
The 'Erin Brockovich town' is still toxic and nearly abandoned - johnshades
https://grist.org/article/the-true-story-of-the-town-behind-erin-brockovich/
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dekhn
I'm a scientist and every time I've looked into this, it seems unlikely that
PG&E's work with chromium-6 actually caused any health problems. It's
unfortunately the movie made the (likely) false narrative popular.

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g3houdini
A lot of people ended up sick in this area and with major health issues. If
not chromium 6, then?

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dekhn
I'm having trouble finding evidence that a statistically significant larger
number of people died in Hinkley at any time, compared to the population as a
whole. If that's the case, then there wasn't a problem in the first place.

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g3houdini
Let's assume I agree with you. Are you stating that the movie EB (and the
woman Erin Brockovich) was responsible for making Hexavalent Chromium 6 the
fall guy and that there was nothing that happened in Hinkley to the very tiny
population of 2k (or less) people?

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dekhn
Hard to agree to those with high confidence; the first is that I am unaware of
any actual statistically significant health problems in Hinkley. I've
researched this a bit, and a lot of the reported health problems are
consistent with base rates, not elevated rates. U Note that news articles
written by nonscientific journalists make basic errors when it comes to
medicine, and often use scary sounding terms like "cancer cluster" to refer to
naturally occurring, normal rates of death that are higher than surrounding
areas, but not statistically significantly higher. The literature around C-VI
is unfortunately hard to parse, because the area has attracted cranks.

If there is no statistically significantly higher rate of death due to
diseases which could have been caused by C-VI that was drunk or eaten by
residents, then I would pretty much stop there; my current belief is this is
the case.

Now, if there was such a higher rate (which IIUC has never been established),
and those rates were highly consistent with C-VI toxicity, and C-VI in
consumed form was toxic, then I think you'd be on to something.

I think it was actually a mistake by EB herself, combined with PG&E's legal
ineptitude, that led to the situation we are in. The movie just amplified the
problem.

Note that I live near a few superfund sites where irresponsible local industry
(thanks Intel and Fairchild!) caused leakage of TCE into the groundwater,
which then plumed, and is causing a very expensive long-term cleanup. TCE
groundwater contamination is much more concerning, with huge amounts of high
quality scientific evidence clearly supporting the danger, and it's right next
to an extremely highly populated area (San Jose). So it's not like I'm some
sort of industry cancer-denier; I just think this is a situation where people
came up with a compelling narrative that was wrong, and it got popular.

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DrScump

      Note that I live near a few superfund sites where irresponsible local industry (thanks Intel and Fairchild!)
    

Have you ever been to Sharks Ice (10th and Alma)?

That paved-over lot across the street is the former Lorentz Barrel and Drum
Superfund site.

