TIL that many Los Angeles residents suffer health problems from hidden oil wells. You can't see them because they are hidden by fake buildings.
https://www.dw.com/en/living-in-the-shadow-of-las-hidden-oil-wells/a-79237420
https://www.dw.com/en/living-in-the-shadow-of-las-hidden-oil-wells/a-79237420
49 Comments
VitoRobles@lemmy.today · 65 pts · 23h
Is this more like Poor LA residents/Poor neighborhoods?
Because this screams lawsuits, especially in LA which is very big on lawsuits for personal health.
stoly@lemmy.world · 48 pts · 21h
Believe it or not this stuff is in and around Beverly Hills.
EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 21 pts · 19h
You'd think with all the rich fucks there, NIMBY would become their whole personality.
stoly@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 19h
Well LA was built up around gold, oil, and cinema. You don't get LA without those three haha.
You will commonly be along Wilshire and see a spot where nobody can park or walk because there's raw petroleum just sitting on the street or sidewalk. It will smell like oil but I think people just accept it.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 pts · 16h
Is there even anything you can do about the tar pits, though? That’s a natural asphalt seep, and new (smaller) spots are always popping up nearby
stoly@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 14h
Petroleum and salt - often found together - are much lighter than the rest of the crust and tend to move up to the surface. SoCal has a lot of these spots. I am sure that people started building up LA long before anyone realized what was down there, or before petroleum even had a use.
Dultas@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 14h
Specifically the ones behind the Beverly Center mall.
moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com · 3 pts · 9h
The article says the one near Beverly Hills High school was plugged due to complaints about health from rich white folks, whereas the oil pumps in poorer neighborhoods keep flowing
stoly@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 8h
There are far more than one. They capped the one by the high school.
Sinthesis@lemmy.today · 10 pts · 13h
The oil derricks were there before it was heavily populated. If I remember right, you could scrape oil off the top of the ground when people first arrived. I guess what I'm trying to say is; the derricks werent built in the poor neighborhoods, the poor neighborhoods were built near the former well sites after they went dry....cheap land. Cover the last few producing wells, build some post-WWII boomer housing and the rest is history.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/oil-derricks-california-old-photos/
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 6 pts · 16h
Inglewood is the most affected, that's mostly Latinos and black people.
susieq0044@sh.itjust.works · 56 pts · 23h
Actually, my husband and I live on top of one of those! We discovered this while we were renovating our downstairs bathroom, suddenly this black liquid started to bubble up. We now store it in big drums and use it to heat the dishwashing water and the house, and to drive the car. It may also explain the neck breaking migraines that we both have suffered from over the last 15 years, yet we remain hush-hush about our discovery, because we are in Dire Straits (economically, not the pop band). We would still vote Trump should he run again.
jdr@lemmy.ml · 52 pts · 23h
Surely Dire Straits would be considered rock
susieq0044@sh.itjust.works · 17 pts · 23h
I’m telling you my life story and all you can come up with is SIMANTICS?
darklamer@feddit.org · 9 pts · 23h
SIMIANS!
hypnicjerk@piefed.social · 6 pts · 22h
between dire straits and simian, simian is definitely pop
Akasazh@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 22h
I like the way you talk, susieq
AmbientChaos@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 22h
Meet in the middle and call it pop rock?
wjrii@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 20h
Knopfler is literally a guitar god who makes every list of the top whatever rock guitarists. A few singles got quite popular at Dire Straits's peak, but it's loose to the point of being misleading to use "pop" as a modifier here.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 3h
"Walk of Life" is pure pop.
boobookittyfrick@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 16h
skittle07crusher@sh.itjust.works · 39 pts · 17h
Excellent TIL right here.
Reminds me of that windowless skyscraper NSA building ‘hiding’ in lower Manhattan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
balderdash9@lemmy.zip · 20 pts · 17h
Nothing to see here, just mass government surveillance, land of the free everybody
Fredselfish@sh.itjust.works · 38 pts · 23h
We have this problem in Oklahoma the difference here is they built whole suburbs on top of the abandoned wells then move families into them. Worse when they don't know how many of these wells there are but the numbers are in the high 100,000s.
moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com · 3 pts · 9h
The article makes it sounds like that's not an issue. The issue is living near an active well afaict
JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip · 34 pts · 21h
If you watch old movies made in LA you see a lot of wells and I remember wondering what happened to them the first time I went to LA.
hansolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 3h
Even when I was a kid, out around Montebello they were right on the side of the road.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 14h
So, let me be sure that I understand... it's illegal for me to build an addition to my home, but this is legal?
At least the USA is consistent, I guess.
moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com · 16 pts · 9h
Nah, it's consistent.
If you're rich, laws don't apply to you.
aceshigh@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 22h
This got me thinking. I move every 4-8 years and adapt to the new living conditions. I suspect this hedges against any unknown issues my living conditions have that I’m unaware of. For example, I never filtered my water until I moved someplace where it was necessary and I just kept the habit. Maybe I should have been filtering water my entire life but moving forced me to create this habit.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 22h
My water tastes delicious unfiltered, trace amounts of radon and all
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19h
With the amount of radon that just exists in the environment, I was unaware I shouldn't be eating it
Feathercrown@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 16h
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3h
Unrelated, but near my gym there is an actual Radon St. I wonder if people who live there have trouble selling their houses. I suspect it may actually be a positive, as this is a Philadelphia suburb where you occasionally see the confederate flag flying, so the brain damage is already widespread.
stoly@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 21h
It should also be noted that the area has so much underground petroleum that it leaks out of the streets along the Wilshire corridor, especially near the La Brea Tar Pits.
morto@piefed.social · 18 pts · 19h
I don't know if it's some bias since I just read what it's about, but that building looks shady as fuck. The kind of place I'd walk around and wonder if there's some money laundering happening in there.
flandish@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 18h
there is. it’s just couched as “capitalism.”
icanbrewmushrooms@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 16h
It's because there are no windows
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 3h
Well, at least we know it's not owned by Putin.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 3h
Semi-related: when I lived in Florida, a store opened up in a strip mall near me that sold nothing but Super-Whippers, $1 plastic whisks. They were never open and they were just 200 feet from three dollar stores and a Publix, all of which sold plastic whisks. I suspect it may have been a money laundering front, but then it's hard to imagine money-launderers putting that little effort into the task.
Uair@autistics.life · 2 pts · 3h
@ChickenLadyLovesLife @morto
I lived in Florida.
A lot of the criminals are utterly useless there. It totally could have been some kind of front. Maybe they imported the whisks from Columbia or something.
Remember the Florida Man game. That applies to the general criminal as well as the whacked-out one.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social · 12 pts · 1d
Zoiks. oO
Constant_Velocity@thelemmy.club · 11 pts · 23h
Google Sat view of Packard Well Site
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub · 41 pts · 22h
Kept trying to get me to download their app. Had to do a workaround just to get to see the image.
Here it is below, so no one else has to deal with this shit.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 19h
The whole "I had to do something and I didn't want to, so let me help y'all do it easier" mentality a lot of folk have here is great. I like your attitude.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub · 6 pts · 14h
Us humans have to band together in this age of AI and Corpos. Human for life!
moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com · 2 pts · 9h
Imgur hasn't worked in years
RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 21h
Oil wells in a city, disguised as commercial buildings. I'm speechless.
Raiderkev@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2h
The La Brea tar pits are a fucking trip too. I thought it would be on the outskirts of LA. But it's It's practically downtown, and surrounded by skyscrapers. When you park, there's asphalt like substance seeping through the pavement in some places. The tar pits are fed by a massive underground oil well. LA is hella weird.