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Parts per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School

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Joy Horowitz, a journalist by trade, has taken the discipline, curiosity and objectivity inherent to her profession and applied these attributes to an intensely controversial, emotional topic-whether the industries adjacent to her alma mater, Beverly Hills High School, have, for decades, poisoned the children who are students there.

For many years the presence of an oil drilling platform immediately adjacent to the athletic fields and, on another side of the campus, the proximity to the facilities that process the air for nearby Century City, have been a subject of vigorous debate regarding their potential for causing health hazards. The appearance of cancer "clusters" among the alumni and faculty of Beverly Hills High School was trivialized by school administrators and minimized by city officials.

Four years in the writing, Horowitz has meticulously investigated all angles of this story, mastering the most technical of material and rendering it with an articulate, personal, and comprehensible style. What emerges will change forever the way you think about where you work, live, and play. Of even greater import, it demands that everyday people begin to analyze the impact that "progress" has on our health and safety, and no longer complacently believe that someone else has our best interests at heart.

"The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School" is a provocative yet clear title. It may be true and it may not be, but the story is told by a very talented insider who in the end lets the reader decide, though she herself is certainly convinced.

The book should appeal to readers of fiction, for it once again proves that truth can be as thrilling as the escape one achieves with a good novel.

Horowitz is a wife and mother whose family lives in Santa Monica, not far from where she graduated high school in Beverly Hills. She is a journalist and writer with extraordinary talent who tells a comprehensive, thoughtful, and lucid tale about fascinating individuals, private corporations, and boring bureaucrats, in the style of a mystery novel that places the reader in the shoes of the narrator, seeing what she sees.

School in Oil Field

What is described in this story is more like occupational oil field worker exposure than general environmental exposure. But in this unusual case the workers are students and teachers at a high school that all but sits in the middle of the producing oil field.

Seven oil field derricks are just outside the windows of the school. Anecdotal evidence of health problems associated with the school mounted steadily as no fewer than 10 teachers in the English Department on the high school's third floor contracted cancer over time.

The book has as many characters as War and Peace and would have benefited from a character chart like the one that accompanies many printings of Tolstoy's novel. One gets to know a wonderful group of dedicated teachers, some with Ivy League credentials, training many students to take their places within the hallowed halls of America's greatest universities.

A star of the book is our old friend and frequent fraudulent rabble rouser, Erin Brockovich, fresh from her fame writ large in the movie Erin Brockovich. In addition, it's quite obvious the book and movie A Civil Action inspired Horowitz to write this book. I am sure she is hopeful of achieving equal success.

While she may well deserve it, I doubt that she will achieve it, for reasons I'll explain shortly.

Big Monetary Return

The very active oil wells surrounding the school provided $75,000 in royalties to the community each month, in part paying for the high school's amazing swimming pools and dance studios. Many of the families receiving those royalties had children attending the school.

To her credit, Horowitz admits the book is not about certainty but "is instead, intended to pose a range of questions. ... [P]eople want to know what I really think; is there solid proof of a connection between environmental exposures and illness at Beverly Hills High School? The question could take decades to answer with any degree of certainty."

She casts this statement in light of the fact that the initial dozen plaintiffs lost their case in court. Of course, that did not stop the publisher from titling the book in such a sensational manner.

Celebrity Hypocrisy

But you have to be impressed by a book that describes Erin Brockovich like this:

"At 42, Erin Brockovich seemed larger than life for reasons beyond her newfound celebrity status. Her physical stature--she is five feet nine and big boned--lends her an Amazonian presence, like a female warrior. And her trademark cleavage, a result of the almost comical breast implants that gave her the desired Barbie-esque proportions, imparts a sort of self-mocking air, like the bombshell from The Producers: if you've got it flaunt it."

Horowitz goes on to denigrate Brockovich fittingly, explaining how her ambulance-chasing law firm gave her a $2.5 million bonus, after which she went out and bought a silver BMW, then traded it in for a black Hummer--not exactly standard issue for someone fighting for the environment. Eventually someone advised her to buy a Toyota Prius.

