California’s Dirty Little Secret: Oil Wells in the Backyard
by Alexandria Herr (Capital & Main) Even Texas and Wyoming do a better job protecting communities from oil and gas drilling. — As a child, Ashley Hernandez remembers pretending that the oil pumpjacks that loomed over her neighborhood were dinosaurs. Other children in her community called them giraffes, or horses. The strange metal animals pecked rhythmically at the earth, sandwiched between homes, next to playgrounds, in the parking lots of grocery stores, sucking the oil from the sediments beneath her neighborhood of Wilmington in southern Los Angeles.
Hernandez also remembers the nosebleeds. She would get them at night, and they were intense — not a trickle of blood, but so heavy that her mom would often tell her to try not to bleed through her pillows.
The nosebleeds weren’t the only thing. Kids and teachers at her school would get cancer diagnoses — a lot. She remembers being scared of the noise that was made by the strange device that her mom would use at night — a nebulizer, to treat her asthma. Adults would tell her not to drink the tap water. And there were periodic warnings to stay inside because of explosions at nearby refineries.
It wasn’t until she was in high school that Hernandez started to learn about the possible connections between the nosebleeds, the cancer, the asthma, the undrinkable water, and the oil.
Despite California’s reputation as an environmentally friendly state, neighborhood drilling is a distinctly Californian phenomenon.
Wilmington and the neighboring community of Carson are home to five oil refineries, as well as the Wilmington Oil Field — the third-most productive patch in the United States.
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In 2015, a coalition of youth and advocacy groups, including Communities for a Better Environment, sued the city of Los Angeles over its practice of rubber-stamping residential oil drilling projects. The groups ultimately settled with the city, which agreed to make changes in the well permitting process.
Oil and gas extraction spews a soup of toxic substances into the air, including nitrogen oxide, formaldehyde, volatile organic compounds, hydrochloric acid, and other chemicals known to be dangerous to human health. Unsurprisingly, living in proximity to oil wells has been linked to a range of health issues — including nosebleeds like Hernandez experienced, as well as migraines, rashes, respiratory problems, and longer-term impacts on health.
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More than 7 million Californians live within a mile of oil and gas drilling operations.
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When people think of oil country, they don’t often think of California. Yet oil played a major role in the state’s development, and oil money is entangled in California’s political system. That’s particularly true in Los Angeles, the city where the state’s oil boom first took off.
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California is the nation’s seventh-largest oil-producing state. And as with any top oil-producing state, it has an active and powerful oil lobby.The Western States Petroleum Association, or WSPA, an oil industry group, is one of the largest lobbying forces in California by expenditure. WSPA argued in opposition to both A.B. 345 and S.B. 467, and Democratic senators who voted against both bills received thousands of dollars in contributions from the industry.
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The agency was known as the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, until 2019. That summer, DOGGR became embroiled in scandal when it came to light that regulators were issuing permits for risky drilling projects without reviewing them first and that they held stock in the very companies they were supposed to be regulating.
In response to the scandal, the California legislature passed a law changing the agency’s name to CalGEM and updated its mandate to more explicitly include the protection of public health. READ MORE
California Proposes 3,200-Foot Buffer Zone Between Oil Wells and Homes, Schools — The new ruling, a key environmental protection, will impact 30% of oil wells in the state. (Grist/Capital and Main)
THE KERN COUNTY CASE: The fate of a majority of California’s oil drilling will be the subject of a state court hearing (Politico’s Morning Energy)
Excerpt from Politico’s Morning Energy: THE KERN COUNTY CASE: The fate of a majority of California’s oil drilling will be the subject of a state court hearing today, with environmentalists challenging Kern County’s environmental review on oil projects in its boundaries, POLITICO’s Colby Bermel reports. The county contains 80 percent of California’s oil production and has sought to make itself the lead on environmental reviews on the industry within its borders rather than the state government. But environmentalists contend doing so violates state law.
The county has had some influential forces backing it, including the Western States Petroleum Association. Today’s hearing likely won’t result in a decision, but the case could have a major hand in California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal of phasing out all oil extraction by 2045. Read more from Colby here. READ MORE
