HA: Paging Julia Roberts
Source: Hattiesburg American
You go girl:
Becky Gillette was an unpaid volunteer with the Sierra Club's Mississippi Chapter when she first heard about colleagues waking up in their federally issued trailers with nosebleeds, hacking coughs and headaches.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had distributed thousands of the aluminum trailers to Gulf Coast residents displaced by the 2005 hurricanes. Gillette heard of babies getting sick and pets, including a co-worker's parakeet, dying in the trailers over several weeks from late 2005 through early 2006.
Drawing on her experience as an activist and journalist, Gillette suspected formaldehyde, a colorless gas used in manufacturing. A colleague had Googled the phrase "testing for formaldehyde" and found a company in Boca Raton, Fla., that would supply test kits and analyze the results. She ordered 32 of the $35 kits and tested trailers along the Gulf Coast. The results were stunning: 30 of the 32 trailers registered unsafe levels of formaldehyde.
"We were shocked," Gillette, 52, says. "We knew then we had a major problem."
The tests were the beginning of a two-year odyssey for Gillette that would propel her through dozens of toxic trailers and the halls of Congress to shed light on a controversial fallout from the 2005 storms: dangerously high levels of formaldehyde in FEMA-issued trailers. A regional weekly newspaper dubbed her "the Erin Brockovich of Formaldehyde," after the consumer advocate who inspired a movie starring Julia Roberts.
Just think where all those folks would be without Becky Gillette - how cool is she?!
