Please plan to attend the County’s Community Advisory Panel meeting Thursday evening at 7 in the Community Room at Kenneth Hahn State Park, 4100 S. La Cienega Blvd., on the subject of Inglewood oil field drilling regulations.
Be there early to get a seat.
County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas will be attending to give an update on the status of the County’s oil regulations at the beginning of the meeting.
He needs to know that this still matters to the community. Here is a list of our concerns:
Why: 600 new wells?
No air monitoring stations around the perimeter of the oil field?
No requirements to close any existing oil wells?
Still no community health study?
No duty to consolidate the oil drilling away from our homes?
Low levels of mandatory insurance?
No prohibition against dangerous fracking drilling?
No landscaping to buffer Culver residences
• Didn’t now-retired County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke leave some “unfinished business” with the oil field regulations?
• Didn’t Supervisor Ridley-Thomas make campaign promises to fix the County’s regulations to better protect our neighborhood from the impacts of oil drilling?
• Didn’t Supervisor Ridley-Thomas host a town hall meeting at West L.A. College over a year ago to listen to our concerns about the oil fields?
So far, the County has nothing new to address the remaining concerns.
Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance’s Recommended Changes to the Baldwin Hills Community Standards District (CSD):
1. REDUCE EXPOSURE/RISK BY LIMITING THE NUMBER OF NEW OIL WELLS
Because oil drilling activities expose area residents to greater health and safety risks, any consideration of new wells in the Inglewood oil field should be made in close coordination with the Baldwin Hills community. The concerned residents who make up the GBHA urge that the CSD be revised to reduce the level of exposure and risk in the following ways:
• Limit New Drilling. The oil field operator should be limited to drilling no more than 350 new wells over the next 20 years, and no more than 20 new wells in any single year, just as it promised the community during the CSD hearing process. Indeed, in the 20 years before PXP intensified its drilling, the operators drilled a more reasonable total of 200 new wells.
• Close Existing Wells. Many oil wells are no longer productive, but continue to threaten the community’s health and safety. The oil field operator should be required to close at least 512 existing wells over the next 20 years, beginning with at least 12 wells per year, just as the County assumed in its certified EIR.
• Set an End Date for New Drilling. No new drilling should be allowed when the CSD’s protections expire in October 2028. After that, the current oil operations in this predominantly residential area should begin to wind down, as prior operators have promised, for possible transition to parkland and open space in this underserved community.
• Require Closure Hearings When Oil Production Drops. The County’s Regional Planning Commission recommended that hearings take place when production drops to 2,000 barrels per day, not the arbitrary trigger of 630 barrels per day that former Supervisor Burke inserted at the last minute.
2. DO MORE TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY
In addition to the above limitations on new drilling, the GBHA recommends that the CSD be strengthened to include the following community protections from the impacts of expanded oil production:
• Ensure Adequate Health And Environmental Justice Studies. Studies should include, at minimum, an analysis of cancer rates, mortality rates, birth outcomes and a survey of other relevant health indicators, and an analysis of the health impacts on people of color and low-income communities.
• Install Air Monitors at the Perimeter of the Oil Field. The oil field operator should be required to pay for and install air quality monitoring stations around the edge of the oil field to measure its air pollution impacts on nearby homes, workplaces, schools and other sensitive locations in the community.
• Consolidate Drilling Operations Away from the Oil Field Perimeter. Given advancements in technology and drilling techniques, future oil wells and equipment should be consolidated on as few sites as possible in this vast oil field and shifted further away from the surrounding community.
• Prohibit ‘Fracking.’ The County should not approve any new drilling plans that involve fracking, a controversial drilling practice that can pollute the groundwater and cause land subsidence or uplift.
• Require Electrical Drilling Instead of Dirty Diesel Drilling. Over time, electric drill rigs should replace conventional rigs to reduce diesel pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Remove the Troublesome Gas Flare. Vibrations from the antiquated gas plant flare are so severe that they rattle windows in adjacent homes. This old piece of equipment needs to be removed and replaced as soon as possible.
• Raise Insurance to Adequate Levels. The existing insurance requirements set by the County are woefully inadequate to protect victims and taxpayers in the event of a catastrophic incident from this vast oil field. The CSD should require the oil field operator to purchase insurance from suitable carriers in an amount no less than $100 million, no portion of which may be “self-insurance.”
3. CLEAN UP THE OIL FIELD AND RESTORE THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Decades of oil drilling in the Baldwin Hills have left many areas scarred by abuse, creating an industrial eyesore. The CSD should be revised as follows to minimize the blight and restore more of the environment’s natural features, as would any responsible business:
• Move all unsightly electrical wiring and piping underground.
• Add visual screening around starkly naked pumping units that operate for decades.
• Restore damaged vegetation.
• Impose actual deadlines for the oil field operator’s landscaping: Fifty percent of promised landscaping by June 30, 2011; completion by Dec. 31, 2012.
• Require landscaping for the Culver City viewshed area.
• Require the prompt removal of unused drilling equipment.
• Increase the clean-up bond amount: For every new well it drills, the oil field operator should be required to post a $200,000 bond to make sure well closures, site restoration, and environmental clean-up activities are performed.
Mr. Bauer may be contacted at culvercity99@aol.com
