'Erin Brockovich' made their town famous. They still don’t have clean water.
30:36 Share

And now, a next-level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day. You've got AT&T 5G, so you're fully confident. But the vendor isn't responding, and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com slash 5G for you for details. ♪

Back in the year 2000, this big movie came out. It stars Julia Roberts, and she plays this no-nonsense single mom who gets a job as a law clerk to support her kids. I'm smart, I'm hardworking, and I'll do anything, and I'm not leaving here without a job.

This movie is all about a legal battle in this tiny town in Southern California where something in the water was making people sick. These people don't dream about being rich. They dream about being able to watch their kids swim in a pool without worrying that they'll have to have a hysterectomy at the age of 20. Julia Roberts' character is named Erin Brockovich, which is also the name of the movie. And she fights for the people of this town, Hinkley, California.

People are dying. You've got document after document here right under your nose that says why, and you haven't said one word about it. I want to know how the hell you sleep at night. And there is a typical Hollywood happy ending. The people in Hinkley win the court battle and get a huge settlement. The payout comes from PG&E. It's the utility company that had been dumping a dangerous chemical in the water. The judge came back with a number. He's going to make them pay...

$333 million. And... Oh, my God. And he's going to make them give $5 million of that to your family. But that's not the whole story. I've had to introduce myself now. I'm Erin Brockovich, not Julia Roberts. The real-life Erin Brockovich never expected she would become a kind of symbol for environmental justice. For her, that fame is bittersweet because the battle she won in the movie continues today.

the water in Hinkley still isn't clean. We're coming up on 25 years of the film, and I started out in Hinkley in '91, '92. It just blows my mind that here we are 30 years into the future, and I wonder what's changed.

I've been investigating different places across the country where regular people are fighting for access to clean water and looking at communities where access to safe drinking water is not available. Sylvia Foster-Frau is an investigative reporter at The Post. This year, she's traveled the country learning just how many Americans don't have access to safe water. This story in Hinkley, California, was seen as one of the biggest success stories

So when I learned that the town featured in this movie still has toxins in their water decades later, I was pretty shocked. I just can't believe that after all this time, oftentimes I feel like I could cry that we're having this conversation. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports.

I'm Martine Powers. It's Friday, December 27th. This year marks 50 years since the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which promises access to clean tap water. We brought you stories from places where people still don't have that. Today, we'll go back to the town made famous in the movie Erin Brockovich and learn why the water there is still contaminated. ♪

Sylvia, you should know that I have seen Erin Brockovich multiple times. Oh. And I think it's a great movie. And I also feel like it's a good – it's not a movie about journalism, but it feels like it's an investigative journalism movie because of the way that she goes about – Totally. I was just going to say that. Yeah, I think journalists, like, really relate to it because she's investigating, like, a potential crime, you know. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it really ends on this triumphant note.

of these people with the help of Erin Brockovich and this law firm that they are able to take down PG&E, score this big settlement, get clean drinking water, help the families who are living there be able to recover from what's happened to them

And it sounds like your reporting is that this isn't really a happy Hollywood ending. How did you first hear about this or learn about the more complicated story of this town?

So the Erin Brockovich movie had come up several times in my reporting on access to safe drinking water, and it did make me wonder how that community was doing now. So I went online and I came across a report about hexavalent chromium in the water in Hinkley. It was a public report that was put out by the state water board.

And I started doing more research and realized that this issue of chromium in the water was still ongoing. And I immediately knew that I wanted to reach out to the real Erin Brockovich.

What is she like in real life? Julia Roberts did a pretty spot-on portrayal of her. She's bold. She speaks her mind. I'm sorry if I get in trouble for saying an F-bomb. I'm serious. And she really embodies getting to the truth and getting justice without any concern for if it's awkward or socially acceptable. When I started in Hinkley, it was like,

You're not a doctor. You're not a lawyer. You're not a scientist. You're foul mouth running around in a miniskirt and a red stiletto, single mom. I mean, come on. What do you know? I love that immediately I'm like, yes, that is Julia Roberts character from the movie. Yes. So tell me a little bit about the real story of how Erin Brockovich got connected with with all this.

