The Fight to End Oil Drilling in Los Angeles | Earth Focus | S7 E3

0:00 -Nearly half a million Angelenos live within a half a mile of an oil well,

0:05 as Los Angeles continues to be the largest urban oil field in the country.

0:11 -This is the photo of us, youth.

0:14 We were 14 to 17-year-olds, and our lawyer,

0:16 and we were suing the city of Los Angeles for environmental racism in violation

0:21 of the California Environmental Quality Act.

0:25 -LA County has backed off from oil drilling and is

0:28 beginning to decommission old oil wells and ban new ones.

0:35 Communities are still experiencing the negative health effects

0:39 of being in close proximity to oil drilling,

0:42 but they are finding solutions to a healthier future.

0:53 [music] -Los Angeles was built on oil, both physically and economically.

1:00 By the mid-1920s, it had become one

1:03 of the largest oil-exporting regions in the world.

1:08 -I've lived in South LA long enough to know that I need to be very alert

1:13 to and wary of these innocuous notices that come

1:17 in the mail from the city planning department.

1:19 We received a notice that the oil company was planning to drill three new wells.

1:24 Some neighbors and I, we purpose to go door to door and just

1:28 talk with every neighbor to make sure that they were

1:31 aware of the expansion that was being planned and to listen

1:34 about how the oil drill site was impacting them.

1:38 The stories we heard were incredible.

1:41 Ms.

1:41 Kuse shared about how she was sprayed with oil as she was out watering her lawn.

1:47 Sunny, who lived next door to the drill site,

1:49 shared how closed windows could not keep the diesel

1:54 exhaust and petroleum fumes out of his two-year-old daughter's bedroom.

1:58 For fear for her health,

2:00 he and his wife were planning to leave the neighborhood.

2:05 I met with Oscar, who shared how just the deafening din of thousands of feet

2:10 of pipe being driven into the ground had

2:13 robbed residents of the peaceful enjoyment of their home.

2:16 We began to connect those dots and just realized this facility,

2:20 which we were never very fond of, as you can imagine,

2:23 was having an enormous impact on our neighborhood.

2:27 [music] -In 1900, the population of Greater LA was a few hundred thousand,

2:40 and in the 19-teens and '20s really begins to take off.

2:45 By the time we get to the '50s and '60s,

2:49 there are many millions of people living in LA,

2:53 and many of the neighborhoods that are

2:55 in and around oil fields are established already.

2:59 -I think in those early days,

3:01 there was this interesting push-pull where some residents wanted

3:04 the activity because they could actually profit from it.

3:08 That was before there was really an understanding of some of the health impacts.

3:11 Also, I think when there wasn't a lot of regulation and when

3:14 there wasn't a lot of understanding about very safe ways to operate,

3:18 when you'd have spills and explosions and things like that.

3:21 As we started to go further into the LA history,

3:23 that's when you start really seeing some policy decisions that I

3:27 think really led to the landscape that we have right now.

3:31 What we have in LA is a situation where we have

3:34 neighborhoods that tend to have more people of color and minorities.

3:39 You started seeing things like redlining,

3:42 where certain neighborhoods were deemed less attractive

3:45 or less valuable or less deserving of home loans.

3:49 Also, racially based covenants,

3:51 which excluded people on the basis of race from buying homes in certain areas.

3:56 There have been studies now that show that there

3:59 is a correlation between those neighborhoods and oil drilling activity.

4:05 -The first oil well in Southern California was

4:08 a tunnel that was dug horizontally into Sulphur Mountain.

4:13 There, they could see oil seeping out of the mountain,

4:16 so they literally just dug a tunnel to follow it.

4:19 A few years later, in 1892, Edward Doheny was driving his wagon through downtown

4:25 LA and realized there was tar on the wheels.

4:29 Doheny was the first to use what at the time was modern drilling technology.

4:33 They sharpened the end of a tree trunk and used that as their drilling

4:37 apparatus to dig a hole that was several hundred feet deep.

4:41 They managed to puncture one of these reservoirs,

4:44 and oil came flowing up out of it.

4:47 That was really the first commercially successful oil well in the LA area.

