Los Angeles Is Littered With Thousands Of Oil Wells Hiding In Fake Buildings, Under Schools And Playgrounds

When you envision the Los Angeles area in your head, what images come to mind? Probably something like sunny beaches, medically enhanced facial features, and since you're reading Jalopnik, a vibrant car culture. Unbeknownst to many, though, the region hides a much different, dirtier secret, often in plain sight: oil and gas extraction and refinement.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, abundant oil attracted waves of American settlers to Southern California — a region that had been home to Indigenous Californians for thousands of years — who quickly transformed its coastline into a forest of hideous oil derricks. In fact, LA once produced around a quarter of the world's oil, and it's currently home to the largest refinery on the west coast. As Los Angeles exploded in size, real estate increasingly outcompeted oil production, and many wells were depleted, abandoned, or concealed to make way for the city's famous sprawl.

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Oil extraction and gas production remains a significant industry in the LA area today, though it's not as overt as it once was, with many operations hidden behind urban facades or disguised as resorts on man-made off-shore islands. As Deutsche Welle Planet A's recent video also points out, many of the decommissioned wells that communities were built on and around are leaking toxic gases and wreaking havoc on the nearby residents, and there's not much being done about it.

I grew up in the southernmost tip of coastal LA County in a little town called Long Beach, where I was acutely aware of the presence of the oil and gas industry in and around my hometown. I have vivid memories of pretending imaginary creatures inhabited the oil islands off the coast, and that the ever-present see-sawing oil derricks were giant grasshoppers or praying mantises to make things feel less bleak.

By sheer luck of the draw, I was fortunate enough not to grow up next to any oil extraction projects, but thousands of residents are not so fortunate. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the abandoned oil wells are not properly sealed, so they continue to pollute their surrounding environment with no one to hold accountable. Many of these problematic wells are located in neighborhoods that are primarily made up of lower-income, working-class families of color, putting them at higher risk of health complications as a result. Yet when the same issue gains traction in a wealthy white neighborhood like Beverly Hills, urgent steps are taken to properly contain the pollutants, which can be described by one of my favorite mottos: disappointing, but not surprising.

This video does an excellent job of exploring and explaining the proliferation of these oil operations in the Los Angeles area, as well as the web of politics behind how to address the threat to the health of neighboring humans and wildlife. Give it a watch!