Columbia Journalism Review, Issues » 2004 » Issue 2: March/April 2004, issue 2, "Muckraker 90210 A Most Unlikely Reporter Nails Erin Brockovich" BY ERIC UMANSKY
THe New Republic, 11/24/03 ERIN BROCKOVICH'S WEIRD SCIENCE. by Eric Umansky "Erin Brockovich: The Sequel A plucky editor takes on a bogus trial-lawyer claim of poisoning--and wins" Friday, March 19, 2004 Wall Street Journal
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Now, Erin Brockovich and her law firm is tackling the problem of benzene leaks from the famous oil well on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. Ms. Brockovich claimed that she had recorded "alarming" benzene readings and had 300 cases of staff, students and alumni with cancer.
"I was just sitting in the bleachers," she told parents gathered for a meeting March 2003 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, "and we got benzene readings that were at very alarming levels-- at least five times higher than on the 405,"-- a freeway. The result of this contamination, she continued, was Hodgkin’s disease at sixteen times the expected levels among alumni.
"When I have three hundred cancers staring me in the face and an oil-production facility underneath the school, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the two fit together," Brockovich-Ellis told People magazine in May 2003. Her law partner, Mr. Masry, told The Associated Press that the school’s cancer rate was twenty to thirty times the national average.
Regulators shut down the oil wells for some months, and then cited Venoco for two potential violations -- an antipollution unit had insufficient filters and the wells had, on occasion, vented natural gas, a process for which the company insists it had permission. Neither potential violation significantly affected benzene levels and both were settled in October.
"Beverly Hills is not all Botox, faux-Spanish mansions and imported sports cars," wrote the august Economist magazine. "It also has cancer clusters, and these have become Erin Brockovich’s latest crusade."
Journalists noted that there were two sides of the story: Brockovich-Ellis said there was a problem, while the city and the wells’ owner, a company named Venoco, said there wasn’t.
The New York Times’s coverage was typical, offering dueling quotes while leaning toward Brockovich-Ellis’s position: a celebrity school’s students say oil wells are making them sick, announced a June 17 story.
Brockovich-Ellis and Masry refused to release their data until the city subpoenaed them and a judge ordered them to comply -- a fact only Zager noted in her stories.
When the data sets were finally handed over, nearly all the readings were normal. The highest benzene reading was still below state regulations and was contradicted by another sample Brockovich-Ellis took at the same time that showed no measurable benzene.
She reported, too, that a local TV producer who had hyped the story had received money during her run for a city council seat from the head of Ms. Brockovich's law firm.
Toxicologists, epidemiologists, and oil regulators all dismissed Brockovich-Ellis’s and Masry’s assertions as quackery: the wells weren’t leaking, the air was relatively clean, and rates of Hodgkin’s disease around the school were normal. Despite reporters’ "balanced" coverage, no independent scientist backed up the allegations as credible.
In any case, several studies have shown no link between oil wells and Hodgkin’s. Los Angeles has thousands of wells and none has been linked to any cancer.
Is there any evidence that benzene at the levels found at Beverly causes cancer? "No," says Thomas Mack, chief of the epidemiology division at the University of Southern California’s medical school. "You’re just as likely to get cancer from your car stereo."