4:52 Once the Doheny well was shown to be productive,

4:56 everyone with a piece of property nearby realized they could also drill a well.

5:02 What followed was this mad rush to drill holes to try and get in on the action

5:09 before your neighbor drilled a well and drained

5:12 because they're all tapping the same reservoir.

5:14 There's this rapid rush to tap the reservoir and have everyone get rich.

5:20 I don't think there is a recognition of how harmful it could be to humans.

5:25 It was quite useful as a fuel for weatherproofing and so on.

5:31 I think the recognition that it was also toxic came about decades later.

5:37 By the time we appreciate the dangers of oil to humans,

5:41 the LA oil fields are fully developed,

5:44 and we have people living around and amongst them throughout the basin.

5:50 At that point, it's probably hard to reverse course.

5:56 This is a graph of the population of LA through time.

5:59 You can see it really starts to take off after 1900 in the teens and '20s.

6:04 Of course, this is the same time that oil

6:07 fields of Los Angeles basin were being developed.

6:11 A lot of this population growth was related

6:14 to the booming oil field business in Los Angeles.

6:19 An oil field consists of many wells

6:22 drilled into that reservoir to extract the oil.

6:27 Generally, when we close an oil field,

6:29 that involves ensuring that all of those holes that we've poked

6:33 into the ground are sealed so that oil can't seep out on its own.

6:38 That involves pumping cement down all

6:41 of the wells to make sure they're tightly sealed.

6:48 This was the first field that was developed by Doheny.

6:51 Here's Dodger Stadium for reference.

6:54 The red color shows you roughly where the oil deposit is located,

6:59 and the black dots show you all

7:01 of the individual wells that have been drilled over time.

7:08 You're really struck by not only how many there are, but how dense they are.

7:13 It must have looked like a forest

7:14 of oil derricks back in the heyday of exploration.

7:18 Today, virtually all of those wells are closed.

7:22 Only a single well is still producing oil from the Los Angeles field,

7:26 that's shown here in the blue arrow.

7:31 -Working-class communities were initially supportive

7:33 of the industry because it promised jobs.

7:37 As they started to witness oil spills and explosions in their neighborhoods,

7:41 along with long-term damage to land, water,

7:44 and human health, they started to push back.

7:54 -In the early 1960s, the oil company demolished all the homes that were

7:58 here to make way for this oil drill site.

8:03 In 2000, the oil company went to the city of Los Angeles and said,

8:07 "We want to rehab these properties,

8:10 turn them into dense, multifamily housing." For decades,

8:15 the oil company would park tanker trucks here, less than 10 feet from homes.

8:22 These tanker trucks, they would deploy thousands of gallons of acid.

8:26 They'd pump it into the ground, dissolving the geology,

8:30 creating pathways to bring oil to the surface.

8:32 Meanwhile, those ambient fumes would kill plants right outside the drill site.

8:40 Residents lived here.

8:42 Their homes were sprayed with oil, and many times,

8:45 the oil company had to repaint their homes.

8:48 Neighbors on every side had toxic impacts from this facility.

8:53 -This drill site is wide open.

8:56 There's not monitoring here.

8:58 -Despite 250 complaints, many health-related to government agencies,

9:03 the oil site remained open until four EPA inspectors

9:07 felt ill and experienced severe headaches during an inspection.

9:12 That's where this story takes another turn.

9:15 It appears this site, and nearly all the other ones in LA,

9:19 haven't been subjected to an environmental impact report in nearly 30 years.

9:28 -We can think about the health effects from living

9:31 by urban oil wells in two big categories.

9:34 One is acute effects that you may experience.

9:37 This can be going outside and getting a headache,

9:41 feeling dizzy, or having an asthmatic episode.

9:44 Also, coughing and wheezing,

9:46 elevated blood pressure are different types of short-term health impacts

9:51 that communities have been experiencing that live near these sites.

9:55 Then we can also think about chronic impacts,

9:57 long-term increases in your risk for hypertension or heart disease,

10:02 more asthma hospitalizations.

10:05 Then we also have seen higher risk of cancer.

10:08 We see linkages between your proximity to oil and gas

10:13 wells and the risk that a child may develop cancer.

