In the town ‘Erin Brockovich’ made famous, residents still fear dirty water

HINKLEY, Calif. – As the popular movie “Erin Brockovich” winds to an end, a character named Donna Jensen wins $5 million from Pacific Gas and Electric, part of a $333 million legal settlement the community won in 1996 after it was accused of contaminating the groundwater here for years, sickening some residents.

What the movie didn’t show is what happened next.

In real life, Roberta Walker, the woman on whom the Jensen character was based, said she received less than $1 million from the settlement. After decades of living in Hinkley, she believed the contaminated water was making her and her family sick, so she moved out of town, as did hundreds of other Hinkley-area residents who were fearful of ongoing contamination. She said she has had five stomach surgeries and three breast surgeries and many members of her family have struggled with health problems.

Local testing wells continue to detect elevated levels of chromium-6, the dangerous chemical that PG&E dumped in local water for more than a decade, according to public reports.

“When you look at the movie, everybody thinks Hinkley got rewarded and saved. But in reality, that was the start of the fall,” said John Turner, 62, who grew up in Hinkley and is one of the few natives who remains.

The lingering presence of chromium-6, also known as hexavalent chromium, in Hinkley illustrates how hard it is to clean contaminated drinking water, even in a case depicted in an award-winning movie that brought national attention to a community.

Cleanup processes for decadesold water contamination crises persist throughout the country: The 1969 Cuyahoga River spill in Ohio that sparked the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 still has ongoing restoration projects, and the 1989 Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base and superfund site in North Carolina wrapped up remediation a few years ago. Even Flint, Michigan, where a water crisis reignited attention to the issue a decade ago, was held in contempt by a federal court this year for not meeting its lead pipe replacement targets.

In Hinkley, water at nine of the 44 wells tested this year as part of PG&E’s state-mandated cleanup efforts were found to have chromium-6 levels over five times higher than the state’s legal maximum and 2,500 times higher than what the state deems safe for public consumption. The regional water board, an arm of the state, has given the company until 2032 to bring the water’s chemical content down to legal levels – 36 years since Brockovich’s lawsuit and 80 years since the toxic substance was first dumped into the ground by PG&E, the state’s largest utility.

Experts, lawyers and local residents here said the long timeline for the cleanup stems partly from the logistical difficulty of removing a toxic substance that has swirled for years in the groundwater but also because the effort has been largely the undertaking of a small regional government water board in charge of regulating a corporate behemoth.

This year, PG&E submitted a letter advocating for reducing its cleanup obligations – a decision that will fall to the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Remediation “is going to take hundreds of years. It’s like a wasteland,” said Gary Praglin, a lawyer who represented residents in the case against PG&E in the 1990s. “You’ve got what I’ll call fast companies and slow regulators. … And it’s not just Hinkley.”

In a statement, PG&E said the remaining cleanup work will take place “over the next several decades” but that the company “continues to apply the best science and knowledge to our programs in Hinkley in a manner that is protective of human health and the environment.”

In the decades since the landmark settlement, this unincorporated area 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles where more than 2,000 people once lived has shrunk to a town of less than 900. Hinkley’s corner store, gas station, school and post office have all closed.

In this San Bernardino County town, its few hundred residents are now scattered across the desert. Some have large filtration water systems in their backyards, donated by PG&E but used rarely because of expensive maintenance.

“We’re no further along,” Brockovich said in an interview. “I don’t know if there’s been a victory for any of us.”

‘Watching a horror movie’

Founded in 1905, PG&E is one of the country’s largest energy utilities, delivering natural gas and electricity across 70,000 square miles in northern and central California. It has been the subject of billions of dollars worth of lawsuits related to California’s wildfires, including the deadly Camp fire in Paradise, where the state concluded an outdated PG&E power line broke and sparked a forest fire in 2018 that killed at least 85 people and destroyed 14,000 homes. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2019, citing the buildup of lawsuits.

The crisis in Hinkley began in 1952 – 18 years before the establishment of the EPA.

PG&E maintains a compressor station in Hinkley, with cooling towers that lower the temperature of the hot gas that travels in pipes from Texas to California. That year, PG&E began adding chromium-6 to the water that cooled down the gas; the substance was a cheap way to prevent the water from rusting and corroding the pipes.

