Californias dirty little secret: Oil wells in the backyard

Table Of Content

• ONE FAMILY. ONE COMPLETELY INSANE DREAM.
• Lost and Found
• Lawn equipment spews ‘shocking’ amount of air pollution, new data shows
• A water crisis in Mississippi turns into a fight against privatization
• Did big expectations doom the tiny house movement?
• Grist House Has an Amazing (and Dog Friendly) Beer Garden

Then, in the early 1930s, the barrio petitioned the city to pave its two primary thoroughfares, Logan and Stafford streets, but was forced to raise the money to cover the cost. The residents ultimately celebrated the paving of their roads with a street dance. You couldn’t shake a stick at your Facebook feed without hitting a shared photo of some wee storybook cottage tucked away in a forest grove. Mueller categorizes the phenomenon of the tiny-house social media craze under a very “millennial” way of posting — one that leans heavily on perfection and idealization, in contrast with Gen Z’s ostensibly more unfiltered approach. But for all the hubbub, tiny houses never really entered the mainstream realm of homeownership. Instead, they entered the province of tourists seeking a brief decampment to a smaller-scale, climate-friendly lifestyle.

ONE FAMILY. ONE COMPLETELY INSANE DREAM.

Despite California’s reputation as an environmentally friendly state, neighborhood drilling is a distinctly Californian phenomenon. Most oil-producing states — including Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and even Texas — have regulations dictating how close to homes, schools, and sometimes hospitals that oil wells are allowed to operate. This buffer zone between oil wells and the areas where people live is known as a setback.

Lost and Found

At the federal level, existing laws primarily focus on regulating the present and future production, use, and disposal of chemicals, but they don’t offer solutions to intervene in already-contaminated areas unless polluted sites are large-scale. In response to my first investigation, a coalition of residents, advocates, and academic scholars has spent four years raising community awareness about the dangers of lead exposure in the city. In 2020, the coalition released a study that corroborates my findings, highlighting how children in Santa Ana’s poorest areas are at a higher risk of being exposed to lead soil contamination. One of the challenges, according to Mielke, is that while much work has been done to decrease water contamination and reduce air toxics, soil is typically ignored as a potential source of contamination.

Lawn equipment spews ‘shocking’ amount of air pollution, new data shows

The XRF tests measure the amount of lead in the soil, but they do not determine the source of the lead. A representative from Massachusetts-based scientific instrument company Thermo Fisher Scientific trained Grist’s reporter, Yvette Cabrera, to operate an XL2 600 Niton XRF analyzer, which produces X-rays to measure the lead content of soil. The company loaned the XRF analyzer to Cabrera and calibrated the analyzer for soil testing. They realized that the city intended to split the neighborhood in half by extending Civic Center Drive East through the heart of the barrio.

Grist is the only award-winning newsroom focused on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. Instead, we rely on our readers to pitch in what they can so that we can continue bringing you our solution-based climate news. In studies of communities living near urban oil wells in Los Angeles, Johnston found that participants living closer to an oil well had impaired lung function and higher rates of asthma than those living farther away — making it quite literally harder to breathe. Living near oil and gas development, in general, has also been linked to preterm births and other adverse reproductive outcomes, as well as a host of other health problems, including higher rates of cancer and heart disease. In 2015, a report authored by the California Council on Science and Technology, a nonprofit that advises the state’s government, concluded that drilling posed health risks to communities living nearby and recommended the development of “science-based” setbacks.

Decades after Watts revolted, the Black neighborhood is being ‘revitalized’ — but the cost is steep

Eat'n Park's strawberry pie inspires 2nd round of Grist House sour ale - TribLIVE

Eat'n Park's strawberry pie inspires 2nd round of Grist House sour ale.

Posted: Tue, 25 Apr 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Remember When, a weeklong exploration of what happened to the climate solutions that once clogged our social feeds. Family owned and operated since 2014, Grist House Craft Brewery has become a Pittsburgh craft beer staple. Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, co-owners and brother-in-laws, Brian Eaton and Kyle Mientkiewicz, moved to Pittsburgh in 2010 and began homebrewing on weekends together. After many experiments, tweaking, taste testing and with the support of friends and family they decided to leave their day jobs to open Grist House. And as with any top oil-producing state, it has an active and powerful oil lobby.

A water crisis in Mississippi turns into a fight against privatization

This is a place where drinking buddies become lifelong friends, and regulars become family. 467 defeated, the most realistic pathway open at the state level to institute setbacks appears to be through CalGEM. The agency was known as the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, until 2019. That summer, DOGGR became embroiled in scandal when it came to light that regulators were issuing permits for risky drilling projects without reviewing them first and that they held stock in the very companies they were supposed to be regulating.