10:17 -The building here in the back is the apartment building that I grew up in.

10:20 It's an affordable housing building owned by Esperanza Community Housing.

10:23 I lived there for 10 years of my life.

10:25 It's a photo where you can see all the pipes and the tubes,

10:28 and the entire facility from the AllenCo oil site.

10:34 This is the photo of me underground inside of AllenCo Energy.

10:39 They have 21 underground wells,

10:42 and the worker gave us an entire tour of the facility.

10:45 I learned that the workers,

10:47 because they're exposed to the emissions themselves for so long,

10:50 that they often lose their sense of smell,

10:52 and that's a common symptom of being exposed

10:54 to hydrogen sulfide for long periods of time.

11:00 -Crude oil, also known as petroleum,

11:02 is a complex mixture made up of tens of thousands of different compounds.

11:07 It forms from natural organic matter that's been

11:11 buried and heated under just the right conditions.

11:14 Once formed, that petroleum is buoyant,

11:17 rising up through the subsurface and moving through layers of rock.

11:21 If it's caught by impermeable rock formations along the way,

11:24 it gets trapped, forming a petroleum reservoir.

11:29 That's what we drill into, but if it's not trapped, it can leak out naturally,

11:34 creating surface seeps like what can be found at the La Brea Tar Pits.

11:39 -Oil starts as living organisms, phytoplankton living in the ocean, for example,

11:45 that get buried in sediments that eventually become sedimentary

11:48 rocks that get buried within the earth and heated.

11:51 As they're heated, the organic molecules that make up that life breaks down

11:57 and turns into other molecules that we call hydrocarbons that make up oil.

12:02 It's less dense than water,

12:04 so it will rise through the subsurface and eventually either reach the surface,

12:09 in which case it's an oil seep or a tar seep,

12:12 or it can be trapped by geologic structures that we would call reservoirs.

12:17 That then can accumulate a deposit

12:19 of oil that would be economically worth exploring.

12:25 The LA basin and the surrounding regions have

12:29 all three of those components of an oil system.

12:32 They have an excellent source rock that's known as the Monterey Formation.

12:37 It is widespread throughout Southern California and very organic-rich.

12:42 We have active plate tectonics.

12:45 This gives us our earthquakes that we know so much about.

12:49 This also has folded up basins and valleys

12:53 and pushed that Monterey Formation deep enough to be heated.

12:57 Then that same tectonics has generated a lot of traps,

13:01 so folds and faults in the geology where that oil can accumulate in reservoirs.

13:08 The LA basin is a really prolific oil field.

13:12 It has something like 68 named fields within it.

13:17 You could think of a field as a single deposit of oil that's all interconnected.

13:22 The amount of oil that it contains is really enormous.

13:27 Something like 15 billion barrels of oil have

13:30 been produced from the area over its lifetime,

13:33 with as much as perhaps 5 billion more yet to be produced.

13:38 That would put it in the top 20 worldwide oil-producing basins.

13:43 Many people know that LA has oil fields.

13:45 They don't, I think, often realize just how big it is.

13:50 [music] -Here we have our air quality sensors.

13:59 This is a pod that was designed

14:01 by the University of Colorado at Boulder to measure

14:04 a variety of pollutants that communities that are

14:07 living near oil and gas sites may be experiencing.

14:11 With these sensors, we work with community residents

14:14 to help us find locations for the sensors.

14:17 With it, we measure carbon dioxide, ozone,

14:21 nitric oxides, methane, and then non-methane hydrocarbons.

14:25 With this, we're able to get measurements that are more related to traffic

14:29 pollution as well as those more specific to oil and gas extraction.

14:34 These are placed up on posts about breathing height.

14:38 They also measure pollutants about every 30 seconds.

14:42 We place about 20 monitors throughout the neighborhoods

14:45 in South LA to continuously monitor for air pollutants.

14:50 We see adverse impacts to folks' lung function,

14:54 both when they're living near an active or an idle site.

14:57 However, we see the effect is worse when you're near an active site.

15:03 When we're considering how oil wells may impact local air quality,

15:09 we see that around a half a mile is where we see

15:13 the highest concentration of pollutants associated

15:16 with the oil well compared to farther away.

