Looks like the California town highlighted in the movie doesn’t suffer from an increased level of cancer – from Reason:
Hinkley, California, the town made famous in the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich, does not show any evidence of an increased rate of cancers.
Pacific Gas and Electric, which released a toxic plume of hexavalent chromium 6 from a Hinkley-based natural gas pipeline station, paid a record $333 million to settle a class-action suit in 1996. But the California Cancer Registry has now completed three studies that show cancer rates remained normal in from 1988 to 2008…
You can rely upon it that if a trial lawyer is making money out of it anywhere along the line, you will not get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There is little money for trial lawyers in truth – especially given that most accidents are just that: accidents – no one is at fault and no one should have to pay a bazillion dollars to a lawyer over it.
A great deal of what we believe these days is just the sort of nonsense we saw in Erin Brockovich. These fairy tales of wicked corporations deliberately poisoning the wells – just a modern re-casting of the old stories of witches or Jews ruining the crops or causing infertility. Just a means by which some get to live well off the wealth others – stirring up mobs to hate and loot the target, with most of the loot, however, winding up in the pockets of the few.
Always be on guard – always consider, when you hear a story alleging that some particular group did a bad thing, whether anyone spreading the story stands to make money or, at least, fame off of it.
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