The Corporate Indifference That Poisoned a Town: A Case Study by Kc MCclary
Initial Summary
Out in Hinkley, California which is just a speck on the map
surrounded by sand, power lines, and silence. People started
getting sick. Real sick. Tumors, miscarriages, spine-warped
kids. A thousand miles from Wall Street but just a whisper away
from the bottom line. The culprit? Chromium-6. Leaking into the
groundwater from a Pacific Gas & Electric facility like poison
tears in a forgotten aquifer.
And the company? It knew. For years, yet never lifted a finger
to right the wrongs.
In the courtroom, PG&E played dumb. In the boardroom, They
played God. This wasn’t just a pollution case. It was a
slow-motion corporate killing. No blade, no bullet. Just time.
And water.
The Legal Issues Involved
Toxic Tort Litigation: Civil suits filed for exposure to hexavalent
chromium, a known carcinogen.
Corporate Fraud: PG&E misrepresented the safety of their actions and
failed to disclose known harm.
Negligence: A failure to act on scientific knowledge of groundwater
contamination.
Concealment of Evidence: Internal documents showed decades of hidden
data.
No criminal charges. No one was jailed. Just settlements and
silence.
The timeline of events
1952–1966:
PG&E uses chromium-6 in cooling towers, dumping waste into
unlined ponds.
1987:
Testing begins; contamination starts surfacing.
1993:
Erin Brockovich, a legal clerk, starts digging.
1996:
PG&E settled for $333 million at the time, the largest
direct-action settlement in U.S. history.
2000:
Hollywood turns it into a redemption story. But Hinkley’s water
is still dirty.
2010s:
Chromium-6 levels spike again. People never left.
2022:
PG&E files for bankruptcy again. Different disaster, same
playbook.
The Analysis: How It Was And How it Wasn't Handled
● What do you do with a serpent that sheds its skin but not
its nature? You prosecute it, sure. But the state never had
the stomach for it. Civil suits don’t imprison people. They
just write checks.
● PG&E should’ve been indicted under criminal environmental
statutes.
● Executives should’ve faced personal liability for willful
negligence.
● Instead, the company paid to make it go away. That’s the
corporate way: let the legal system sterilize the wound but
never touch the infection.
Business or Ethical Implications
Externalizing Risk
● PG&E transferred the cost of its pollution to poor families
with weak voices.
● Ethics by Spreadsheet: Internal memos showed cost-benefit
analysis of human suffering.
● Crisis Management Culture: Don’t prevent disasters, they
just manage them after they happen.
● Corporate Personhood: The legal fiction of a “corporate
person” lets real people hide behind it.
● The business world rewards short-term growth. Not long-term
conscience.
My Perspective on this
People lie in courtrooms, they lie in pews, lie on their
deathbeds. But corporations? They don’t lie. They don’t have to.
They just wait.
PG&E wasn’t a villain in the comic book sense. It was far worse.
It was indifferent. It didn’t hate the people of Hinkley. It
didn’t even know them. It just knew numbers. And numbers don’t
bleed, scream, or shed tears of anguish.
In a noble and utopian world, the water wouldn’t need a voice.
But in this one, the poison speaks louder. And the boardroom
doesn’t hear unless you scream in lawsuits, favors, powerful
connections, or proud Benjamins.
The tragedy? Not just what was done. But how easily it was
buried. Out there in the desert, bones don’t rot instead they
fossilize. And so do the truths we’re too tired or too disturbed
to dig up again.