Nearly 20 years ago, Pacific Gas & Electric paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle legal claims that it had poisoned the Mojave Desert community of Hinkley by dumping industrial waste into the ground.
But that David and Goliath triumph — portrayed in the movie “Erin Brockovich” — didn’t last. Since then, a plume of groundwater contaminated with toxic chromium-6 has continued to spread, and the town is emptying.
Sonja Pellerin’s first- and second-grade classroom at Hinkley Elementary School is a lively and brightly colored place. Each time Pellerin gives an instruction to the class, she punctuates the instruction by clapping
Source: The California Report Science