PG&E has agreed the company then dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into large, unlined retention ponds. The chromium-6 water seeped into groundwater that was drawn into residents’ private wells used for drinking. Experts have found that breathing or drinking chromium-6 over prolonged periods can cause an increased risk of cancer as well as kidney, stomach and liver damage.

Residents wondered for years if there was a problem with the water. The Walkers – Roberta and her husband, Greg – had several livestock on their farm die inexplicably, she recalled. Brockovich remembers spotting sick trees secreting a white, chemical-laced substance from absorbing the contaminated groundwater.

In 1987, PG&E reported to the state that chromium-6 levels in one of its wells violated what was at the time the state’s legal limit, 50 parts per billion. That admission empowered the water board to issue an order to bring down the level of water contamination. The board has imposed even stronger requirements over time as the scope of the problem came into fuller view, said experts who have watched its work.

There were early hints that PG&E recognized a problem.

According to locals, PG&E workers began showing up at residents’ homes within a mile radius of the compressor stations and offered bottled water. They started offering to buy the homes of dozens of local residents.

Roberta Walker lived in one of those homes. She began to test how far PG&E would go. She said she requested more and more bottles a week until the company filled her entire swimming pool with bottled water.

On Feb. 10, 1993, Walker recorded in her diary that the monitoring well behind her home, which PG&E was testing, had a chromium-6 level of 4,900 parts per billion. The state’s current legal limit is 10 ppb.

After rejecting offers to buy her home, which she had purchased for $20,000, Walker told the company in 1993 that they could buy the property for $200,000. She was stunned when they accepted.

“It was kind of like somebody watching a horror movie and they know what’s going on, and the people in the movie don’t,” her husband, Greg, said.

Walker gathered together paperwork and sent it to the law firm Masry & Vititoe, where her files landed on the desk of a fiery single mother working as a law clerk – Erin Brockovich.

Brockovich said one of the first things she did was examine the medical files of Walker and her children.

“Everything was off the charts,” Brockovich, 61, said in an interview. “Every single time one of these environmental disasters happens, its always a pissed off mom that rises up. Starting with Roberta Walker. Every. Single. Time.”

When Brockovich and other lawyers knocked on other doors in the 1990s, they recall encountering families with generations of tumors and cancer diagnoses, varying from kidney and stomach cancers to leukemias and lymphomas.

In 1996, after a heated court battle that moved into arbitration, PG&E agreed to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars for 650 Hinkley residents who said their health suffered from the chromium in their water.

A toxic plume

After the landmark legal settlement and then the national attention from the 2000 movie – for which actor Julia Roberts won an Oscar portraying Brockovich – state officials began scrutinizing PG&E more closely. Soon, more people, including some from nearby communities, said they too had been harmed by toxic water.

To accomplish the cleanup, PG&E has been working to convert chromium-6 to chromium-3, a harmless micronutrient. One process involves pumping ethanol-filled water into the soil and another uses alfalfa fields, which naturally convert the elements.

PG&E settled again in 2006 for $295 million with a new group of 1,100 residents from Hinkley and other towns, including the Kettleman Hills, where PG&E also has a compressor station. The company also apologized for the pollution. “Clearly, this situation should never have happened, and we are sorry that it did,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Two years later, a final case was settled for $20 million after 104 more people claimed exposure to the toxic water.

Even so, by 2010, the local water board reported that the plume of poisonous chromium-6 appeared to have been spreading since its previous cleanup order two years earlier. It ordered PG&E to expand its monitoring of the water, which turned up contaminated areas that previously were assumed to be unaffected.

“Its kind of like they didn’t want to lift up the rug and see all the dirt underneath because they knew it would cost them a lot of the money,” said Lisa Dernbach, a senior engineering geologist who worked for the Lahontan water board from 1992 to 2019.

PG&E denied they violated any state law. In a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, a PG&E representative said the new reports of chromium-6 could be part of the natural shifting shape of the contaminant’s plume and said that while they worked to remediate it, more research was needed to know whether those levels were coming from the plume or produced naturally.

