First of two parts
(See pdf below)
Going into last night’s meeting of the oil field watchdog group the Community Advisory Panel, environmental arch-activist Gary Gless was positive that the supposedly marquee-worthy health survey of surrounding homes – due to be officially unveiled momentarily – was the twin brother of a three-dollar bill.
“Bogus,” was his term.
“As I see it, the County never wanted to find any correlation between what is happening in the community and the oil field here.
“I am really put out,” Mr. Gless said, “because they are calling this the Inglewood Oil Field Health Survey, which it is not. It has nothing to do with the oil field at all.
“It was just a random survey done around the community with ‘phone calls. We requested that they do zoning so that if they found hot spots, they could say ‘people here have a higher rate of cancer.’ They wouldn’t do that, either.”
This Side Claims a Link
Mr. Gless and his well-organized allies long have been convinced there is an undeniable channel between the Inglewood Oil Field and what they assert are widespread, somewhat mysterious, health problems arising in roughly oil field-adjacent families.
Activists and others are miffed not just because the County concluded that it could not reach a conclusion about a link, but that that is the way the survey was intended to end.
The survey of 1,020 residents living within 1½ miles of the Baldwin Hills landmark did not come close to indicating, not to mention proving, a connection.
“We don’t know,” said the County.
For 75 minutes at the outset of the meeting atop Kenny Hahn State Park, two County public health officials patiently, politely and seemingly thoroughly, explained skeletals of the survey. However, they were repeatedly – 40 to 45 times – confronted by CAP members and the audience with piercing, exacting challenges to the methodologies and overall validity of the exercise.
No Room for the Weak
Nearly all hard-driven questions were by partisans, who displayed comprehensive insight and deep knowledge. The two County health officials easily could have folded or stammered. They never did, but also failed to satisfy their adversaries.
No night for amateurs or the intimidatable.
When partisans charged that the allegedly oddly organized survey leaked like a bottomless bucket, was counterfeit, unreliable in design and content, the County presenters were pushed into their most vulnerable corner. Instead of firing back with intellectual ammunition, they merely said the methodology and other styles were patterned after the Countywide health surveys – a wobbly, defensive response that did not ameliorate even the most timid partisan.
Mr. Gless told the newspaper that “the results were known before the survey even started.
“As the chair of the Public Health subcommittee, we had requested certain questions be on the health survey before it was even done. It was repeatedly rejected by the County Public Health, such items that would correlate the oil field response. Like if somebody smelled something: ‘What did it smell like? Did you feel nauseous after that?’
“But the County refused to put in those kinds of followup questions because they would link the issues with the oil field,” Mr. Gless said.
“They circumvented those types of questions and instead they asked about the obesity rate. Nothing that relates to the oil field at all.
“It is to the County’s financial advantage to have the survey come out this way, and it did.”
(To be continued)
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