Yeah, so for Brockovich, the story started when she was working at a law firm in Southern California. She was a legal clerk there, and it's the 90s, and basically her lawyer dumps a box of files on her desk and says, there seems to be some sort of property dispute here. Could you just take a look at what this is?

And she starts going through that box. And not only are there property record files, but there are also medical records. And it's from a resident in this tiny town called Hinkley, California. And the resident was Roberta Walker. And it was the medical records of her and her family and also some property deed files. And so Brockovich is trying to connect the dots, like what's going on here? She's trying to connect the dots.

She goes to the town and starts talking to people. And she learns that this company that has a station there, it's called Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E,

had started offering to buy residents property, like literally putting in offers on their homes for really high offers. In Roberta Walker's case, she had bought her home for $20,000. And at the end of the kind of back and forth with PG&E, PG&E was offering her $200,000 for her home.

Oh, interesting, which I'm sure in that moment you're like, wow, somebody's offering me a lot of money for my house. That's great. But also why? Exactly. It was a great opportunity for many residents, but it also begged the question of, well, what's going on in my home or on my property that would make you want to buy this much?

So Erin Brockovich went up to Roberta Walker's door and Roberta told me she wasn't quite sure what to make of Erin. But Erin told me it really didn't take long before she felt a connection with Roberta as someone who had to kind of struggle to be listened to. I felt a very kindred spirit with her. I felt I recognized for her not being heard, not being seen, not being listened to. I connected to her as a mom.

And I wanted to help however I could. Roberta Walker at the time was in her 30s. Now she's 71 and she has two daughters. She's Latina and had lived in Hinkley for a long time and really wanted to stay there with her family and near her extended family.

And she was increasingly growing suspicious about the actions of PG&E right next door. She had horses that were dying inexplicably. Her daughters were getting nosebleeds and they had asthma and her whole family was suffering from a host of health issues. And PG&E, she said, was offering free family doctor's visits and they began delivering water bottle for free to her and other residents in the community.

We're able to go and have free physicals and all this and that. And then I went, I thought, oh, cool. We're going for a free physical, you know, and everything was fine. We're good. Everything was great. And you got to remember that this is, it was a poor community and we were not wealthy. We were barely hanging on. So when they say free, you're going to go, right? When they say free bottled water, you're going to, yay. Yeah.

At one point, Roberta began to test just how far PG&E would go. She said she requested more and more water bottles a week until the company gave her so much bottled water that it filled up her entire swimming pool. And that's when she really was like, OK, this is not normal. Something is going on here. The things just didn't seem right. Just like that was telling me.

So obviously it sounds like in that moment, Roberta was highly suspicious of this company and like, why are they so willing to just give her free stuff, give her free water? What,

was going on. So PG&E is one of the country's largest energy utilities and the largest one in the state of California. And it's gained a lot of notoriety in recent years for the role that it has allegedly played in California's wildfires. One of its many compressor stations is located in Hinkley, California. And so that's where they kind of compress the gas and shoot it through the pipes to go on into the homes of millions of residents of California.

And they use water to cool down the gas in those pipes. And it's that water that they put hexavalent chromium in to reduce the water's rusting of the pipes. What is hexavalent chromium?

Hexavalent chromium is a toxic form of the metal chromium. It's also called chromium-6, and it's been found to be very dangerous to human health, but it's cheap, relatively so, and it's often been used as an anti-corrosive mechanism. So you put it in water and it helps prevent rusting of pipes.

And when they discard that used wastewater, they put it in these unlined ponds. And the idea was that it would just kind of evaporate and disappear. But when the ponds are unlined, that water seeps into the groundwater. And groundwater is this whole ecosystem, right? It's moving. And these people who rely on private wells are pumping water. So they're pulling water from the ground to drink.

And that's causing this hexavalent chromium in the water to then go into their wells and become part of their drinking water. It's what they're drinking with, they're showering with, they're filling their swimming pools with, the whole thing. Wow.

And so in 1987, PG&E reported, for the first time at least that's publicly known, that hexavalent chromium levels were found in some testing wells that PG&E had. And they were required to report that to the state because it was above what was the legal maximum at the time in the state. So by the 80s, they had realized that the wastewater that they were putting out into this community, that it was actually getting into people's water wells.