15:19 However, this reach may be farther than a half a mile,

15:22 but a lot of the evidence to date has

15:25 suggested that this is the really important zone of influence.

15:32 -My grandma developed asthma when she was 70 years old.

15:35 My mom developed it when she was 40.

15:38 My sister has thyroid issues.

15:39 My brother had asthma as well,

15:41 and so many of us were experiencing symptoms inside of our apartment.

15:47 My nosebleeds became so severe I couldn't sleep in my own bed anymore.

15:51 I would sleep in a chair to prevent choking on my own blood.

15:54 I developed body spasms so severe my mom

15:57 would carry me from one place to the other.

15:59 I had headaches, stomach pains.

16:01 I had heart palpitations, and I wore a heart monitor.

16:04 I developed asthma.

16:05 That's something I'm always going to have to live with now.

16:11 -The body of research on this issue continues to grow,

16:14 and the scientific and health findings are clear.

16:18 While my district is disproportionately burdened by oil drilling, in fact,

16:23 over half of the oil wells in unincorporated

16:25 LA County are in the second district.

16:28 It truly is a countywide issue.

16:30 Collectively, these motions take initial steps to deal

16:33 with the impacts of oil drilling in unincorporated LA County

16:38 and get us the information we need to make

16:40 informed decisions about a long-term oil drilling phase-out plan.

16:45 -I think the health risk between these different

16:47 kinds of oil operations aren't fully explored yet.

16:51 By research, we have evidence from communities

16:55 living nearby of them still experiencing odors,

16:58 headaches, respiratory health issues when they're living near these idle sites.

17:03 That's because some of these air pollutants may still

17:07 be leaking or being released into the nearby environment.

17:11 Some of the work that we've done specifically in South LA,

17:15 we observe more reductions in lung function among people

17:20 living near an active site compared to an idle site,

17:23 but we observe it in both communities.

17:27 -Solutions lie in communities coming together and advocating for safer

17:31 spaces and a future that looks a little greener.

17:35 -Part of what we wanted to do today is

17:37 bring what's behind that wall out into the light

17:40 and work together to call the city

17:43 to ensure justice and just treatment for our community.

17:47 -Oversight over the oil industry is pretty complicated.

17:50 There are cities, there's the county, there's also the state.

17:54 Then, depending on what particular aspect of the industry we're talking about,

17:58 who oversees it can vary.

18:00 For instance, the state really has oversight over

18:04 drilling operations themselves as well as well closures.

18:07 On the other hand, if it is in an incorporated city,

18:09 it would have land use control.

18:11 They would be the ones that actually permit the drilling operations.

18:14 In LA County, when it's a public health

18:16 issue or something related to public health code,

18:18 our county public health department would have jurisdiction.

18:21 It's pretty variable depending on the specific issue that we're talking about.

18:28 We would expect that if a well is abandoned,

18:30 you really have a blank slate in terms of what you can do with that land.

18:34 We are a very urban area, and there are a lot of needs.

18:37 There's a lot of interest in developing more green space, more housing,

18:41 areas where we can have better transportation or jobs, and things like that.

18:46 In an ideal world, we are left with a site

18:49 where the community can really be part of making that decision.

18:56 -Residents worked together to shut down this oil drill site.

19:01 In 2019, we won the closure of the facility.

19:05 Where we're standing now is where the old oil well cellar used to be.

19:10 We figured that the oil company wasn't going

19:12 to be very excited to negotiate the acquisition with us.

19:16 We formed a partnership with the LA Neighborhood Land Trust.

19:20 Then we reached out to our local elective leaders.

19:23 We received a $10 million state grant

19:26 for the acquisition through Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer.

19:30 We gave those funds to the LA Neighborhood Land Trust,

19:33 and they took the lead in negotiating the acquisition of this drill site.

19:37 All the oil wells have been plugged, capped, cut off,

19:42 but we need to retain access to them

19:44 in the future in case they were to leak again.

19:48 What used to be the oil drill site will be a new community park.

19:52 Over here, we're going to build a community

19:55 center to house programs for our neighborhood.

