This is America
There are four small artificial islands off the coast at Long Beach, known as the THUMS islands or Astronaut Islands. They are platforms for oil wells, built in the 60s in a climate of opposition to local petroleum operations. They are a fever dream of Disney-esque retro-futuristic facade and landscaping, designed to look something like space-age resorts.
Island Grissom at night @ Flickr
The oft forgotten tale behind Long Beach’s ‘resort’ oil drilling islands
I know I’ve seen photo features on these disguised urban wells before, but I’m not having much luck finding what I remember (a good look down the facade at the machinery) now. This 2014 feature at The Atlantic is worth a look, anyway.
Hiding oil wells? Wow.
That shouldn’t be allowed, how can you even have discussions about the problems if people don’t know. You could move beside one and be none the wiser.
For a beautification reasons I can get it, but they should be plainly marked as oil wells if you’re going to do that.
Also at the end of the story they talk about people trying to find out who own them and they haven’t been able to for years, thats wild and also terrible.
I mean it’s all terrible, but wow.
Set it on fire and see who comes to bitch about it.
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.
I think there is a movie about a volcano in LA and a tar pit is in it, I wonder if that was filmed on location and not on a set. Wild
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.
Nah, it’s consistent.
If you’re rich, laws don’t apply to you.
Excellent TIL right here.
Reminds me of that windowless skyscraper NSA building ‘hiding’ in lower Manhattan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
Nothing to see here, just mass government surveillance, land of the free everybody
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.
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/
Believe it or not this stuff is in and around Beverly Hills.
You’d think with all the rich fucks there, NIMBY would become their whole personality.
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.
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
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.
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
There are far more than one. They capped the one by the high school.
Specifically the ones behind the Beverly Center mall.
Inglewood is the most affected, that’s mostly Latinos and black people.
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.
Surely Dire Straits would be considered rock
“Walk of Life” is pure pop.
I’m telling you my life story and all you can come up with is SIMANTICS?
SIMANTICS
SIMIANS!
between dire straits and simian, simian is definitely pop
I like the way you talk, susieq
Meet in the middle and call it pop rock?
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.
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.
They are still there in the open along La Cienega near a large nature park. The famous finale scene in Beverly Hills Cop II was shot there, and it looks the same today.
Even when I was a kid, out around Montebello they were right on the side of the road.
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.
The article makes it sounds like that’s not an issue. The issue is living near an active well afaict
Unless the sealing of the well fails, which I’m sure it does sometimes?
I don’t think so. I think the release of toxic gasses is a byproduct of pumping.
I imagine natural releases are negligible
This seems to say that uncapped wells are a serious emissions issue
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/non-producing-oil-gas-wells-mcgill-1.7565725
If a capping failed for some reason, it would then be leaking?
Edit: And even if it’s just methane which is odorless and nothing else, that can’t be good to have coming up around everyone?
Edit: I read further and they can also leak hydrogen sulfide which causes issues, but at least it smells and indicates an issue.
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.
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.
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.
It’s because there are no windows
I thought the same, but was unsure if those gaps are some sort of window that I’ve never seen before
Well, at least we know it’s not owned by Putin.
there is. it’s just couched as “capitalism.”
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.
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.
My water tastes delicious unfiltered, trace amounts of radon and all
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.
With the amount of radon that just exists in the environment, I was unaware I shouldn’t be eating it
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.
Here it is below, so no one else has to deal with this shit.
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.
Us humans have to band together in this age of AI and Corpos. Human for life!
Go Team Human!
Imgur is temporarily over capacity
Imgur hasn’t worked in years
Zoiks. oO
