Life on an Urban Oil Field

The first thing I noticed was that although we were just 20 miles south of where I started, the temperature was a good 15 degrees hotter.

The smells of tar and sulfur permeated the air. After a while, my eyes started to burn and itch.

I wasn’t in Nigeria or Iraq or Venezuela. My guide, Jesus Torres, otherwise known as JT, had taken me to Wilmington, Calif., in Los Angeles County, just 20 miles south of the L.A. beach town where I live.

Wilmington is home to 53,000 people – 45,000 of them Latino, 24 percent below the national poverty level – living in the midst of oil wells, oil refineries and the Port of Los Angeles. It was one of the stops on the Toxic Tour of Los Angeles that the organization, Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) leads. The group advocates around issues of environmental justice showcasing how our dependence on fossil fuels has impacted low income neighborhoods across the country.

Of the more than 2 million barrels of oil refined in California each day, 650,000 of them come from five refineries in the Wilmington area run by BP, ConocoPhillips, Tesoro and Valero.

Along with the oil, they produce 1,600 tons per year of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs).

Add to that gas flaring, emissions from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Alameda railway corridor, the constant passage of diesel trucks along residential streets as they exit the ports, and the drilling of a large oil field in Wilmington in the midst of a residential neighborhood – Wilmington contains the third largest oil field in the United States – and you have a series of cumulative impacts that wreak havoc with the air quality and the health of the people living here.

Active and abandoned drills take up residence in lots right next to homes and schools.

One homeowner told me that the abandoned drill next to his house has been there for 35 years (right). His elderly father finally started jumping the fence and clearing the lot so that it would not become overgrown with weeds and vermin.

JT explained to me that the oil rigs don’t just go up and down, but they drill sideways. Neighbors complain about noise, odor, cracked foundations and walls, and unusually high levels of seismic activity.

When oil prices are high, some of the drills run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, like the drill run by Warren Energy and Petroleum that sits behind the neighborhood little league field (participation fees covered courtesy of Warren Energy). The company, which has frequently been in violation of permit conditions and limits, plans to put in 540 more wells in the area.

After out-going Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo went on the tour, he cited a number of polluters and permit violators in the area. But there still seem to be violations and lax air quality regulations everywhere you look in Wilmington.

Children leave the Hawaiian Street School near the Port of Los Angeles

Walk down the streets of Wilmington and the smell of sulfur is pervasive. That's in part because many of California’s refineries are using crude with high levels of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. That means more incidences of asthma and other respiratory diseases. In fact, childhood asthma rates among 5- to 17-year-olds in the area are 21.9 percent, 6.3 percent higher than the rest of Los Angeles and 7.2 percent above the national average.