Erin Brockovich is an American woman born in 1960. Even though she did not have an education as a lawyer, she had a central role in the trial about “Pacific Gas and Electric Company“ (PG&E) in 1993.
In 2000 a film about Erin Brockovich was released. In the movie Erin is played by Julia Roberts. The movie is set to the time right before and during the time Erin works with the trial about PG&E. Erin is a mother of three children, and before she got a job at the small lawyer firm, she was an unemployed. However, she asks her lawyer if she could get a job at his firm, and she does get a job, as a file clerk. After a while Erin finds a pro bono case, she gets interested in. The case includes the company PG&E, and how they poison hundreds of citizens in the small town Hinkley. PG&E used cooling towers with water containing hexavalent chromium. The town’s groundwater consisted water from the cooling towers. As a result of that, hundreds of people got many types of different diseases. Erin acts immediately, and starts to investigate the case. She finds a lot of evidence that PG&E knew about the hexavalent chromium, but tried to hide it. The case never went to trial, but the evidence was examined by a judge. PG&E ends up with paying 333 million dollars as a compensation to all the plaintiffs. I think the move was great. Firstly because it showed how much pollution can damage people’s lives. On the other hand, it showed how much only one person can affect so many people, in a positive way. Erin was not like all the other lawyers, she was more of a friend to the victims. Therefore she gained their trust, and managed to get a lot of important information from them.
You are right about the fact that Erin became a friend of the victims and that it helped her with the case. I think in most cases it is the personal interest and the perseverance that makes the difference. She never gave up.
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