LOS ANGELES (CN) – Ashley Hernandez often woke up with a bloody nose as a child. Her parents thought it was heat related, but she also had the same constant headaches and breathing problems as other students at her school in the Los Angeles suburb of Wilmington.
More than a decade later, Hernandez says the culprit was always just down the street from her bedroom: An oil well near a Little League baseball diamond and surrounded by homes.
“Like we say: You live, pray and sleep near oil in Wilmington,” Hernandez, 26, said cynically on a recent tour of the neighborhood just a few miles from the Port of Los Angeles, where oil derricks and storage tanks break up the pattern of homes.
With over 10 million LA County residents living near 5,000 active oil and gas wells, residents are exposed to a variety of chemicals and pollutants. But in a strange twist, a group of residents living near drill sites were sued by the oil industry.
It began when residents sued the city of Los Angeles in 2015, claiming drill permits were issued at a high rate in poor neighborhoods without proper review of impacts to the community. The city’s actions, the residents said, amounted to a form of environmental racism.
The following year, just as the parties reached a settlement, the oil trade group California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA) that sought to join the lawsuit filed a cross complaint claiming industry interests would be impacted.
A youth organizer for the environmental nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), Hernandez said residents are being sued because they were able to make real progress over the oil industry’s practices.
“Living in our community is really like living in a ticking time bomb,” she said. “That’s why we’re always telling people you don’t have time to do more studies, we don’t have time to go through these retaliatory lawsuits and cases.”
CIPA declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a statement the trade group’s CEO Rock Zierman said California has some of the strictest environmental rules in the country and is not benefitting from the “energy boom” other parts of the country are experiencing. If left unchecked the state’s demand for energy will be met by “foreign imports” that do not have the state’s best interests in mind, Zierman said.
Communities for a Better Environment and the other environmental groups CIPA filed an anti-SLAPP motion to strike the countersuit, arguing CIPA was targeting them for trying to update the city’s policies. For its part, CIPA moved for $700,000 in attorney fees. A state court judge denied both motions.
On Friday, however, a Second Appellate District panel reversed the lower court’s ruling on the groups’ anti-SLAPP motion to strike, finding CIPA has no chance of prevailing as the nonprofits can’t be considered state actors and the city has the authority to make decisions regarding zoning.
Not in my back yard?
Associate Professor Bhavna Shamasunder with the urban and environmental policy department at Occidental College said oil operations and neighborhoods have developed side by side. Over the years, residents have had to fend for themselves to hold well operators liable under state and federal regulations.
“Many wells have had their permits grandfathered in LA and that predates the big environmental review policies that arrived during the Nixon administration,” Shamasunder said. “They’ve almost escaped all the major regulations from the 1970s.”
Asthma, nose bleeds and headaches are common in poor neighborhoods like Wilmington, Inglewood and South Los Angeles, but data from over a century of oil drilling in the region have not been well documented, said Jill Johnston with the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.