FIGHTING BACK - $333 MILLION AND A GHOST TOWN: ERIN BROCKOVICH VS. PG&E — PART 2

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fischer, Tuesday May twelfth, twenty twenty six. Yesterday we left off with a file clerk named Aaron Brockovich, who had driven into the Mojave Desert with no legal training, spent months knocking on doors in a dying town, uncovered a thirty year corporate cover up of hexavalent chromium contamination, recruited six hundred and thirty four plaintiffs, and watched PG and ESE hired consultants falsify a dead scientists research to undermine the case against them. Today we cover what happened next, the legal strategy, the settlement that broke the record books, and then the part that the Oscar winning film doesn't show you what happened to Hinckley after the cameras left. And I want to be honest with you upfront that this one doesn't have a clean, happy ending, because the truth doesn't always. One of the decisions that defined the outcome of this case was made early in the legal process, and it was counterintuitive enough that Ed Mazri had to work to convince the Hinckley residents to go along with it rather than pursuing a traditional jury trial, which is what most people picture when they imagine a landmark lawsuit, twelve people in a box, closing arguments, a dramatic verdict. Masri and his co council recommended binding arbitration. The case would be decided by a panel of arbitrators rather than a jury, with

1:34 a maximum possible damages award of four hundred million dollars, and the decision would be final and not subject to the usual appeals process. The residents were nervous about this. They had expected a trial. They wanted their day in court. In the most literal sense, witnesses testimony, the public accountability of an open proceeding arbitration felt like a closed room, less dramatic, less visible mass Rey's argument was that it was faster, that it was more likely to result in a substantial award rather than the risk of a sympathetic jury being overwhelmed by PG and e's expert witnesses, and that the finality of arbitration meant PG and E couldn't spend a decade appealing a verdict. While the residents waited, they agreed to go with arbitration. The process moved through nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety five, with the first group of roughly forty plaintiffs going through arbitration. The results from those initial cases produced awards totaling approximately one hundred twenty million dollars, an extraordinary number for the first forty plaintiffs in what was still an ongoing proceeding. When PG and E looked at those numbers and extrapolated them out across the remaining six hundred claimants, the math became untenable.

2:49 They were staring at potential total exposure that could approach or exceed four hundred million dollars, the maximum under the arbitration agreement, and the arbitration process was producing results that told them they were not going to win. On July second, nineteen ninety six, PG and E settled all six hundred thirty four current and former Hinckley residents received a combined payment of three hundred thirty three million dollars, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct action lawsuit in the history of the United States at that time. Individual payments varied widely. One plaintiff reported knowing of awards ranging from ten thousand dollars to two point five million dollars, though recipients were bound by confidentiality agreements that prevented them from disclosing what they had personally received. The median award was roughly five hundred thousand dollars. For families who had spent years watching loved ones die from cancers, they could now name and trace and connect to a company that had known and said nothing. It was at least something. At least the number acknowledged what had been taken. Aaron's bonus.

3:56 Aaron Brockovich was not a named attorney on the case. She was a legal clerk, a paralegal, which meant she was not entitled to a percentage of the attorney's fees in the standard way. What she received was a bonus determined by Ed Masry, paid from the firm share of the settlement. He had told her before the settlement came through that he had changed the amount he was planning to give her. She was bracing for bad news. He handed her a check for two point five million dollars. Aaron Brockovich had seventy four dollars in her bank account when she started investigating the Hinckley case four years earlier. She used the two point five million dollars to buy a house in Agra Hills, California, and later described the experience of going from barely making rent to financial security as disorienting. She also said candidly that the sudden wealth made her over indulge her children out of guilt about the time the case had taken from them. She is not precious about any of this. She tells it straight.