So in addition to working to make Logan more residential, local activists must also battle to ensure that nuisance businesses comply with existing regulations. The city may have heard their calls to change the “business-as-usual” approach in recent decades, but ultimately, those who live there now still pay the price for the decades that it was an industrial hotspot. The cohesiveness of the neighborhood was hard to duplicate, and it’s why children who grew up in Logan, like Joe Andrade, often returned.

They’ve given six-figure sums to every California governor since Republican Pete Wilson. Then they gave $221,000 to his replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called them “some of my dearest, dearest friends.” The $150,000 they’ve sprinkled on Jerry Brown since 2010 might not seem like a lot by comparison, but no other individual donor has given more. The Resnicks also have chipped in another $250,000 to support Brown’s pet ballot measure to fund education. Two years later, with a federal judge now restricting Delta pumping for the sake of the smelt, the Resnicks began raising their concerns with friends in Washington. Their first big purchase as a couple, in 1979, was Teleflora, a flower delivery company that Lynda revitalized by pioneering the “flowers in a gift” concept — blooms wilt, but the cut-glass vase and teddy bear live on. In 1985, they acquired the Franklin Mint, which at the time mainly sold commemorative coins and medallions.

City documents from that era showcase citizen concerns that Santa Ana’s eastside residential neighborhoods were bearing the brunt of the city’s industrialization, describing these areas as having the “highest degree of inter-mixing” of single-family homes with commercial and industrial uses. In 1972, the Santa Ana Human Relations Commission submitted a resolution noting how grievously the Logan community had suffered at the hands of past planning commissioners due to zoning decisions and the introduction of industry to the barrio. Further, racial and class disparities among children with elevated blood levels have persisted since the height of leaded gasoline use in the mid-20th century, with higher numbers of Black, Latino, and low-income children suffering from elevated levels. Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson has shown that, while the risk of lead exposure is higher in poor neighborhoods, it’s even higher in racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods. In a 2018 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, Sampson and his colleagues examined blood lead level differences across small neighborhoods in Chicago. Even when controlling for factors such as poverty, housing, and population density, they found that Black neighborhoods still had higher levels of lead exposure.

Using data from CalGEM, the California Department of Education, and the California Health and Human Services department, Grist analyzed the number of oil wells near schools to help understand the impact that setbacks for oil and gas wells might have on frontline communities. The 601 soil samples tested with the XRF analyzer in the field had an average margin of error of 18 parts per million. Grist discarded any soil tests with incomplete scans, which could be caused by any disruptions that produced a movement of the XRF analyzer during analysis. In 1994, residents rose up to oppose a car salvage yard that had proposed opening near the Interstate 5 freeway. The last thing residents wanted was more noise and more traffic, they argued at the time. “The important thing about the barrios is they became very specific sites of commerce and culture and family life, and are really thought of as a really positive space in those days,” said Haas, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

People were so invested in the war effort, Elkin said, the oil companies got what they wanted. Hernandez is one of millions of Californians affected by neighborhood drilling — the practice of exploring for oil right in the middle of communities, next to the places where people live, study, and seek medical care. The phenomenon disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, and creates an environmental health nightmare for those living in its shadow. “A lot of the folks around there, once their houses were condemned, they had no alternative — so they had to move,” said Romero. His father was one of the few residents fortunate enough to be able to renovate his home without a loan after he became the first Latino to get a job paving roads with the city’s public works department, a job that paid him a higher wage than most of his neighbors.

While the U.S. has a national Clean Water Act and a Clean Air Act, there’s no federal Clean Soil Act to address soil contamination comprehensively. Further, at the local level, not enough is done by public health care agencies to proactively pinpoint hot spots of soil lead contamination by using existing childhood blood lead level data, Mielke said. Before construction was first supposed to begin on the redevelopment project in 2011, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, conducted environmental assessments of the site. Tests showed that lead soil contamination around Jordan Downs was at 22,000 parts per million, or ppm — 275 times higher than state limits. The soil also came back with actionable levels of the cancer-causing toxins arsenic, cadmium, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

In response to a request for comment from Grist, CalGEM head Uduak-Joe Ntuk pointed to the agency’s new public health mandate and to several actions to bring its policies in line with California’s climate change goals. “CalGEM has instituted a new rigorous conflict of interest policy for all staff, embarked on racial justice training, increased transparency with new online data portals, and instituted the most rigorous review and approval of permits in the nation,” he said. Yet oil played a major role in the state’s development, and oil money is entangled in California’s political system. That’s particularly true in Los Angeles, the city where the state’s oil boom first took off.

Traditional real estate tends to appreciate in value, which arguably rationalizes the massive upfront cost of buying a home. But tiny houses are different, particularly ones built on wheels, because they depreciate pretty quickly. That’s on top of an extremely high price per-square-foot, which is also hard to swallow for the standard American homebuyer. They would argue that a true tiny house is 8.5 feet wide and able to fit on a wheeled base, like an RV chassis.