19:59 On the opposite corner, we're going to build multifamily housing to create

20:03 new homes for families in our community.

20:08 [music] -As communities come together

20:16 to advocate for change in their neighborhoods,

20:18 the policy will take time, but the voices have been heard.

20:23 -I never thought my activism would lead me to where I am today.

20:27 The Los Angeles Times wrote a story about my community,

20:30 and that story captured the attention of former US Senator Barbara Boxer.

20:34 She came out and had a press conference with us

20:36 where she pled AllenCo Energy to cease operations, and they did.

20:41 Shortly after, they temporarily closed in 2013,

20:44 which was made permanent in 2020.

20:47 I'm very proud to say that AllenCo Energy

20:49 has been temporarily shut down for six years, going on seven this November.

20:52 [applause] -We then noticed we weren't

20:57 the only community being affected by oil extraction,

21:00 so came the birth of STAND-LA,

21:02 Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling Los Angeles.

21:06 STAND-LA fights tirelessly to pass an ordinance to establish a 2,500-foot health

21:10 and safety buffer zone between oil extraction and sensitive land for our health,

21:15 our safety, and our environment.

21:18 This photo is a historic day.

21:21 This is when Mayor Eric Garcetti signed the ordinance

21:25 of the Los Angeles City Council and County Board of Supervisors,

21:28 voting unanimously to ban all new oil

21:31 and gas exploration in the city and county,

21:33 and also phase out the existing sites over 20 years,

21:36 which is historic because Los Angeles is

21:39 the largest urban oil field in the nation.

21:42 I tirelessly fight for my community because I believe everyone

21:45 has the right to breathe clean air despite their age,

21:48 gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, zip code.

21:51 -We have such a strong advocacy community

21:54 that's been working on this issue for years.

21:57 As those neighborhoods and the residents in them

22:00 were really understanding the impact that they're having,

22:03 seeing them around them, they were able to organize their specific coalitions,

22:07 like the STAND-LA Coalition,

22:09 that is very adept and savvy at figuring out the levers that they can pull.

22:15 They've done a lot of work to develop

22:17 policy statements and coalesce around specific pushes,

22:21 and then reach out to decision makers to move policy forward.

22:25 They've been very successful with that over the past few years.

22:30 -I became an activist out of survival.

22:33 We would organize community meetings within our own community and apartment,

22:37 and we were constantly finding ways to mobilize and organize ourselves and make

22:42 noise about this toxic monster that was 30 feet from our homes.

22:49 -More and more, climate is just becoming the overriding crisis of our time,

22:54 as well as biodiversity loss.

22:58 A lot of my office's goals and my goals are really focused

23:01 on what do we do to make Los Angeles a model for climate resilience?

23:06 That means addressing the suite of hazards that we have.

23:09 I think a lot of that comes through more

23:12 greening and getting reconnected to the nature that's in LA,

23:16 and so to the extent that we can increase parks and open

23:20 space and green spaces while also balancing those other needs of housing,

23:24 and jobs, and transportation.

23:26 When I think about a future Los Angeles,

23:29 I want to see one where communities are thriving.

23:33 I think less pollution, more greening are key to that vision.

23:40 -In the acquisition of the Jefferson Drill Site now for redevelopment,

23:45 it's amazing the kind of dreaming that you can do,

23:49 and that's what we're beginning to see here.

23:51 We've created a model for how communities can

23:54 take on these multi-billion-dollar toxic polluters and prevail.

23:59 I can't wait to see that vision take root in this place.

24:05 I hope that we're creating a model by which other drill sites

24:09 will be repurposed for the blessing of the communities in which they're located.

24:15 -Nalleli and her leadership inspired the enactment of SB 1137,

24:20 banning all new oil wells within 3,200 feet of communities in California.

24:27 Richard and his neighborhood shut down the Jefferson Drill Site.

24:32 Even with this hopeful activism,

24:34 there's still work to do as multiple other sites like Wilmington,

24:39 Long Beach, Los Angeles City, and other fields continue to operate.

24:44 [music] -If you enjoy stories like this, you can support them by liking,

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25:28 Thanks, and stick around for the next one.

25:31 I think you're going to love it.