The Oil Next Door

Oil in Los Angeles is hidden in plain sight. A new movement to acknowledge and change the influence of oil on LA is beginning to gain traction.

Living in Los Angeles is synonymous with life amidst an oil field; nearly ⅓ of Angelenos live within a mile of an active drilling site, while many more live in proximity to an idle one.

The City of Los Angeles gained immense wealth off oil, but now, calls for decreasing the number of oil wells are gaining momentum. In September, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to ban the creation of new oil wells in unincorporated Los Angeles. The motion will assess existing wells to evaluate how to proceed, either shutting them down or allowing them to continue to operate. However, wells can not simply be plugged and decommissioned until their owners have made a profit.

Exposure to oil mining is linked with long-lasted health effects. Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College, Bhavna Shamasunder, found that “the closer someone lived to an active or recently idle well site, the poorer that person’s lung function, even after adjusting for such other risk factors as smoking, asthma, and living near a freeway… There has been a real causal link between health outcomes and birth outcomes [with adjacency to oil operations], so babies are born premature and with low birth weight and respiratory harm.”

Dr. Jason Jarvis, an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University who researches the history of the use of social media and oil, explains “you have a city that’s a big tourist city and no one thinks of oil, we all think of Hollywood and all that.” Jarvis attributes that mentality to “the idea that if they built it must be safe…and that is definitely not true.”

There is a long history of oil extraction sites being offloaded into poorer neighborhoods, and nine out of ten Californians who live near an oil mine are people of color. Even more disturbing is that Shamasundurs’ study found that 45% of the people who live near oil fields aren’t even aware of their proximity to them.

Even more so, oil drilling companies have it in their best interest to fly under the radar of public awareness — the more scrutiny, the harder it is to mine. Historically, Los Angeles has been a big proponent of the oil industry as it provides a large source of profit. In the city, the oil and gas industry contributes $4 billion in state and local taxes and other revenue. The industry also directly creates 36,000 jobs in the county and another 76,000 indirectly through supporting, among others, the chemical manufacturing, engineering, and construction industries. Proponents of ending the oil industry in Los Angeles recognize the need to not leave these workers behind.

Shamasunder discussed the importance of creating systems to transition workers from fossil fuel jobs into more sustainable ones: “There is a whole field called ‘just transitions,’ and how do you create a ‘just transition’ that is based in justice for workers…There is lots of work happening [in the field], lots of ideas, for how it happens”

(Photo by Max Haimes / The Jaguardian)

An active oil mine lays just behind a fence in the residential neighborhood of Playa Del Rey.

During conversations about climate change, the needs of the workers are often left behind, but as Shamasunder puts it, many of the jobs are “not unionized jobs, some of the most dangerous jobs are independent contractors.” Union workers are afforded higher levels of protection than their un-unionized counterparts, so the most at-risk workers are the least protected.

At Beverly Hills High School, The Tower of Hope is an outer shell of a building, hiding the oil derricks inside. The tower was painted in flowers when the school district, in 2000, had 3000 terminally ill children from neighboring hospitals come in and paint it. The school allowed the mines to be built on school grounds because they were receiving royalties. In the 1970s, the school district was getting paid 1.5 million dollars a year in royalties from the 19 wells operating on its campus.

Public backlash and high-profile lawsuits did not change the course of these mines. The school only shut down the operation in 2017, after Venoco Inc., owner and operator of the mines, went bankrupt.

Yet, there still exist mines disguised by false buildings. There are 54 mines behind the Beverly Center, 52 at the Packard Well Site, an open-air false office building, and another 40 wells at the Cardiff Tower, designed to resemble a synagogue.

(Screenshot by Liam Waldman / The Jaguardian

The Los Angeles Times Keeps Track of California’s Oil Wells on an Interactive map.

Stand LA, a group dedicated to ending neighborhood drilling, reported that the walls of the Cardiff Tower were extended from 12 feet to 25, the diesel mining rig was replaced with an electric model, and other expensive anti-pollution and noise reducing measures were taken when it was put into re-use in 1998. The modifications don’t eliminate the pollution and noise harms, but they do assist in reducing them. However, STAND LA noted on their website that, oftentimes, poorer neighborhoods in South LA aren’t afforded these same protections.

Despite these drilling operations being relatively small at only 40 to 50 wells, they are still profitable, due to the preponderance of slant drilling, a technique involving mining at an angle in order to access new oil, as one derrick can be used to access multiple wells. The strategy can dramatically increase revenue, but can exacerbate health and safety issues by expanding the range of the wells as well.

There is still a lot of work to be done to eliminate the inequities that oil mines in the county create, and a population aware of their impact is the first step. Even though oil is all around Angelenos, it has historically been out of sight and out of mind. Acknowledging oil’s impact on our city and its health are the first steps in the fight for accountability.