The company, meanwhile, offered to buy up more homes, residents said. Houses were demolished and residents recalled seeing cabinets, mattresses and sofas dumped in the local landfill.

In 2012, the Lahontan water board fined PG&E $3.6 million for failing to contain the spread of the plume.

More than a decade later, a U.S. Geological Survey study that the water board had ordered PG&E to commission concluded that the company had for years overestimated the amount of naturally occurring chromium in the ground and underestimated the plume’s spread. Residents hoped the study would lay the groundwork for tough new mandates on the company.

In a statement to The Washington Post, the company said that this year it reached what it called a “significant milestone” in its cleanup efforts, removing 89 percent of chromium-6 found in the groundwater. “PG&E has made this substantial progress by working with regulatory agencies, partnering with the community, and through innovative and sustainable methods including our treatment system and farming methods,” a spokesman said.

In recent years, chromium-6 levels in the plume have been shrinking, according to monitoring well reports from PG&E.

This April, California established a maximum contaminant level for chromium-6 that’s the strictest in the country but higher than the 2023 study found was naturally occurring in the area. The following month, PG&E submitted a letter to the water board pushing for a target goal of 9 parts per billion – significantly higher than the study found was the naturally occurring level of chromium-6 in the area and just under the new legal standard.

PG&E said anything stricter than its proposal “would create an unsustainable approach with unnecessary regulatory complexity and no resulting benefit.”

Many residents were outraged.

‘Same old, same old’

Tree roots and stumps now dot Community Boulevard, a Hinkley thoroughfare, remnants of trees cut down by PG&E after it purchased the land. John Izbicki, who led the independent USGS study, described his time here as “the very unsettling experience of watching a town die.”

Nearby on a recent November afternoon, Subway salads and sandwiches were laid out on the kitchen counter of a Hinkley home paid for by PG&E as a place to hold meetings on the cleanup process. They are led by Project Navigator, the independent group with experience working on superfund sites hired by PG&E to assist the community as part of a water board mandate.

A large back room holds dozens of large posters with maps and stacks of old reports, crafted over the years to demonstrate contamination levels in the community. In recent years, the maps show how the plume is slowly shrinking with the cleanup processes PG&E has been implementing.

A couple dozen residents slowly filtered in, many from working-class jobs in fields or factories, loading up their plates and taking a seat in front of Project Navigator’s Raudel Sanchez. They have been meeting at least quarterly in preparation for the water board to issue its final cleanup order for PG&E.

Sanchez began his presentation, which explained PG&E’s recent request for a more lenient cleanup goal. The water board is now taking public comment, deciding whether to accept the proposal.

Some residents listening to Sanchez groaned.

“This is the same old, same old,” life-long resident John Turner said.

The former butcher, who now runs the community center as a volunteer, posed a question to the small crowd: Was another fight worth it? Would a standard below the state’s legal limit really be that bad?

“I’m not saying we let them off the hook. But where do we stop?” he said. “Until everybody moves out of here?”

Never ending

Roberta now lives in a house on a hill in Barstow, where she can see Hinkley nearby.

Her first home, which she lived in from 1976 until she was bought out in 1992, is fenced off with a private property sign – 10 acres of pure desert. After PG&E bought that home, the Walkers built a new high-ceilinged house in Hinkley. Then the company offered to buy that property, too. Convinced Hinkley was unsafe, she and her husband agreed to sell and moved.

That second home in Hinkley is marked only by a set of stone steps, which used to be her front stoop before the company tore the place down. Sometimes she still goes there to sit and reflect.

She said both of her daughters have autoimmune diseases and fibromyalgia; one has had a hysterectomy and another is having hers next year. Her mother and father in-law died of cancer, she said, and her brother in law has Hodgkin’s disease. Greg, her husband, has prostate cancer. Even her grandchildren have autoimmune conditions, she said.

After decades of fighting PG&E, she said she’s tired of the battle. She no longer attends meetings to discuss the town’s issues.

“I try to live my life to the best, try to be happy and make it good but – its hard,” she said. The water crisis “is still going on, and it’s not going to be taken care of in our lifetime. … I don’t think it’s ever going to end.”