Gas leaks – the real Erin Brockovich story

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company of San Francisco once thought that its worst nightmare was sassy legal assistant Erin Brockovich.

It was Brockovich, a twice-divorced mother of three with no legal or scientific background, who almost single-handedly discovered that the company had contaminated the water supply of a small Californian desert town where it owned a natural gas compressor station.

When her tiny Los Angeles law firm brought a class-action suit, the company was forced to pay a whopping $US333 million ($666 million) to those who had suffered respiratory diseases, kidney and liver disorders and colon cancer.

But now PG&E faces public humiliation of an altogether different order. Brockovich's story, which never had much attention at the time, has been made into a movie. A movie starring Julia Roberts, the biggest female star in Hollywood. A movie that since its release two weeks ago has been America's No 1 box-office smash.

All of a sudden a relatively well-kept dirty secret has become widespread knowledge. There is scarcely a teenager who can't tell you how PG&E dumped chromium 6 into the water in the dusty town of Hinkley, a few kilometres off the main Los Angeles-Las Vegas highway, then sought to hush up the noxious effects.

Newspapers and television have made up for lost time by covering the movie, and the scandal, in painstaking detail. Brockovich has been profiled in People magazine and attended the celebrity-jammed post-Oscars party hosted by Vanity Fair.

Having once had to contend with the determined resourcefulness of Erin Brockovich the woman, PG&E's nightmare is now the film and Hollywood's unstoppable publicity machine.

Since the film opened, almost 100 potential plaintiffs have called Masry and Vititoe, the law firm where Brockovich works. The firm already has a number of follow-up cases. The biggest concerns 1500 people who live near a PG&E plant in Kettleman Hills, in California's Central Valley, who have similar complaints to the 650 Hinkley plaintiffs.

There are also outstanding claims by 150 Hinkley people who didn't come forward the first time around, and by 20 others from Topock on the California-Arizona border, where there is a risk that the contamination could seep into the Colorado River, one of the most important freshwater sources in south-west America.

"We won't feel resolved - morally, ethically, or legally - until we have found everyone we were supposed to," Brockovich says.

That's a task the media will make a whole lot easier. PG&E is insisting on a jury trial for the Kettleman Hills class-action suit, but there are doubts about how easy it will be to find 12 jurors who have not been influenced by the film. (The plaintiffs would prefer, and might still get, binding arbitration by a judge, which means instant settlement and no possibility for any appeal).

The cable channel Court TV wants permission to broadcast the proceedings, which may initiate further claims.

PG&E has clearly been concerned about the movie for some time. Company sources tapped by the Sacramento Bee say that the top brass kept a close eye while the film was being made, and hired a Los Angeles public relations firm to report on the script and the way it was being shot.

"It was bad enough that a film was being made," a former company official told the Bee, "but the fact that Julia Roberts was in the film really heightened anxiety. Everybody figured that Hollywood would slam the hell out of the company."

A week before the film was released, PG&E chief executive Bob Glynn put out an internal memo that has formed the basis of all the company's public statements: "PG&E did not respond to the groundwater problem as openly, quickly or thoroughly as it should have. It is clear, in retrospect, that our company should have handled some things differently at that time."

However, Glynn went on, "'Based on a true story' doesn't mean that everything in the story is true. The movie is an entertainment vehicle."

Unluckily for PG&E, Brockovich probably sticks as closely to the facts as any Hollywood movie in memory. And director Steven Soderbergh went through the script line by line with Brockovich and Ed Masry, the lead lawyer on the case, to ensure scrupulous accuracy.

He even persuaded the real trial judge to play himself, giving extra gravitas to his condemnations of PG&E.

The film spells out how PG&E used hexavalent chromium to reduce corrosion at its Hinkley plant, then drained it into inadequately lined pools from which it seeped into groundwater. The company told residents about the chromium, but did not say how toxic it was and even said it brought health benefits.

Brockovich pieced together the puzzle from a seemingly innocuous document relating to the sale of a Hinkley house to PG&E. It happened to mention blood-count irregularities and other health problems afflicting the sellers.

Not only did she link the high incidence of cancers and other serious illnesses to the chromium, but she found company memos pointing to their knowledge of the problem going back to the 1960s.

The movie's appeal stems not so much from the harrowing details of the environmental scandal - although there are some heart-wrenching scenes involving the victims - as from its archetypal depiction of a righteous, if flawed, individual fighting the powerful bad guys and winning.

Roberts gives the performance of her career as the no-nonsense, straight-talking former beauty queen whose short skirts and skimpy tops make her just trashy enough for her enemies to underestimate her.

She browbeats Masry (played by Albert Finney) into giving her a job and cajoles him to risk his practice and personal savings to pursue the case.

In publicity interviews for the film, Masry now sounds just as sassy as his remarkable sidekick. Of his adversaries at PG&E, he says: "Their heads are in the sand. And now they think this movie is just going to go away. It's going to get a lot worse for PG&E."

- INDEPENDENT