(LB)
Oh look Pacific Gas and Electric Company - can anyone remember Erin Brockovich?
From 1952 to 1966, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) dumped approximately 370 million gallons of chromium-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California, located in the Mojave Desert (about 121 miles driving distance north-northeast of Los Angeles).
PG&E used chromium 6, or Hexavalent chromium, a cheap and efficient rust suppressor, in their compressor station for natural gas transmission pipelines. Hexavalent chromium compounds are genotoxic carcinogens.
In 1993, legal clerk Erin Brockovich began an investigation into the health impacts of the contamination. A class-action lawsuit over the contamination was settled in 1996 for $333 million, the largest settlement of a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history. In 2008, PG&E settled the last of the cases involved with the Hinkley claims. Since then the city's population has dwindled to the point that, in 2016, The New York Times described Hinkley as having been slowly turned into a ghost town.
PG&E again - how many more times have they caused incidents like this? Is this noteworthy?