Los Angeles County, California supervisors voted unanimously Wednesday to phase out oil and gas drilling and ban new drill sites in the unincorporated areas of the nation’s most populous county.
Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who represents the district where most of the Inglewood Oil Field is located, recommended the move. She said the negative health effects of such operations are now well-established.
“The scientific and health findings are clear,” Mitchell said, reports USA News Posts. “There are short-term and long-term health effects associated with living near active and inactive oil wells. These include decreased lung function, asthma, cardiovascular disease, low birth weight, and other reproductive health impacts.”
Mitchell, along with Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, made the motion to phase out drilling in the county’s unincorporated areas. County Supervisor Janice Hahn praised the plan as “a framework for how we transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy and make sure we bring our labor partners with us.”
The Inglewood Oil Field
The Inglewood Oil Field in Los Angeles County is the 18th-largest oil field in the state of California, and the second-most productive in the Los Angeles Basin. It is also the largest urban oil field in the U.S.
Currently, there are 1,046 active wells, 637 idle wells, and 2,731 abandoned wells in unincorporated areas of the nation’s most populous county. according to a memo to the board dated June 3, 2021. The oil field has been in continuous production since its discovery in 1924.
The Inglewood Oil Field is somewhat unusual in that everything is essentially out in the open for all to see, including the individual pumpjacks on drilling pads. Other oil fields in the entirely urbanized parts of Los Angeles hide their pumping and drilling equipment, storage tanks, and other operations in large windowless buildings disguised to blend in with the urban landscape.
In the map above, you can see the proximity of several Black communities, including Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, and View Park to the oil field. For over a decade, residents have worried about the field’s impact on their health and the local environment, reports the Associated Press.
Residents have complained of foul odors from the wells and say they have seen oil bubbling through sidewalk cracks in their neighborhoods. And this doesn’t include the number of health issues associated with living next to oil wells.
“L.A. County has had a long history of oil and gas development and poor land-use decisions, which has resulted in oil and gas operations occurring too close to places where people live, work, play, go to school and pray,” Mitchell said in an interview before the vote. “Many residents may not even realize it, but tens of thousands of people in L.A. County live in close proximity to an oil well and 73 percent of them are people of color.”
The measure that passed also called for residents, the oil companies, and other stakeholders in the community to explore what else can be done with the privately owned land. “My goal is complete, comprehensive (cleanup of the site), with the oil companies paying for it, not taxpayers,” Supervisor Mitchell said.
