Part I
[Editor’s Note: The breathtaking dimensions of the latest planned oil-drilling project in the Baldwin Hills by the Houston-based company known familiarly to Westsiders as PXP, Plains Exploration & Production Co., are so mammoth — wide, deep and dense with people — that it is practically impossible for non-professionals to grasp more than the rudiments in a single sitting. Drilling in the Baldwin Hills oil field is 84 years old. But it is only within the last 2 1/2 or 3 years that the 500 households of Culver Crest have actively become aware that drilling, and its accompanying potential perils, are ever-present. In the middle of a chilly January night in ’06, Crest residents were shaken awake by apparent gasses and clouds of fumes frighteningly streaking into their neighborhood from the supposedly quiescent oil fields. Community activism was born with that unforgettable incident, and since has risen to a polished professional level. This is the first in a series of articles on the latest information surrounding the prospective expansion of drilling from the perspective of the nearly 2 million residents living within the affected range of PXP’s drilling area.]
[img]135|left|<strong>Mr. Ken Kutcher</strong||no_popup[/img] After more than a half-dozen delays since late last year, Los Angeles County last Friday finally released a widely awaited voluminous document known as the draft environmental impact report , a semifinal version of the guidelines Plains Exploration & Production Co. is supposed to follow as it broadens its oil-drilling vista across the Baldwin Hills.
The size and scope of the report make “War and Peace” resemble an office memo.
Exactly what form the final environmental impact report will take is a central mystery, and the overarching question.
Will It Be Influential?
The day before the County issued the draft EIR — that bears the gigantic footprint of the oil drilling company — a citizens group produced a much smaller but ambitiously muscular document of its own, “the Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance Community Standards District, Covering the Baldwin Hills Oil Field.” Following 14 pages listing contents and 11 more for a glossary of terms, the authors lay out thresholds and guidelines the professionally astute citizens group believes PXP should be commanded to follow.
Whether the County will buy any meaningful portion of that assertion, and then will develop the sheer will to enforce the finalized version of regulations, does not appear to be known by anyone on earth at the present.
As the drama plays out this summer to perhaps an October, or later, conclusion, a numbing question is whether the residents of Culver Crest and their 2 million neighbors will remain the softest link in a three-party chain with the County and PXP. Or will the organized community , through extreme diligence and record-level hard work, improve its stature to something approaching equal status?
Patience Wanes
PXP, impatiently tapping its toes while more active industry rivals prosper in these unusual economic times, is anxious to plough ahead with its 20-Year Drilling Plan involving almost 1100 wells that are practically in the backyard of Culver Crest residents.
PXP’s production facilities span 750 acres of the Baldwin Hills. More than 1400 wells have been drilled since 1924, meaning PXP plans to practically double the total, and 436 are in active production.
But the single most complicated and beguiling piece of data may be the 2 million residents who are very unevenly distributed around an incoherent network of historically disparate communities, thinly related to each other, if at all.
Peoples of Many Kinds
The black community has a huge stake in this summer’s drama. Forty percent of the 283,000 residents within 3 miles of the drilling fields are black. Another 23 percent are Hispanic . Los Angeles has become so ethnically diversified in recent years that a whopping 17 percent describe themselves as belonging to Other. Almost one-fifth of the residents live in poverty. Nearly two-thirds are renters.
Such scattered, widely varying pockets of humanity have given the 20 or so leaders of a citizens organization the challenge of their lives:
How to most effectively represent this amorphous mass and how to pull their brethren into a sufficiently coherent group that will force the presumably determinative agency, Los Angeles County, to be impressed and to take them as an equal and legitimate voice, is surely daunting.
This is the mountainous chore that two Culver Crest residents who happen to be lawyers, Ken Kutcher and John Kuechle, have set for themselves from their seats in the forefront of the citizens group.
Tomorrow: Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Kuechle define their terms and begin to explain how they are going to spend their working summer.
