Erin Brockovich, an American woman, was born in Kansas. She studied at a business college for a year, then she moved to southern California and married a restaurant manager.

In 1990, when she was thirty years old, she was in a car accident. A law company helped her after the accident, and later she started to work for them.

Her job was to organise papers. One day Erin realised that there were lots of papers about some very sick people in a place called Hinkley. She started to look for more information about the town.

Erin worked very hard for five years. She visited lots of sick people in Hinkley and listened to their stories. All the people lived near a big Pacific Gas and Electric factory and she discovered that there was a chemical called chromium in the local water. It was from the factory and Erin believed that the people were sick because of the chromium in their drinking water. She planned to help them.