Overview

During an early morning run, Saro Rizzo, a young attorney from Avila Beach, California, stumbled yet again over picnic debris, and determined to get his little town a beach-cleaning machine. Ringed by mountains and nestled between Santa Barbara and Monterey, Avila Beach was an isolated little oil town of some four hundred aging hippies, scattered professionals, and active octogenarians. It was not a community of protestors. Rizzo innocently began his crusade by requesting a donation from the local oil giant Unocal. Through a series of events rich in deceit, controversy, and greed, a massive oil spill and an environmental disaster were exposed. Written by Pulitzer-prize-nominee Barbara Wolcott, David, Goliath and the Beach-Cleaning Machine is the hard-charging story of this heroic quest started by a son of immigrants, only two years out of law school, who rallies his town of fierce independents to take on a corporate giant -- and win big to the tune of $18 million in damages as well as an estimated $100-200 million for clean-up. Rizzo's suit was the first of nearly sixty, including some filed by Ed Masry of Erin Brockovich fame. As a result of the massive clean-up, beautiful Avila Beach has been almost totally leveled and the townspeople are fighting to save those buildings that represent their history and sense of place. Now that the town is in the spotlight as a model of environmental rescue, the beach-cleaning machine has arrived!

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9781931868310

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Nestled between the Sierre Madre Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the self-described funky little community of Avila Beach had an ominous neighbor lurking over, and under, the town and its sand, soil, homes, and businesses.The Unocal Oil Company, long the town's major employer, had been steadily, and knowingly, polluting the seemingly pristine beach community for decades and would have continued were it not for a fateful morning jog in which longtime resident and new attorney, Saro Rizzo, literally stumbled on evidence of Unocal's dastardly despoiling of the environment.What begins as a simple case of trying to correct what appears to be a small problem quickly snowballs into the discovery of an environmental nightmare to rival the Exxon Valdez.In a classic and, unfortunately by now, familiar tale of big-business greed versus small-town pride, Pulitzer Prize-nominee Wolcott presents a balanced expose of one company's arrogant response to an ecological and economic disaster and what one town and one man accomplished in the face of overwhelming odds.

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