Erin Brockovich Sounded the Alarm on Flint a Year Ago — Why Didn’t Anyone Listen?
Over a year ago — nine months after the city of Flint, Michigan, began sourcing its water from a polluted local river, and 10 months before the national media began paying any attention to the crisis unfolding there — Erin Brockovich was sounding alarm bells.
“Dangerous Undrinkable Drinking Water,” Brockovich wrote on Facebook in January 2015. “Everyone is responsible from the top down: USEPA, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the State of Michigan and the local officials.”
Brockovich is famous for her fight in the 1990s to hold Pacific Gas & Electric accountable for contaminating the groundwater in the town of Hinkley, California. The company was eventually forced to settle the direct-action lawsuit she brought against it for $333 million — at the time, the largest award for a suit of its kind. Julia Roberts famously portrayed Brockovich in the 2000 film about the suit.
Brockovich’s early 2015 Facebook post turned out to be prophetic. Several months later, scientists from Virginia Tech confirmed that dangerously high levels of lead had been found in more than 40 percent of residents’ homes, and some time after that officials admitted they’d stopped essential water treatments — the kind would keep from lead and copper from leaching into the water — after switching water sources.
Within the year, the EPA’s regional administrator, the head of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and MDEQ’s spokesman had all resigned in connection with the crisis. Gov. Rick Snyder publicly apologized and promised to do everything he could to fix the situation.
So, how did Brockovich — who lives in Southern California, 2,300 miles from Flint — know there was a problem before local and state officials did? Because the people of Flint told her.
“Whenever there is a water contamination [problem], because of the film Erin Brockovich, people just think: Erin Brockovich,” she tells Rolling Stone. She has a website with a contact form that routes inquiries to her email address, so whenever a flurry of emails from one city show up in her inbox, she knows there may a problem.