I had been waiting for a long time, but reporters didn't .

Erin, an American woman, was born in Kansas. In1990, 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 organize papers. One day Erin realized 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 factory and she discovered that there was a chemical called chromium in the local water. It was from the factory. Erin believed that the people were sick because of the chromium in their drinking water. She planned to help them.

Erin started law case (诉讼) against the factory. The factory didn't agree that the people were ill because of the water, but in 1996 the judge (法官) ordered the factory to pay the people in Hinkley $500, 000 each (there were about600 sick people, so that was S 333 million in total).

In 2000, there was a film about Erin, and it was very successful. Now Erin is famous—she has her own company and she gives talks all over the world.