protagonist hospitalised would take the film.
2. The case never actually went to court
The lawsuit against PG&E was settled through arbitration, meaning that PG&E were not charged with anything and were able to simply make the case go away by paying for it. Although they settled for $333 million, they were a multi-billion dollar company.
3. PG&E continuously and deliberately misled the town
Throughout the film, we see how PG&E told the families who lived on the affected land that what was really in the water was chromium-3, a nutrient that is actually beneficial for consumption, and hid the fact that they knew the water actually contained chromium-6, the carcinogenic kind.
The doctors that PG&E paid for the affected individuals to see further corroborated this lie, informing these trusting families that their illnesses (nosebleeds followed by cancer followed by ulcers followed by a different type of cancer) were not related to any chemical interference and were simply a series of the worst case of luck the world has ever seen.
4. This isn’t the only case against PG&E
In 2005, a similar lawsuit in Kettleman City, California, found that PG&E had hired consultants to publish a fraudulent analysis of cancer mortality in Chinese villagers who were exposed to hexavalent chromium to try to hide the link between the chromium and cancer.
5. Hexavalent chromium still contaminates drinking water in many American states
In 2010 (14 years after the Hinkley case against PG&E and 10 years after Erin Brockovich was released) the Environmental Working Group tested the tap water in 35 American cities and found hexavalent chromium in 31 of them. At this time, the utilities that provide this tap water served more than 26 million people. No wonder I’ve never seen an American drink tap water.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency, set the standard for the amount of chromium allowed in drinking water in 1991 (yes that’s right, they haven’t updated it in 30 years) based on, in their own words, ‘the best available science at the time’ because continued exposure to hexavalent chromium can result in allergic dermatitis. They decided that 100 parts per billion (ppb) or 0.1 milligram per litre (mg/L) is a safe level in regard to avoiding skin irritation. Yet intriguingly, the State of California, which is where the original PG&E scandal took place, has a much stricter Mass Contamination Level for hexavalent chromium of 0.05 mg/L and a Public Health Goal to make this level 0.00002 mg/L.
Therefore, it seems that the conspiracy surrounding dangerous chemical compounds in United States water supplies does not end with the story of Erin Brockovich, with many boards and agencies still appearing to shadily evade more thorough examinations into, and stricter guidelines on, what is actually in the tap water that people drink, wash with and swim in.
So what does Erin Brockovich mean for us in 2021?
While we might think that seedy corporations exploiting the trust and slight naivety of us ordinary people is something of the past, perhaps we should adopt some of Brockovich’s traits when we look at the world around us twenty five years on. Her critical analysis of the story she was being fed, her refusal to accept ‘facts’ that clearly contradicted what she knew to be the truth and her determination to stop at nothing to seek justice for those around her, through a system in which she had no training or qualifications, is an example we can all aspire to and is the essence at the core of Find Others. If Erin Brockovich can show us anything, it’s the profound impact rallying and uniting a community has in making real, tangible change and seeking actionable justice.
Stay updated on Find Others via our Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram channels.