4:58 She had been a single mother, holding everything together with very little, and then everything changed very fast, and it took time to find her footing in the new version of her life. She has never stopped working. In the years since Hinckley, she has consulted on dozens of environmental contamination cases across the country and internationally, built a research and consulting firm, and continued to knock on doors and communities where people are sick and a corporation nearby is telling them there's nothing to worry about. She says. Hinckley is not an isolated case. She says it is a pattern. Every time she goes somewhere new, she sees the same playbook. Company denies, community suffers, regulator moves slowly, and whoever lives there is left to fight or leave the movie. The film came out in two thousand and four years after the settlement. Julia Roberts's Aaron Albert Finney as Ed Mazri, Steven Soderberg directing It won Roberts the Academy Award for Best Actress and grossed over two hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide. Aaron herself has said the film is about ninety eight percent accurate, which is a remarkably high bar for a Hollywood biopic. The scene where a pgn E attorney is afraid to drink from a glass of hinky water that Aaron sets in front of her, that actually happened.

6:17 Soderberg cut a scene where Aaron got sick from the chromium exposure during the investigation, which also actually happened, because he didn't want the film to become a story about the protagonist's illness rather than her fight. The film ends with the settlement. The credits roll on a victory. The story unfortunately does not end there after the break, the plume that kept growing, the school that closed, the house is being bought and bulldozed, and the question that nobody in Hinckley can quite answer, what does it mean to win when the winning doesn't stop? What's killing you the plume that kept spreading. As part of the settlement, PG and E agreed not just to pay damages, but to clean up the contaminated groundwater. That cleanup has been ongoing for thirty years. It is not complete. It may not be complete within the lifetimes of the people who are alive today. In the early two thousands, environmental monitoring began showing something deeply troubling. The chromium plume was not shrinking, it was growing. A contamination area that had originally been measured at roughly two and a half miles long was by twenty thirteen eight miles long and two to four miles wide. The plume had migrated downward from the upper Aquifer into the lower Aquifer, the deeper water table that feeds wells even farther from the original PG and E

7:49 compressor station. Chromium six was now showing up in water tested miles away from where it had originally been found, reaching properties that had not been part of the original in a lawsuit because their owners had no reason to believe they were affected. In twenty twelve, regulators find PG and E three point six million dollars for allowing the plume to spread beyond boundaries they had been ordered to contain it within. PG and E began a more aggressive remediation program, pumping ethanol into the ground to feed microbes that convert chromium six into the less toxic chromium three, planting vast fields of alfalfa that absorb and biologically process the contaminated water, building concrete barriers to contain the plume's edges.

8:34 By twenty twenty four, PG and E said it had removed about eighty nine percent of the estimated chromium six release. The cleanup, by PG and e's own engineer's estimation, will take another forty years at minimum to complete. Some wells were still testing at chromium levels two thy five hundred times the state safety standard. The cleanup is real, and it's happening, and it would be inaccurate not to say that, but forty more years and two thousand, five hundred times the safety standard in some wells, and the plume is in the lower aquifer now, which means it has gotten into a water source that is far more difficult to remediate than the upper aquifer. The people who live in Hinckley today, those who remain turn off their wells and use bottled water. Provided by PG and E. The company that poisoned the water now delivers the water. That is the arrangement. What happened to the town? Hinckley had a school.

9:33 It closed after the twenty twelve to twenty thirteen school year because the population of children had dropped too low to sustain it. There wasn't enough left of the community to fill a classroom. The fire department was losing members one by one, not because firefighters were leaving their profession, but because PG and E was buying their homes. Four of the department's six members were in buyout negotiations at the same time, including the fire captain, Julie Hegenberger, whose mother was the town nurse and whose father had founded the volunteer fire department. Her parents had both died of diseases she blamed on the contaminated water. Her husband, who had grown up moving constantly and had always dreamed of staying in one place, raising their children in one house, watching them go through the same schools he had wished he could attend. He and Julie decided their children's safety had to come first. They packed and left. You get a bitterness about the whole thing, said Patsy Morris, an eighty three year old longtime resident who remembered Hinckley when the houses had green lawns and children played on the streets.

