[Editor’s Note: The statement that Culver Crest activist Suzanne De Benedittis made last Wednesday before the County Regional Planning Commission at a public hearing on expanded drilling in the Inglewood oil field.]
To proceed with fairness and justice for all parties involved, I ask you to consider a motion that allows PXP to proceed with its plans, even as the County extends the time needed to do the studies necessary to create regulations that realistically mitigate the dangers involved and truly protect the people.
How so?
In appropriate legal language, the County could go ahead and issue conditional permits stating that PXP can commence the process of going through all of the regulatory agencies to get permits to drill as long as PXP and the landowners understand and agree to comply with the following necessities to assure everyone’s health and safety and to prevent liabilities:
1. That the County is funded by PXP at the time it requests these conditional permits to hire independent consultants to study all of the land in the Baldwin Hills and its subterranean fissures that go into contiguous urban areas to determine what type of drilling (conventional or enhanced recovery), how much, and if any drilling at all is safe given the seismicity of this fragile terrain.
2. That at the same time, the County is also funded by PXP to conduct real live cancer cluster and other oil production- related health issues studies to determine a baseline of cancer and other gas and oil related diseases already in the populated areas over these underground fissures and contiguous to the oil fields.
3. That PXP also fund the County, before commencing drilling paying for the repair or replacement of all residences and other structures, including streets in need of repair that are situated over the subterranean fissures or are affected by the uplift and subsidence that is already occurring from current production.
4. Finally, that PXP knows in commencing under this conditional permit that it must abide by the findings of the safety and health studies, and that may result in costly mitigations of the entire oil field, or may call for no longer allowing parts or all of this land to be used for oil production, and that there are no “grandfathering” provisions.
In essence, that this conditional permit would lead to regulations in a sense similar to those promulgated after the Northridge earthquake where safety prevailed over private interest.
For example, living units above garages had to be bolstered, there had to be shear walls, chimneys retrofitted and more. And even certain structures had to be demolished because they were found to be unsafe.
Thus, in commencing, PXP would understand and agree to the strict regulations which they asked for, which will be the result of these independent studies, independent studies necessitated by serious health and safety omissions in the current Community Standards District, that has been issued in haste from a very problematic environmental impact report.
What else would be fairer to all parties involved?
What else would honor each of the stakeholders so there would no longer be threats of lawsuits from either side?
Ms. De Benedittis may be contacted at
debenedittis@sbcglobal.net
