Polluted town championed by Erin Brockovich is largely gone despite $333M settlement
Fifteen years after a movie helped make legal assistant Erin Brockovich famous for her role in helping win a $333 million settlement over environmental pollution in Hinkley, California, the small farming community town is largely gone.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which agreed to the settlement concerning elevated levels of chromium 6 in the town’s groundwater, has purchased the property of about 300 residents. The town’s post office and market are either closed or expected to shut down soon, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Earlier thought by residents to be limited to the area surrounding the company’s compressor station, where waste material from giant cooling towers was put into unlined ponds in the 1950s and 1960s, chromium 6 has since been found in a much wider swath.
At one point, a toxic water plume was some five miles long and two miles wide, the San Bernardino Sun reported in 2013. Opinions differ as to whether the plume moved in recent years from the original contamination site or was there all along and simply took a while to be identified.
The polluted area has diminished, apparently due to ongoing remediation efforts by Pacific Gas & Electric. Part of the company’s effort is represented by fields of alfalfa where people once lived; the crop is effective in transforming chromium 6 into micronutrient chromium 3. The final phase of the cleanup plan is still being developed.
“You had a great community out here, and now it’s gone,” resident Roger Killian told the Times.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Erin Brockovich Goes Back to Work on Hinkley, Where Residents Claim New Chromium Problems”
San Bernardino Sun: “Hinkley: A ghost town in the making”
