A pool of crude oil, gasoline and diesel under the Avila Beach downtown leaked from underground pipelines for decades and produced enough aromatic hydrocarbons to blow two college students out the window of their basement apartment. Fumes ignited by a water heater pilot landed the roommates on their feet in the street, singed and still holding the paint brushes they had been using.
Part of the town supported Unocal Oil because it was perceived as having been a good neighbor for nearly a hundred years and family members worked for the company. Others did not want believe there could be so much contamination underground or that it was a problem. Indecision led to years of wrangling among county, state and federal agencies with company attorneys who played the delay game exceptionally well.
Enter twenty-three year old attorney Sar Rizzo, newly graduated and licensed to practice. Rizzo used his innate common sense, got help from the unexpected and recruited help from the law firm responsible for winning the ExxonValdez spill litigation, return of Holocaust Victims’ WWII bank accounts from Switzerland and a number of other landmark cases. His dynamic personality was not lost on California’s Attorney General who took second chair to him when the state joined the suit Rizzo filed against Unocal.
Dana Landing is based on Rizzo’s true story in the Central Coast Region of California where he learned on the job, taking Unocal to the mat several times and finally achieving the largest ever in the country oil cleanup settlement brought by a civil action -a quarter of a billion dollars in cleanup and damages.