More Oil!

The last time I sat down to write on this blog, it was due to a series of coincidences that made me want to better understand Union Oil. Attending a party on top of what used to be the Standard Oil building and watching Daniel Day Lewis play an oil man in There Will Be Blood a few days later led me to look into Union's pipeline to Wilmington, the huge oil refinery (and it's orange Jack-o-Lantern), and the series of high rises Union owned downtown.

Well as usually happens on the LA History blog, that initial oil entry has led to another. More oil! This time, it's an oil story that's been sitting underneath my feet.

My earliest curiosity on this blog, what the digits in our phone number meant, led me to discover this housing tract was one of the original developments in what came to be known as Carson. Built in the mid-fifties, we were given a phone number from the Wilmington branch of the phone company. That branch had been spun off from the original San Pedro branch, and thus San Pedro, Wilmington, and Carson all have 83x-xxxx phone numbers.

As cul-de-sacs go, ours is truly the deadest. Not only is there only one way in and one way out, we have a virtual moat around the development. On the South side of a major thoroughfare, we've got what used to be a can factory to the West, to the East is an alley separating us from the next development, and to the South are the railroad tracks of the BNSF Harbor Subdivision.

The Harbor Subdivision was originally built to connect downtown to Port Ballona in Playa Del Rey. Then when Redondo Beach built a better port, it was extended there. This is all pre-1900. Those two ports would be eclipsed by Los Angeles building it's own port in San Pedro, but the line continued to be useful in the 1920s because of the oil fields in the South Bay. So the line that was jutting out to the ocean curls back in through Torrance, through my back yard, and on into Wilmington and Long Beach. The line makes a giant crescent through western Los Angeles county.

On the other side of the Harbor Subdivision railroad tracks is the much larger Carousel housing tract, a 50 acre development built twenty years later. The owner of that property for the 50 years before the development was Shell Oil.

Wooden tank farm in Signal Hill, 1920s. These tank farms were all over the South Bay after the oil fields and refineries cropped up. Some still stand. Others, like the one on the property south of my house, were developed into housing as 

Now not only are oil refineries just something I grew up with, but tank farms are as well. There's still a tank farm on Crenshaw and Lomita Blvd, across from the Torrance Crossroads development and not too far from Torrance Airport. Their used to be a spur from the Harbor line called the Torrance Oil line that went from the airport, past the tank farm, and onto the Harbor line. I went to school down the street at the Catholic church.

I've now learned their used to be a tank farm just south of my house. It became an issue when owners of homes in the Carousel tract had ooze bubbling up in their yards. Shell had built the tank farm in the 20s, and it was basically giant concrete bathtubs with wood roofs. The old Shell refinery still stands 1.5 miles to the East (along Wilmington blvd) though it is now owned by BP. That refinery has the capacity for processing 266,000 barrels per day.

The Shell crude oil holding facility just on the other side of the train tracks, was sold to the developer as is, and it was the developer's job to clean up. Well that didn't happen, and cases of cancer in humans and adults on the tract are abnormally high. Ground water tests have shown serious amounts of methane gas and benzine. There are 285 homes in the Carousel tract.

When the pipelines were built out here, and the oil fields were discovered in Wilmington and Signal Hill, there weren't that many regulations. Techniques were, well crude. Not only is oil (be it through refineries, tank farms, and derricks in residential neighborhoods) still a major part of South Bay life, but the areas where conversion has been tried haven't always been successful. It's easy to see the link between some areas of the South Bay, and the angry townsfolk who were had by Daniel Plainsview.

Sources:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/27/local/la-me-carousel-shell-20100427
http://ci.carson.ca.us/MeetingAgendas/AgendaPacket/MG51973/AS51986/AS51990/AI52017/DO52081/DO_52081.PDF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbor_Subdivision
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-22/local/me-3068_1_medical-offices
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-21/local/me-693_1_torrance-crossroads
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-09/shell-bp-to-close-sell-oil-refineries-in-europe-u-s-table-.html
http://blogs.kqed.org/ourxperience/2011/06/03/carson-residents-fight-shell-oil/