Case Thrown Out

The trial brought by the first 12 plaintiffs ended before it even began, when the judge dismissed all causes of action for lack of evidence. The plaintiffs' experts could not provide evidence to support their theory that benzene from the oil wells had promoted cancers by suppressing the immune systems of already-vulnerable populations of students and faculty.

Benzene exposures are thought to require 20 to 60 parts per million over a number of years in order to create leukemia-type symptoms. Beverly Hills High students and faculty were exposed only to single-digit parts per billion.

Doubts Remain

While there is evidence the oil companies exceeded emissions permits, it remains extremely difficult to prove people are being made ill as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. No one denies the oil field is creating an increased health risk. The question is how much.

Horowitz tells us, "The corporate polluters don't deny they emit hazardous substances at the high school. They insist, however, that they are so tiny as to be inconsequential. In the eyes of the law, these chemical exposures are 'trivial.'"

While Horowitz states her opinion clearly, she still lets the story tell itself. She is not overly strident or even too emotional, even though she actually lived the story, loved the people and the place, and now tells it as a journalist with a particular perspective.

Are her suspicions correct? Is the cancer cluster at Beverly Hills High School the result of the oil wells that enable them to have few budgetary worries? It may in fact be one more cancer cluster that is attributable to statistical randomness more than anything else. On the other hand, building a high school in an active oil field may not be such a good idea.

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Jay Lehr, Ph.D. [...] is science director for The Heartland Institute.

This intense, clearly and compellingly written, painstakingly researched epic is a human tragedy set in a medical and environmental disaster affecting children and their teachers, and the residents of an entire neighborhood. While similar cancer clusters have appeared in other locations, the clear cause of the cancer cluster at Beverly Hills High School has blinded the local government, parents and other residents, and has caused them to act against the best interests of their children and community, dooming them to a huge risk of an array of early fatal cancers. Horowitz has dug deeply into the scientific background and legal action of this disaster, producing a page-turner, despite the volume of information. If this can happen in a wealthy community with the resources of Beverly Hills, it can happen anywhere (and is). Anyone interested in the intersection between business and environmental and legal issues must read this excellent book, which in my opinion should win the Pulitzer Prize!!!!

I can't believe how much of a page-turner this book is, given the complex and technical nature of the subject. I was hooked on the second page when the author described the magazines in a hospital waiting room having pages as limp as silk. Such details give a texture to the material which could in other less competent hands be as dry as a bone. That and the fact that the author, an alumna of Beverly Hills High, isn't hopeless about the hideous, head-in-the-sand response from the School District and the City of Beverly Hills. It's a truly marvelous book!

It's a rare privilege to be able to join a journalist at the top of her game in her search for the truth. That is what Joy Horowitz invites and allows us to do. I urge everyone awake to accept the invitation and
read this book. Then go wake up someone else and give it to them. It's too
important to miss and it's a thrilling, chilling, moving and finally remarkably human story. Don't miss this one!

This is an important book on a crucial topic. While we live in a time of great advances and scientific discovery, the chemicals and by-products that steadily increase in our environment are having greater and greater influence on our cells and ourselves.

We need information. Journalists like Joy are hindered in their ability to get their hands on this information because polluters are far more interested in protecting themselves than their fellow citizens. And although we may like to believe that the government agencies whose mission is to protect us are in fact protecting us, the sad truth is that some presidents actually do the reverse by appointing industry insiders to EPA (and other agency) positions so that business will not have to be bothered with the nuisance of being responsible, or even truthful.

This book tackles these difficult questions very well. Her writing is clear and powerful. This is not a science book though it teaches us much about the science of oil. It is a human story about trying to take control of our lives. We all need to be better informed and she helps us to be just that.

Bravo!

As a one time journalist turned environmental lawyer who is intimately familiar with the oil drilling at Beverly Hills High, I think the author has a lot of talent. Unfortunately, it is wasted on Parts per Million. The story had potential but she squandered the opportunity to get it right if she had told it like it was instead of writing a propaganda piece. An objective reporter would have carefully checked out her sources but all too often, unreliable sources are quoted without reservation, if the source supports the author's message. And those who don't are savaged by her. Moreover, her research into the history of the wells leaves much to be desired.

