Showing posts with label Erin Brockovich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Erin Brockovich. Show all posts

Sunday, 25 February 2018

LEAVING SAN FRANCISCO: EVERYBODY, GET TOGETHER!

The Grandma preparing TV in her private jet
The Beans are ready to leave San Francisco. The family has spent some unforgettable days in this wonderful city. 

The Grandma has closed some new business in Silicon Valley before leaving the city. They're going to flight to San Diego in a private flight of almost two hours. She has bought some films to watch in the plane like Erin Brockovich, the film which explains the case alleged contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium, in the southern California town of Hinkley because of the construction in 1952 of a natural-gas pipeline to be connected with the San Francisco Bay Area. 

She have also bought the five seasons of The Streets of San Francisco the 70's TV Series performanced by Karl Maden and Michael Douglas; The Presidio an interesting film from 1988 with Sean Connery, Mark Hamon and Meg Ryan as the main characters and What's up doctor, from 1972, a masterclass of comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.  

More information: Thrillist

Estefanía, Eli & Paqui Bean in the tram
In a few days, they're going to travel to visit the Navajo community and return to Europe to participate in the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon, Portugal. Because of the long duration of the transatlantic flights, The Grandma has decided to obtain all these films.

Before leaving the city, the family has walked across its streets and have taken the tram, the most famous transport of the city, and something that it has in common qith Lisbon, a future destination.

The Beans has visited the Coit Tower to take the last photographs and to say goodbye to the city and its inhabitants.

More information: Street Car 


Money lives in New York. Power sits in Washington. 
Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco.

Joe Flower


Coit Tower, also known as the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, is 64 m tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco; at her death in 1929 Coit left one-third of her estate to the city for civic beautification. 

Edgar Bean seeing the views from Coit Tower
The tower was proposed in 1931 as an appropriate use of Coit's gift. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.

The art deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard, with fresco murals by 27 different on-site artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation off-site. Although an apocryphal story claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle due to Coit's affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance is coincidental.

More information: The Culture Trip

Coit Tower was paid for with money left by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy socialite who loved to chase fires in the early days of the city's history. Before December 1866, there was no city fire department, and fires in the city, which broke out regularly in the wooden buildings, were extinguished by several volunteer fire companies.  

The Beans inside the Coit Tower
Lillie Coit was one of the more eccentric characters in the history of North Beach and Telegraph Hill, smoking cigars and wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was an avid gambler and often dressed like a man in order to gamble in the males-only establishments that dotted North Beach.

Lillie's fortune funded the monument four years following her death in 1929. She had a special relationship with the city's firefighters. At the age of fifteen she witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 in response to a fire call up on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and threw her school books to the ground and pitched in to help, calling out to other bystanders to help get the engine up the hill to the fire, to get the first water onto the blaze. After that Lillie became the Engine Co. mascot and could barely be constrained by her parents from jumping into action at the sound of every fire bell. 

More information: Found San Francisco

After this she was frequently riding with the Knickerbocker Engine Co. 5, especially so in street parades and celebrations in which the Engine Co. participated. Through her youth and adulthood Lillie was recognized as an honorary firefighter.


Some may come and some may go.
He will surely pass
when the one that left us here
returns for us at last.

 
The Youngbloods

Thursday, 22 June 2017

ERIN BROCKOVICH: PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT

Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich (born June 22, 1960) is an American legal clerk and environmental activist, who, despite her lack of formal education in the law, was instrumental in building a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California in 1993. Her successful lawsuit was the subject of a 2000 film, Erin Brockovich, which starred Julia Roberts. Since then, Brockovich has become a media personality as well, hosting the TV series Challenge America with Erin Brockovich on ABC and Final Justice on Zone Reality. She is the president of Brockovich Research & Consulting. She also works as a consultant for Girardi & Keese, the New York law firm of Weitz & Luxenberg, which has a focus on personal injury claims for asbestos exposure, and Shine Lawyers in Australia.

She was born Erin Pattee in Lawrence, Kansas, the daughter of Betty Jo, a journalist, and Frank Pattee (1924–2011), an industrial engineer and football player. She worked as a management trainee for Kmart in 1981 but quit after a few months and entered a beauty pageant. She won Miss Pacific Coast in 1981 and left the beauty pageant after the win. She has lived in California since 1982.


More information: Erin Brockovich

The case alleged contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium, also written as Chromium VI, Cr-VI or Cr-6, in the southern California town of Hinkley. At the center of the case was a facility, the Hinkley compressor station, built in 1952 as a part of a natural-gas pipeline connecting to the San Francisco Bay Area. Between 1952 and 1966, PG&E used hexavalent chromium in a cooling tower system to fight corrosion. The wastewater was discharged to unlined ponds at the site, and some percolated into the groundwater, affecting an area near the plant approximately 3.2 by 1.6 km. The Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) put the PG&E site under its regulations in 1968.


Erin Brockovich
The case was settled in 1996 for US$333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history. Masry & Vititoe, the law firm for which Brockovich was a legal clerk, received $133.6 million of that settlement, and Brockovich herself was given a bonus of $2.5 million.

A study released in 2010 by the California Cancer Registry showed that cancer rates in Hinkley remained unremarkable from 1988 to 2008. An epidemiologist involved in the study said that the 196 cases of cancer reported during the most recent survey of 1996 through 2008 were fewer than what he would expect based on demographics and the regional rate of cancer. However, a June 2013 Mother Jones magazine article featured an extensive critique from the Center for Public Integrity of the author's work on the later epidemiological studies.


As of 2006, average Cr-6 levels in Hinkley were recorded as 1.19 ppb with a peak of 3.09 ppb. For comparison, the PG&E Topock Compressor Station on the California-Arizona border averaged 7.8 ppb with peaks of 31.8 ppb based on a PG&E Background Study.
 
More information: Chasing the Frog


 If you believe you're right... 
stand up and fight for your place in the sun. 
If you believe you can do it, hang in for the whole 15 rounds 
because even if you don't win, 
you will have earned the respect of everyone in the fight, 
including yourself, and in that sense you will have prevailed.
 
Erin Brockovich