Parts Per Million The Untold Story of Big Oil, Dirty Secrets, and the Poisoning of Beverly Hills High

"Not many people outside Los Angeles know that there are active oil wells and a power plant mere yards from the campus of the famous Beverly Hills High School. When Joy Horowitz attended the school in the 1970s, she didn't pay much mind to the oil derricks pumping up and down just past the athletic fields. The sprawling city of L.A. was built up over a rich and expansive oil field, containing more petroleum per acre of land than anywhere else in the world including Saudi Arabia, and for decades the school board and Beverly Hills residents considered an oil well on school property a boon for the royalty money it generated. No one imagined it would drag the tiny community into an environmental toxicity scandal - until a staggering number of Beverly alumni and faculty fell terminally ill, and whistle-blowers began suggesting that toxic chemicals from the sites were the cause of the alleged cancer cluster in the area." "Industrial pollution, historically a problem only in poor, marginalized communities, seems incompatible with daily life in one of the wealthiest towns in America. Yet in 2003, a landmark toxic tort suit was filed in Los Angeles, with more than one thousand plaintiffs claiming their illnesses could be traced to exposures from the oil and energy companies at the high school. Parts per Million is the product of Joy Horowitz's four years researching and investigating the story. Horowitz goes behind the scenes to find out if the connection between the pollution and the cancers could, in fact, be real. What she discovers is bigger and uglier than a single court case can attest to."--BOOK JACKET.Horowitz, Joy is the author of 'Parts Per Million The Untold Story of Big Oil, Dirty Secrets, and the Poisoning of Beverly Hills High', published 2007 under ISBN 9780670037988 and ISBN 0670037982.