It is not that we don't agree that oil wells shouldn't be on a school campus. They shouldn't be in any urban setting or in any environmentally sensitive area. However, it not only defies common sense but also any credible scientific evidence to link them to the hodge podge of diseases that supposedly afflicted former Beverly Hills High School students.

I first saw the oil wells scattered on the High School campus in 1946 when my school football team played at Beverly Hills High. I photographed the game and I noticed the oil wells in the background of several of photos and I thought how ugly they were. Those wells had been there since 1928 and have been pumping ever since. Nothing was done until 1978 to clean up the drilling. and conditions were pretty bad then. Yet there were no unusual claims of afflictions occurring prior to then.

Ironically, I was hired in 1973 by the City of Beverly Hills to get rid of the oil wells. I had had success in Torrance ridding that City of abandoned and non-productive oil wells, getting legislation passed by the State which made it much easier. It was hoped that because oil was selling at only $2 a barrel, the owners of the high school wells could be convinced to abandon the wells.

Unfortunately, later that year there was an oil embargo and the price of oil shot up to $18 a barrel and the well owners had no incentive to abandon the wells even though they were not particularly productive.

However, the owners owned oil leases under much of the southwest portion of Beverly Hills and if new wells could be slant drilled to tap the oil under much of the area there was considerable potential. The City was not about to let the owners do that until Proposition 13 passed, which did not affect the City because it was able to increase other taxes to make up for the short fall. But the schools had to rely on property taxes which were severely restricted.

So when the owner approached the schools with a proposal to consolidate all the wells located on the school property into one location and to pay much higher royalties to the schools, it appeared to be a win-win situation for the schools. The City Council did not want to go along with it, but the schools and the parents, as well as many of the property owners that had leased their oil rights, put enormous pressure on the City Council to grant the permits. Nevertheless, before granting the permits, the City imposed severe restrictions upon the permit to designed to protect the safety and the health of both the students, faculty and area residents, restrictions more severe than any ever imposed by any other public entity on oil drilling.

Knowing the history, when KCBS-TV first broadcast Erin Brockovich's sensational accusations I knew that they were mostly untrue and I informed KCBS of the many of the errors in the story but the station did not contact me. It was more interested in sensationalism than the truth. I have always been skeptical of Erin Brockovich largely because she worked for Ed Masry, who from my dealings with him, was to me a greedy ambulance chaser always looking for a jackpot. He got one in the PG&E case but based on what I learned about the case, I had doubts that he would have won had he gone to trial.

So based largely on the fame she got from that case, Brockovich probably thought that she could walk all over Beverly Hills with little effort and as a result she and Masry made a fatal error. The jumped without looking where they were going. They should have made sure that they had a case first. They probably thought all they had to do was say "boo" and Beverly Hills would cave in and settle. But Masry, should have known from his previous experience with Beverly Hills, that Beverly Hills has a history of doggedly fighting cases, particularly when liability is questionable, and this case the City had good reason to question liability and in the end was successful, not because the City had better lawyers, but because there never was a case to begin with.

I came upon this book at the library.Now I have ordered my own copy as the library copy had pages torn out. I had heard about the oil well lawsuit, but didn't know that a book had been written about it. It's a well researched and well written book. As a graduate of Beverly I'm glad this book was written. I only wish more people knew about it. I was so sad when I read the part about my former teacher,Susan Srere, a veteran of 38 years in the school district, who died soon after she retired. There is something definitely wrong at BHHS-and something wrong with a city which would only allow oil drilling at the high school.

Joy Horowitz has written a mesmerizing and disturbing account of what is hidden from us, literally and metaphorically. She weaves compelling personal stories together with a history of Beverly Hills, its glamour and secrets, as she exposes the ubiquitous role of oil in this country. A Beverly Hills High graduate herself, the author infuses her journalistic account with a first hand knowledge of the place and the people about whom she writes. It is a moving and revelatory book. And you will want to underline at least one thing on every page.