![]() ![]() But safe water could be delivered, and the town still seemed like a place where people could live their lives.īut over a decade later, new problems started to arise. What she did between 19 became so famous, "Erin Brockovich" was used as a verb on a recent episode of Better Call Saul.Īfter the ensuing settlement, the affected residents were swimming in money, which is good, because most of their pool water was probably contaminated. In 1992, Brockovich started gathering plaintiffs. Armed with a little bit of light research about water contamination, Walker went to the Law Offices of Masry & Vititoe, where Erin Brockovich worked. Since she didn't feel like selling anyway, she hit them with a $250,000 counteroffer, and they said yes. Hinkley resident Roberta Walker thought it was strange when she received a $60,000 offer for her little piece of real estate in the middle of nowhere, which was probably only worth $25,000. In 1987, they notified the necessary watchdog group, invested $12.5 million in cleanup, and in the early 1990s, they started offering to buy real estate in spots where the contamination was worst. There was just a boom in business at her bar, a big media circus when some residents got huge checks, and then business slowly tapered off.īut PG&E did act irresponsibly, and watchdog groups would argue that they didn't stop acting irresponsibly after the settlement.īefore 1972, PG&E dumped out 370 million gallons of hexavalent chromium-slightly more in terms of volume than the oil spilled in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Finding out the huge company that does business in town has been acting irresponsibly was a shock, but the contaminated water never killed Brenda. She had a hard time casting PG&E as the villain in the story of her life. "I didn't know it was going on, or I wouldn't have bought stock in PG&E," she said. But it sounded like things were more complicated than that for Brenda. "I know some of the people who got money and shouldn't have." It seemed like an odd stance to take, since the bad guy here is PG&E, a really easy character to hate. According to Brenda, Brockovich came to the bar to meet with PG&E representatives and conduct legal business, although she couldn't tell me exactly which business, since she hadn't been eavesdropping. Riley's was one of the spots that featured into the Erin Brockovich story-although it wasn't used in the film. It looks like they're just knocking down the houses and saying goodbye to a big headache. ![]() After all, PG&E isn't turning all that land into brand new condominiums. In fact, according to the San Bernardino Sun, they'd already turned themselves into Hinkley's largest landholder, and PG&E's insatiable appetite for Hinkley real estate at any cost was what originally clued residents in to the fact that something was awry back in the 1990s.Ī growing number of residents have accepted offers in the past few years, and local business has really started to suffer. The company had already been buying up property for decades. In the scene, Brockovich tells Donna Jensen, a made-up victim of the contamination, that the settlement is "enough for whatever you could ever need." It's a great story, because putting cancer in people's water is an unambiguously villainous thing to do, and the bad guys in the story lose.īut in November of 2010, PG&E publicly offered to just straight-up buy a huge amount of property in certain contaminated areas, which made it appear that something was suddenly wrong.
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