Are There More Oil and Gas Wells in LA Than Movie Stars?

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It was 2010 when people in the neighborhood started to notice the odors. The air reeked with rotten egg smell and super sweet scents like cotton candy or overripe, decaying guavas—a popular metaphor in the mainly poor and working class Latino area. A wave of maladies swept through crowded apartment houses: watery eyes, nausea, dizziness and visual disorientation, headaches as sharp as skewers lanced through the brain. Children increasingly missed school. Workers lost badly needed pay as some adults developed asthma.

In March 2011, Monic Uriarte, an employee of Esperanza Community Housing, and her daughter found the gate to the facility open and walked inside. Warmly greeted by the employees, they got a grand tour. An Allenco worker explained, “This is Mother Nature’s gift to us.”

Uriarte immediately told her boss, Esperanza’s executive director, Nancy Halpern Ibrahim, what she had seen. Ibrahim and her staff connected the dots: The sweet smells came from additives to the natural gas; the rotten smell indicated hydrogen sulfide; the big tanker trucks that had been tearing up the streets and sidewalks were bringing water and hydrochloric acid for well stimulation and maintenance. The illnesses in the community likely came from these chemical mixes, volatile organic compounds and hydrocarbons released by drilling, and whatever fumes were emitted when Allenco pumped the “produced” (or used) water and acid back underground. At subsequent community meetings, no one at Esperanza was impressed by Allenco’s presentations, which were laced with condescension. “Don’t you enjoy cooking with gas, Sweetie? We’ll provide a service to you, Sweetie.”

In LA County there are 3,700 fossil fuel wells and 2,000 miles of oil pipelines.

Many community groups might mobilize when faced with such danger, but few could function at Esperanza Community Housing’s level. The organization owns five apartment buildings in the neighborhood, former single occupancy tenements built in the early twentieth century that Esperanza remodeled to rent to low-income families. Ibrahim arrived at Esperanza in 1985 when she was 30 years old to become its health director. Educated with a master’s degree in public health, her first mission was to survey all 1,700 residences in the census tract, looking for lead paint, and testing everyone’s blood for lead poisoning. During the following years, Esperanza trained a vast cadre of community health workers. Now, the organization tapped into its health worker network to identify and quantify the impacts from the new oil drilling. One survey question, Ibrahim says, showed that many residents “who had been here for ages did not know the source of the strange smells.”

“We began to train the community how to file a regulatory complaint with the Air Quality Management (AQMD) District,” Ibrahim says. “We’d call the AQMD—a regional branch of California’s Air Resources Board—and we’d get different answers on how many separate complaints we had to file to get an AQMD inspector out to investigate. They’d tell us: ‘We need six people, we need nine people, we need 11 people not from the same household.’ If the smell wasn’t present when the inspector arrived, they would not file a complaint.” Nor would the inspectors file a complaint against Allenco on the basis of widespread nosebleeds. “We don’t know if the nosebleeds are related,” AQMD inspectors said. Ibrahim became increasingly frustrated. “Toxics destroy the sense of smell. If you are living in it 24/7, you won’t be able to smell it anymore,” she says.

On Sept. 5, 2012 Esperanza launched a public campaign against the oil drilling. From one of the residential buildings directly across the street from the well pad the group unfurled banners that read, in English and Spanish, “People, not poisons.” In front of the apartment building, Esperanza placed eight Styrofoam heads, each with an artistic rendition of a common illness from the oil drilling—skewers running through the skull, circling stars, pounding headaches. It was “very visual, very shocking, and very upsetting,” Ibrahim says. The media ate it up.

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat known for her environmental advocacy, saw some of the coverage and asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate. Three EPA inspectors showed up at the well pad in November 2013. All three immediately became ill from the fumes. The EPA told the company it needed to make $700,000 worth of modifications to comply with federal regulations and fined it $99,000 for violating Clean Air Act regulations. Allenco decided to close the operation while it began to make the required changes. But the organizers at Esperanza felt they had won only a temporary victory. “We have not permanently shut them down, “ Ibrahim says. “It’s in limbo.”

Los Angeles projects itself as a theme park of movie stars, ocean surf, and sunshine. Think of the lovely pictures of Santa Monica Bay broadcast every year during the Rose Bowl Parade or the glamorous emblem of the Hollywood sign. Yet underneath and behind the beauty and glitz, the city and county of Los Angeles function as a gigantic oil field and processing facility.

Los Angeles County is home to more than 9 million people, sprawling across nearly 700 square miles, and including not just LA but also the cities of Burbank, Long Beach, Pasadena, and others. Within this metropolis exist some 3,700 active fossil fuel wells. Together, they extract 24 million barrels of oil each year and 18 million cubic feet of natural gas. Ten of California’s 20 oil refineries are in LA County, processing 40 million barrels of oil each month that are shipped in from across the nation and around the world. The California State Fire Marshall reports that 2,000 miles of major petroleum pipelines underlie the county, while the federal government’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration tallies 681 miles of large-bore natural gas pipes. Just as LA has developed its own culture of food trucks, multi-ethnic neighborhoods, and alluring entertainment and high tech industries, so, too, has the city created a unique oil aesthetic.

But now LA’s oil industry—long considered a source of wealth and a normal and distinctive part of the urban landscape—is increasingly challenged as a threat to public health and safety. A loose network of activists, spurred to action by the boom in unconventional drilling techniques and oil field modernization, is tugging at the mask that the industry hides behind.

Esperanza’s success in the fall of 2013, however tentative, helped inspire a broad range of similar challenges to the oil and gas companies. At one level, the victory meant LA activists now felt more firmly connected to the wider national and global movements to move beyond fossil fuel. Urban drilling— especially the new forms of well stimulation—was just too hazardous to public health to remain unchallenged. At the same time, the Esperanza story revealed a signature feature of Los Angeles oil fields and facilities—the ways in which they have become “normalized” and accepted. It has taken the residents of Los Angeles years to awaken from what you could call the “visual anesthesia” created by high walls and lovely landscaping.

The disguised Allenco wells are just one oil site among many similarly camouflaged. To name just a few examples: Near the upscale Beverly Center on La Cienega Boulevard is a pad with 40 wells cloaked by a high wall. The sprawling Veterans Administration Compound in West Los Angeles hides 18 wells. LA’s historic Jewish section contains both a faux synagogue-esque building surrounded by flagstone walls and a seven-story office-building façade, complete with a lobby. The “synagogue” hides 40 active wells while the “office building” holds 28. In some places, dense foliage serves as a disguise. Both the Hillcrest Country Club and LA’s Rancho Park Golf Course contain oil pads that are rendered almost invisible by thick strands of bushes and trees. Out of sight, out of mind, seems to be the reasoning.