Being Like Brockovich

"I've always preferred the freedom of riding alone," Elizabeth Crawford says, taking long, purposeful strides as she shows me where she likes to bring her horse. We're on Ahmanson Ranch, a vast tract of rolling, oak-studded hills bordering Los Angeles and Ventura counties that Crawford helped to preserve.

Although the 2,983-acre ranch appears tranquil, the battle over who would control it was nothing short of ferocious. The land had always attracted nature lovers and filmmakers; parts of Gone with the Wind were shot here. More recently, a developer had a different vision: a mini-city of 3,050 luxury homes, two golf courses, retail and office space, schools, and a hotel.

Predictably, these plans sparked a fight between the developer--Ahmanson Land Company, owned by the Seattle-based banking giant Washington Mutual--and environmentalists, who wanted to save the wildlife. Like many such conflicts around the country, this one dragged on for years. But when Crawford joined the movement to save the ranch, she learned these acres hid a far more troubling story than anything she'd expected. Before long, Crawford--a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do--found herself pitted against formidable opponents, including an aerospace giant, government officials, nearby residents, and even some of the environmentalists who'd once been on her side.

In 2001 Crawford was a stay-at-home mother. Always health conscious and outdoorsy, she had rekindled her girlhood passion for horses and taught her three sons to ride at the ranch, which was owned by Washington Mutual but afforded some public access.

"I saw a chance to recapture a part of my childhood," she says. She had grown up in Hacienda Heights, about an hour east of Los Angeles, when that area was orchards, fields, and running creeks. "We had endless gallops through the hills," she says. "But in 1971, the bulldozers came, and my friends and I watched, horrified, as they plowed everything down."

So when she learned about the plans for the new development, she thought, I couldn't save Hacienda Heights, but I can try to do something about this. She joined the Rally to Save Ahmanson Ranch, a well-funded coalition that included several Hollywood activists, one of whom was her husband's boss, HBO president Chris Albrecht.

At her second meeting, one word stopped her in her tracks: Rocketdyne.

During the Cold War, Rocketdyne (a military contractor that was once a division of North American Aviation and later became part of Rockwell International and then Boeing) had done several groundbreaking government-backed projects, including work on an early nuclear reactor. The then remote location of Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), about two miles from Ahmanson Ranch, must have seemed perfect for such top-secret work. But by the 1990s, L.A.'s sprawl pushed many homes into the shadow of the plant on the hill, Crawford's among them. Before moving to the tonier suburb of Encino in 1996, she'd lived within earshot of Rocketdyne and had often been awakened by mysterious 2am explosions that rattled her windows and sent plumes of bright red smoke into the air.

"I knew those detonations weren't kosher, but it was beyond me to find out what, who, why, and so on," she says.

Now was her chance. Crawford's assignment from the Rally was to find out whether toxins from Rocketdyne might have contaminated soil and groundwater on the ranch, which would make it unattractive to the developer. Rocketdyne had a frightful safety record--a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959 that experts estimate was on a scale rivaling Three Mile Island's and a 1994 explosion that killed two scientists, for which the company pleaded guilty to illegal storing and dumping of hazardous waste and was fined $6.5 million. Dozens of former employees and local residents have blamed Rocketdyne for their cancers and other illnesses.