Activist Erin Brockovich said Texas is “in her face” when it comes to environmental issues in the Lone Star State.
The 2000 Oscar-winning film about her efforts to fight contaminated water in the town of Hinkley, California helped put her at the forefront of environmental issues. Brockvich still travels to help communities in environmental turmoil, she said at an event on Lake Conroe last week.
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Brockovich’s Texas work
While Brockovich travels around the country championing a cleaner environment, she also has a history of speaking up for Texans in places where she believes there are issues with water contamination or other chemical risks to the population.
“There’s a lot of groundwater contamination here. You can implement a plan to clean it up, but nobody is very realistic about that because it’s not going to happen overnight. You’re talking a decade,” she said.
In 2020, Brockovich worked with U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and the residents of Houston’s Fifth Ward, where residents were exposed to a creosote plume left over from years of chemical treatment for wooden railroad ties by Southern Pacific railroad.
After residents spent years demanding help, Houston announced this month that it will relocate residents from the neighborhood, which has been identified as a cancer cluster.
In 2009, she was in Midland, Texas advising people not to drink their well water because she said high levels of chromium 6, or hexavalent chromium were present.
In May 2011, nearly 300 Midland residents sued Schlumberger Technology Corp, Dow Chemical Co. and Lear Corp for medical expenses, lower property values, emotional stress and other losses they say were caused by a water supply that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality determed was contaminated with hexavalent chromium.
The Environmental Protection Agency subsequently designated the area impacted by the contamination as a federal Superfund site.
In 2019, an appellate judge ordered that the lawsuit be dismissed after the EPA never determined the source of the contamination. Parties to the suit had agreed that the case would be dismissed if the EPA failed to find Schlumberger and Dow to be the source by April 15, 2019.
Brockovich spoke up during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, calling Texas’ handling of the disaster “complete state mismanagement” in an interview with the news station KETK in Tyler, Texas. She used Uri as an example to highlight how water infrastructure is at risk during a variety of extreme weather events, including floods and hurricanes. She encouraged homeowners to invest in reverse osmosis systems to filter their own water in the event of an emergency.
In 2015, she also raised concerns about contamination in the water supply in Tyler, according to a 2015 Tyler Morning Telegraph article. In the article, the city said it followed all TCEQ recommendations after what it said was a temporary contamination.
In January 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the city of Tyler agreed to significantly upgrade its sanitary sewer system to resolve alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act. The city also went through extensive operational improvements to its sanitary sewer system and paid a total of $563,000 in civil penalties, according to documents from the EPA.
Last week, Brockovich said local governments should prioritize better filtration to keep toxins from getting into water systems.
She also calls for corporations to put people and the environment first when planning projects that may impact the water supply.
“It’s absolutely possible to do it the right way and still yield a profit,” she said.
Why Brockovich is so passionate about water
Brockovich was born in Lawrence, Kan. where her father was an engineer for pipelines and her mother was a journalist.
“When I was growing up, the environment was it for me. I was always outside and I learned everything through my own instincts and observations of the environment,” she said.
She didn’t like school very much because she is dyslexic. But her father was always teaching her about water, even making up little songs for her about the topic.
“When I stumbled upon Hinkley, all those instincts and all those observations from growing up, everything about it was speaking to me,” she said.
Hinkley, California and the hit movie
In 1993, Brockovich found herself an out-of-work mother of three in California. She started working for attorney Ed Masry after he represented her in a traffic accident case.
Brockovich’s filing work for Masry led her to find real estate case between a resident of Hinkley, Calif. and Pacific Gas and Electric Company. She went on to file suit against the company on behalf of the town of Hinkley. The result was the company paying a $333 million settlement to the people of the town.
She said the film ended up not only being about the environment but there was subtexts about gender role issues as well.
Brockovich said remains proud of the film, not just for its accuracy or because it highlights environmental pollution, but also for its subtexts challenging traditional gender roles.
“They didn’t fantasize a bunch of stuff and stayed true to the story,” she said. She thinks Roberts did a great job and there was great casting with Albert Finney’s Masry being spot on.
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The strain of Brockovich’s work
Brockovich’s website offers a community healthbook map where people can report water and environmental issues. The map is full of entries from residents, including many in the Houston region.
“It’s a hard job,” she said of her activism. “It tears me up that I go into so many communities and I always feel like I’m the bearer of bad news and constantly pushed down and down. It seems like nothing has changed since the film 23 years ago.”
She said she’s currently driven by thinking of her grandchildren. She wants to make sure they have a clean environment to grow up in.
“We are water, and we forget that. To destroy it is to destroy ourselves,” she said. “It’s painful and it hurts and that’s worth the fight because nothing changes until we do.”