Yes. And so the state and the local water board, you know, began telling them that they needed to do things to remedy it. But it was all seemed to be very hush hush. The residents were not aware about this, but PG&E as part of their sort of response said,

began offering bottled water, began also buying up land for areas that were really particularly contaminated. But there was no real clear communication to the residents, according to them, about what exactly was going on. And no sense that maybe the health problems that they were having was directly related to that.

And what were those health problems? What were they starting to notice? So there was a range of health issues from kidney, stomach, and liver damage, increased risk of cancer. A lot of people in the community had developed cancer. Roberta and her family, for example, had a host of health issues. So she has, at this point in her life, had five stomach surgeries, three breast surgeries,

Many of her family have had health problems. So her daughters both have autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia. One has had a hysterectomy. Another is having hers next year. Roberta has already had her hysterectomy. Her mother and father-in-law died of cancer. Her brother-in-law has Hodgkin's disease. Her husband has prostate cancer. And even her grandchildren have autoimmune conditions.

We all have chromium-6 in our DNA. Oh, really? Yeah. She said that people in her family had tested with high chromium-6 levels in their bloodstream. And so between that and the high levels that were reported in the well water near her home, it started to dawn on her that her family was in real danger. I was angry. I was pissed. And it wasn't because of

so much what they were doing, but it was what they could be doing with my kids. Because reading on it, it's like that's a death sentence. To me, that's what it sounded like when I read it, was it was a death sentence. And all I could think of was my daughters. My God, how can they do this? So what happens after Roberta gets connected with Aaron Brockovich and they start to try to get answers and get some kind of justice?

Yeah, so they gathered together stories of hundreds of people living in Hinkley with really similar experiences to Roberta Walker's. They knocked on doors. They did their own kind of investigating, you know,

And they launched a lawsuit and a heated court battle. And in 1996, PG&E settled and agreed to pay $333 million to 650 Hinckley residents. The idea was that residents would be getting millions of dollars to compensate for the medical care that they needed.

Did PG&E acknowledge at all what they'd done here, acknowledge some kind of wrongdoing or recognize that what they'd done with this water had had these horrific effects for these families? So PG&E has acknowledged publicly, and it's even on their website, the history of the dump and how they had started using hexavalent chromium and how it leaked into the groundwater in Hinkley.

So I asked PG&E whether their actions directly caused people's health problems in the community, but they did not respond to my question. So these settlements, I mean, the numbers that you're putting out of, what, $330 million for these residents? I mean, that's a huge number, and that seems like a big success. Yeah.

And that also, I think, speaks to why they wanted to make a movie about it, because it is this kind of triumphant moment of they were able to get so much money from this company. Can you talk a little bit about the attention around the movie and this moment of like they win the settlement and then they get this national attention because Julia Roberts is coming in to star in this movie about their town? Yeah, so they get the settlement in 1996.

In 2000, the movie comes out and it's Julia Roberts starring as the lead. And it goes through everything that we've just talked about. And it brings also more attention to the community again. Now people know the name Hinckley. They know the name Brockovich. They know that it was this like incredible story about a community rising up against a company. Very kind of David Goliath. Julia Roberts ends up winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Brockovich.

Thank you, thank you ever so much. I want to acknowledge so many people that made Erin Brockovich Erin Brockovich, but let me make my dress pretty. And it's all seen like this incredible, inspirational story as an example of how a community can stick up for itself and win in the end. That's where the version of the story that most people know ended. But for Roberta Walker and for many others, it was just the beginning.

In fact, there is still hexavalent chromium in their water, and it's very much above the levels that are considered safe for human consumption. We'll be right back.

Today's episode is supported by Z-Biotics. The holiday season is upon us, and some days after a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day. Until I found Z-Biotics. Z-Biotics is a pre-alcohol probiotic drink that is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut.

It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com slash reports to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use reports at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with 100% money-back guarantee, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money.

Head to zbiotics.com slash reports and use the code reports at checkout for 15% off. So Sylvia, tell me about your trip to Hinkley. What does it look like now?