10:39 They're just going to make this a big dust bowl. That's all I can say about it. My friends are leaving one way or another. It gets you, you know. She was describing in plain language what happens to a place when a corporation poisons its foundation and the cleanup takes longer than the community can survive. The houses that PG and E buys are not rehabilitated and resold. They are raised, torn down, the land cleared, the lots left empty. The New York Times visited in twenty sixteen and described Hinckley as having slowly become a ghost town. When ABC News returned with Aaron Brockovich in twenty twenty one, her assessment was direct, everything's boarded. It's a ghost town. That's a good way to end a community in America poisoned and its people. The broader picture here's the detail that I think has not gotten enough attention in the years since the settlement and the movie Chromium six is not only in Hinckley. In twenty sixteen, The Environmental Working Group analyzed federal water testing data from across the country and found that hexavalent chromium contaminates water supplies reaching more than two hundred million Americans across all fifty states two hundred million people. The Hinckley case was not an outlier. It was a visible example of a problem that is embedded in the water infrastructure of the country, the result of decades of industrial practices that deposited heavy metals into groundwater

12:09 the communities then drank without knowing what was in it. California passed a law after the Brokovich case requiring testing and an enforceable drinking water standard for chromium six, with a two thousand and four deadline. That deadline was delayed when PG and ESE consultants successfully placed the fraudulent, rewritten Chinese study into the scientific record, the same study they had ghost written for the elderly doctor Jong, and used it to challenge the regulatory science that would have required a stricter standard. The law that was supposed to protect California's water from what happened in Hinckley was delayed for years, in part because PG and E had corrupted the scientific foundation that the regulation rested on. The fraud was not just about winning one lawsuit. It was about shaping the regulatory environment in ways that served PG and nix ease interest for decades afterward. In two thousand and six, PG and E paid another two hundred ninety five million dollars to settle cases involving roughly one thousand, one hundred additional plaintiffs from Hinckley and nearby areas who had not been included in the original nineteen ninety six settlement. In two thousand and eight, they settled what remained of the Hinckley claims.

13:23 Total payouts, including remediation costs, exceed eight hundred million dollars. The company worth twenty eight billion dollars when Aaron Brockovich first walked into its orbit, has paid out more than eight hundred million dollars in Hinckley related costs, and is still cleaning up groundwater in the Mojave Desert. The cleanup will outlast everyone involved in this story. I want to close on what this case actually represents because I think the movie, as good as it is, makes it easier to see than it actually was. The movie gives you Julia Roberts and a satisfying ending. The real story gives you a file clerk with no legal training who drove into the desert because a real estate file had blood tests in it, and who spent four years of her life connecting a corporation's choices to the cancer in her neighbour's bodies, while being told repeatedly by people with more credentials and more resources that she didn't know what she was talking about. She knew, and she was right. And the six hundred and thirty four people who trusted her, who led her into their kitchens and told her about their dead spouses and their five miscarriages and their children's tumors, they were right to trust her. The legal system, when it worked as it was supposed to work, gave them a reckoning that no other mechanism would have produced. Three hundred thirty three million dollars is not enough. No amount of money is enough for what was done to Hinckley.

14:52 But it was accountability, and it was real, and it happened because one person with no law degree refused to be told it was none of her bas business. The families of Hinckley, the ones who stayed and the ones who left, and the ones who are buried there, Remember them. That's the Aaron Brockovich story. Tomorrow we go somewhere darker and more recent. Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, OxyContin and the most devastating corporate drug case in American history. More than half a million people dead, ten billion dollars moved out of the company and into private accounts while the lawsuits were piling up. And families who had lost children to overdoses, who showed up to depositions of Sackler family members, holding photographs of the dead and refusing to leave. That's tomorrow, Part one of two Do Better. Disclaimer. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court records, Environmental Working Group research, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, ABC News, and AI assisted research.

15:59 We do our best to get get it, writs. We are a podcast, not a courtroom. This is entertainment and commentary, not legal fact.