WEST PALM BEACH, FL -- The four hundred or so people who streamed into the Palm Beach County Convention Center were greeted with packets of information on two personal injury law firms.
One is from New York the other "Searcy, Denney, Barnhart, Shipley and Scarola." Jack Scarola himself taking part in the briefing of Acreage residents.
But the star attraction was Erin Brockovich whose 333 million dollar settlement against a polluting California utility, and the movie that followed, made her famous.
She arrived, well briefed. "They're man made, they're coming from somewhere," she said, referring to radioactive elements detected in water tests.
The law firm Weitz and Luxenberg paid for research on the water from ten homes of Acreage cancer patients and differed form the state assessment of the danger posed by the groundwater.
The firm says, while radiation is in virtually everything, the radiation it detected was produced by man, therefore by an environmental polluter.
"I am getting e-mails from people who have lived here and moved away and have come down with brain tumors. Those are not included in the statistics,” Brokovich said.
She twice brought up Pratt and Whitney as suspect revealing that Weitz and Luxenberg had collected data on past spills. But her role in the evening was to rally the community.
"This radioactivity in the ground waste is a potential source of a health problem," one of the attorney's said.
Could the cancer spike be the result of agriculture or industry or perhaps, as one expert suggests, a self inflicted wound.
"It's difficult to get wells away from septic tanks. Think about what you thrown down the toilet. Don't get rid of your drugs there," said Dr William Lauda of FAU.
He suspects prescription drugs, dumped down toilets could be creating a carcinogenic environment in the groundwater.