So Hinkley is an unincorporated area, but it used to be more of a town with sort of a town center. It had a corner store, a gas station, an elementary school that was a Title I school, so kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds, but was actually very successful. It was one of the best schools in the district, and people in the community were very proud of their school. But all that has closed. No more corner store, gas station, no more school, no more post office, no more school

And so many people have moved away. Some of them was because PG&E bought their property and they chose to move somewhere else. Some folks had health problems and wanted easier access to medical facilities. They're out in a rural desert part of California where hospitals and medical access tend to be a bit harder than if you're in a more urban area. So for all those reasons, it's basically a ghost town. ♪

So when I got to Hinkley, Roberta Walker offered to drive me around. All these were homes all over here. And she showed me all the empty land that used to be her neighbors and friends that is now just deserted land that PG&E had bought up and then destroyed the homes and left it as an empty desert. What they used to do when PG&E was buying homes, they would...

bring the debris, all of the debris from the homes and throw them right here. And you could see, I used to call it Hinkley Graveyard. She showed me her old homes, her first old home, which is the one that she had bought for $20,000 and PG&E bought for $200,000. And then she also showed me her second home in Hinkley, which she also moved out of because the chromium-6 had spread to that second home.

But this is where I lived. How far did it go? To the tree, that tree, the first tree on the left. Yeah, we had 10 acres and it went all the way to the back. Oh.

So that house was this beautiful big home that she and her husband had helped design themselves out of this big kind of pot of money that they unexpectedly got from selling their first home to PG&E. It had Christmas trees that she planted for each one of her grandchildren that were born and just had a lot of character for her family and life there.

It's been completely destroyed because it was also bought up by PG&E after the chromium plume spread to that house, too. All that remains there is this set of steps. Yeah, so these are my steps. You can see that there's nothing left of any homes that they demolished. Sometimes she goes there and just sits there and kind of reflects. It was just, it was our place, you know? Mm-hmm.

I'm curious if anyone decided to stay in the town. Like, does anybody live there anymore? There are a few remaining residents, and they still attend regular meetings every year with PG&E, where they talk through the latest updates on the chromium-6 and go through exactly where their water levels stand now and what the next phase in the process is of cleanup. ♪

These high levels of chromium-6 in their water continue even today. At several testing wells in Hinkley this year, chromium-6 levels were more than five times higher than the state's legal maximum and 2,500 times higher than what the state deems safe for the public. And what does PG&E say about...

The extent to which, like, things are not okay, that the hexavalent chromium is still present, that the people who used to live there are still struggling with all of the health effects. I mean, what do they have to say about that? So in a statement to me, PG&E said that the remaining cleanup work will take place, quote, over the next several decades. So they acknowledge the amount of time that this will take to clean up,

everyone pretty much agrees that it's very hard to remove a contaminant from the groundwater once it's in. This was hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic wastewater that was dumped into the community for over a decade.

But then there's another more controversial aspect to this story, which is that a lot of folks said that the local water board was simply not strong enough in regulating PG&E from the get-go and ensuring and coming down hard on

Oh, interesting. What did she mean by that?

She was saying that PG&E would often use delay tactics, would try to kind of be buddy-buddy with the local water board in the hopes of not having to pay as much as they would eventually need to do for the cleanup. They tried to minimize how bad the plume spread was and also minimize the amount of money they had to put into it.

And so, you know, it is important to note PG&E is this huge company. And the local water board...

is not expansively staffed, whereas PG&E has teams of consultants and lawyers and PR folks that they were at different points all deploying down in this small town for this small regional water board to kind of manage their PR and manage what was going on there. So I think you also just did have an imbalance here that played out in a variety of ways.

Did PG&E have anything to say about this accusation that they essentially were able to outmaneuver the local water board?

