Hinkley is an unincorporated community in the western Mojave Desert, in San Bernardino County, California, about 14 miles northwest of Barstow and roughly 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The settlement traces its name to 1882, when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was establishing its corridor across the Mojave; the place was first spelled "Hinckley" for a railroad figure. For generations Hinkley was a small, self-contained desert outpost with a school, a store, and a scattering of homes, sustained by the railroad and by agriculture at the desert's edge. The community became nationally known for the Hinkley groundwater contamination. From 1952 to 1966, Pacific Gas and Electric Company disposed of wastewater containing hexavalent chromium from a natural gas compressor station into unlined ponds near the community, and the contaminant entered the local groundwater. In the 1990s, residents — with the help of legal clerk Erin Brockovich — pursued claims against PG&E, leading to a $333 million settlement in 1996, at the time the largest such settlement in U.S. history. The episode became the subject of the film "Erin Brockovich." In the years that followed, many properties were acquired and residents moved away, leaving Hinkley a quieter, more sparsely populated community than it was a generation ago. Today Hinkley is a small desert settlement of fewer than 1,000 residents, with homes set on large, widely spaced parcels. The BNSF Railway's transcontinental line still runs through the area, and the open Mojave stretches in every direction. It is a place defined by distance, desert light, and railroad heritage rather than by the suburban rhythms of cities nearer the coast.