Nearby homes are in danger of fire after an explosion on the Signal Hill oil field in Long Beach, California, June 1933. Credit: FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
By Liza Gross, Inside Climate News, April 5, 2023
Decades before movie moguls produced celluloid heroes, oil claimed the spotlight in Los Angeles. California’s oil industry took off in the mid-1870s just 30 miles north of what would later become Hollywood Boulevard.
By the 1920s,the Los Angeles Basin had become the state’s leading oil-producing region as prospectors frenetically developed one oil-rich deposit after another. The rush to drill triggered explosions, fires and gushers that unleashed torrents of oil, rocks and debris in the fastest-growing metropolitan region in the country.
Kern County long ago eclipsed Los Angeles as the center of California oil production. Yet today, more than 60 percent of the million-plus Californians exposed to an actively producing oil or gas well live in Los Angeles County, a team of public health researchers reports in the peer-reviewed journal GeoHealth. And more than 90 percent of the people who live near California’s 110,000-plus new, active or retired wells are concentrated in just three counties: Los Angeles, Kern and Orange.
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