PG&E didn't directly respond to that. They said that they had reached a significant milestone in their cleanup efforts and were kind of looking forward to continuing their work. Right now, they're converting chromium-6 into chromium-3. That's like this harmless micronutrient. And so they've found different ways to make that conversion, and they're doing that across the Hinkley area. That's...

their plan right now is basically they can't completely get it out, but that they can turn it into this other substance that is less harmful. Yes. So the dynamic that you're describing here in terms of this small town, this maybe relatively unsophisticated waterboard going up against this huge company armed with lawyers and PR people and consultants, how have you seen that play out in other parts of the country? Yeah.

What I found in my research is that there are a lot of decades old water crises that are still in the process of cleaning up today. From the Cuyahoga River spill in Ohio to even ongoing battles in Flint, Michigan over their lead pipe replacement program.

And that river spill in Ohio was in 1969, and Flint was 10 years ago. So it really just, across the board, you see how hard it seems to be to remove this contamination. And what about the regulatory side of things? Like,

Why isn't it that the government is able to, like, push to get these problems fixed in a much more expedient and successful way? A lot of advocates in the environmental community would say that the EPA needs a lot more funding to fully do its job and that a lot of the state EPAs could also use the same, more funding, more personnel, more resources. But

But that doesn't seem to be coming anytime in the near future. We have a Trump administration coming in, which in the previous era of Trump, the EPA rolled back dozens of environmental rules, including those for safe and clean water protections. And the Trump administration at that time tried to significantly cut the agency's budget. I think it was like trying to cut it by a third.

And it seems like the administration is on track to do very similar things in the next coming years.

I'm curious, from the folks that you talked to who were current or mostly former Hinckley residents, what was it like for them to see their story hailed as this kind of success story, this, like, David and Goliath, like, you were able to, like, get the justice that you sought considering the reality that they were actually faced with? I think it was two-pronged, and it has changed over time. At first, it was, like,

Residents told me they were very grateful for the attention it gave. A lot more people knew about Hinkley and put it on the map. And a lot more state regulators and environmental activists paid attention to Hinkley right after the movie came out.

But there was also a frustration that over time when they saw that their water was still not getting clean and there was a frustration over this sense that the settlement kind of cured all their problems. I think both from the fact that, you know, money can't solve your health issues and

But also that in many of their cases, the money did not make them extraordinarily rich. It helped them get a little bit of a leg up, but they largely still felt like they were dealing with the same problems they were dealing with before.

Roberta Walker has stopped going to the regular meetings. She no longer participates in the activism around the issue. She's not raising hell like she used to do or speaking up. She really just had to take a step away from that fight and focus on her family. It took a really big toll on her. I'm curious if Erin Brockovich talked about this, considering that she was—

you know, that her character was the star of this movie, like what she says about the more complicated realities of the narrative of what happened in Hinkley. You know, Erin didn't shy away from talking about that. It does feel demoralizing because it is. And the justice, I look at this, it wasn't a dollar figure for anybody in Hinkley. And I'll go back to that scene again.

in the movie. What is your uterus worth to you, Ms. Sanchez? I want you to think real hard about what your spine is worth, Mr. Walker. Then you take out your calculator and you multiply that number by a hundred. Pretty hard to put a dollar figure on those things. What's the dollar value of a child that was exposed and drank this poison that dies of cancer at 20? You can't. I think the justice for them was that they said something

And they stood up to it. And it wasn't the dollar figure that was the justice. Maybe that the truth came out. Maybe that was the justice. But the real justice would have been that this never happened at all.

For her and for so many other residents, you know, it sounds like there is no future justice, right? Like what happened, happened. And they can never get back their health or their sense of trust in government or in the companies that work next to them after everything they've been through. I don't think any of these residents are going to see a conclusion in their lifetime.

Sylvia, thank you so much for sharing this story. Thank you so much for having me. Sylvia Foster-Frau is a national investigative reporter at The Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. If you're looking for the latest updates on the big news of the day, check out our morning news briefing, The Seven. We bring you through the seven stories you need to know about every weekday morning by 7 a.m. You can listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Today's show was produced by Emma Talcoff. It was mixed by Sam Baer and edited by Monica Campbell. Thanks also to Rosalind Helderman. I'm Martine Powers. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.

And now, a next-level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day. You've got AT&T 5G, so you're fully confident. But the vendor isn't responding, and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com slash 5G for you for details. ♪