Re The 6 articles and commentaries published on Monday and Tuesday regarding concerns for and regulations that will govern oil drilling in the Culver City-adjacent Baldwin Hills oil field.
Because I live on the other side of Culver City, away from Culver Crest, I had not thought much about the proposed oil field drilling, even with the major gas release in January 2006. The impact seemed isolated to Culver Crest.
Until now, I had not realized that Culver City schools will also be at risk. The Environmental Impact Report (EIR) map that the Plains, Exploration & Production, PXP, the oil drilling company, released shows some of the areas that would be at risk of suffering odor impacts as a result of oil field operations.
That area includes four of the local schools: El Rincon, Farragut, Culver City Middle School and Culver City High School.
Although the EIR does not provide any guidance as to what might be expected from a gas release that exceeds 0.5, studies show that hydrogen sulfide can be toxic; it can cause nausea, illness, and — in extreme situations — death. It is assumed that hydrogen sulfide’s strong odor usually allows for detection long before it reaches extreme levels.
But by the time the leak has permeated the entire Culver Crest area, as it did in 2006, you have to wonder what the concentration level was at that point?
While the leak in 2006 was bothersome for Culver Crest residents, if it had reached the schools, it would have been a much more dramatic problem for children because children exposed to the same levels of hydrogen sulfide as adults receive larger doses due to their greater lung surface area: body weight ratios and increased minute volumes/ weight ratios.
Children may be more vulnerable to corrosive agents than adults because of the relatively smaller diameter of their airways.
I cannot forget that hydrogen sulfide leaks could be the least of our worries with more than 1,000 new wells proposed.
L.A.’s Belmont Learning Center and Beverly Hills High are not so far away or long ago that we can discount the cancer and the lessons we learned there: that issues after the fact do not get resolved or even fully investigated.
So now is the time, before we sign away our children’s future health, that we and our city and County representatives insist that stringent regulations be put in place. All three of my children are in schools that lie in the risk areas.
As a resident of Culver City, I want all the health and safety issues outlined and addressed before the County comes to any decision let alone agreement regarding future drilling and new wells.
As a city, we need to demand more time from the County for a comprehensive EIR to be drafted that addresses local residents’ concerns about whether or not precautions will be put in place to avert and/or deal with potential toxic spills and possible fires caused by the drilling. And I want to know that Culver City, L.A. County and Plains Exploration & Production will be drafting some sort of prior legal liability agreement should the drilling result in cancer clusters 20 years down the line.
