Meet the investigators hunting oil well pollution in LA neighborhoods

Next door to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington, an oil pumpjack slowly bobs up and down. Across the street, oil holding tanks and a couple more pumpjacks pepper a park landscape.

This L.A. neighborhood has the highest concentration of oil drilling in the city. And in the absence of consistent monitoring by regulators, a small group of public health advocates has taken matters into their own hands, documenting equipment leaks using a high-tech camera.

It looks something like a camcorder, but it’s no ordinary video camera — it’s a forward looking infrared camera, or FLIR.

Cesar Aguirre with the Central California Environmental Justice Network uses a FLIR camera to monitor methane leaks at an oil drilling site at a park in Wilmington.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“ Methane absorbs a certain wavelength of light, and this camera is tuned to that wavelength, so you're able to see methane,” explained Ivan Ortiz, an analyst and field investigator with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, based in Bakersfield in Kern County, where the vast majority of California’s oil drilling occurs.

The group was able to buy the camera, which cost around $100,000, through a combination of grants. It has allowed them to document leaks at dozens of sites near homes, schools and other sensitive areas in Kern County that otherwise may have gone unnoticed. The camera is approved by state and federal regulators to monitor such leaks.

Since October, they’ve partnered with a coalition of Angelenos to monitor drill sites in L.A. and submit data to regulators in the hopes they’ll conduct more thorough inspections and fix the leaks.

“We really want to hold regulators accountable to make sure that they do their job, and set an actual gold standard for community protection and not protecting profit,” said Cesar Aguirre, an associate director at CCEJN.

Cesar Aguirre, left, and Ivan Ortiz look at a methane leak from an idle oil pumpjack that they documented with a FLIR camera.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Why it matters

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that’s rapidly heating up the planet. It often leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines and tanks. And when methane leaks, it’s likely other chemicals are too, such as benzene, a carcinogen.

Research has found that communities living near oil drilling sites have higher rates of asthma, cancer and premature birth.

Monitoring methane has been a key way for researchers to parse out health impacts from oil and gas infrastructure, versus other sources of pollution, such as nearby freeways.

Homes in Wilmington are neighbors with oil infrastructure, including this holding tank.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“ Methane, generally, is not considered a health toxin, but we use it as a proxy marker for exposure because it's specifically related to natural gas and oil extraction and not to traffic,” said Jill Johnston, an environmental health professor at USC who studies the health effects of oil drilling in L.A.

“Even in neighborhoods in L.A. where we know there's a lot of different kinds of pollution, that proximity to oil wells can be a factor that influences health outcomes,” Johnston said.

Her research was cited in a state law passed in 2022 that requires a 3,200-foot buffer zone between new oil and gas wells and neighborhoods and schools. It was also cited in the ordinances passed by the county and city of L.A. to phase out oil drilling in neighborhoods (which has been stalled by lawsuits brought by the oil industry).

A screenshot from the California Geologic Energy Management Division well map of oil wells and holding tanks in a park and next to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington.

(

California Geologic Energy Management Division

)

But L.A. was built on oil, so these drill sites are all over the city.

“This kind of aging infrastructure throughout L.A. is really concerning for health and safety,” said Emma Silber with Physicians for Social Responsibility L.A., one of a coalition of groups working to end urban oil drilling in the city.

Small leaks add up

With the FLIR camera, Ortiz, Aguirre and Silber walked to one of the pumpjacks in the Wilmington park. This pumpjack is idle, which means it’s not producing oil. But it hasn’t been plugged, so it can still leak.

And sure enough, it is. Ortiz looked at the black and white viewfinder of the camera — tiny plumes of what look like smoke come out of a joint in a pipe.

“It's like very short burps coming from the pipe,” Ortiz observed.

Then we headed over to some oil holding tanks a couple hundred yards away, right next to the park’s soccer field. The numbers started to go up.

“I can smell it,” said Silber.

“ 14...14.9, that's as high as it went. It’s starting to go down,” Ortiz said.

“ Well, let's not stay here then,” Silber replied, adjusting her face mask.

“But now we have it, it's in the data, so we're able to submit that,” Ortiz said.

Emma Silber, right, and Cesar Aguirre assess a pumpjack for methane leaks.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

What’s considered by regulators to be normal is a leak at 2 parts per million, or ppm. On this day, these tanks appeared to be leaking at nearly 15 ppm, and just a few months ago, the group measured leaks here as high as 134 ppm.

That’s far less than the 50,000 ppm that could cause an explosion, but researchers worry about the cumulative impact of these smaller, near-constant leaks — for both the planet’s and people’s health.

“They may be small leaks individually, but the cumulative impact means that there are higher risk exposures for the communities living around them,” said Kyle Ferrar, a researcher with FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that investigates leaks and associated health risks from oil and gas sites.

(LAist reached out to O’Donnell Oil, the oil company that owns the visited sites, via phone and email, but did not receive a response.)

Advocates have documented methane leaks from these tanks using infrared several times.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Irregular monitoring

Ferrar said a big part of the problem is the lack of consistent monitoring. While big refineries are required to have fence line air sensors, these small sites aren’t.

“All the monitoring has to be done via inspections, and typically there's not many triggers that would inspire an inspection to occur — that means that community members and researchers like myself have to be on the ground identifying issues,” Ferrar said. “Even when we do identify these leaks, we don't know how long they've been leaking for.”

It's time-consuming and expensive to inspect these sites one-by-one, so regulators often rely on community complaints and self-monitoring by oil companies.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District, which oversees these sites along with the state, has only 10 inspectors for a region with thousands of wells.

Small drill sites like these are not required to have fence line air sensors like big refineries are.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

A spokesperson for the agency told LAist in an email that “our enforcement team does its best to conduct unannounced on-site inspections, but some sites are visited more frequently if they are subject to public complaints.” The companies that own the sites are also required to submit self-monitoring reports more frequently to the district.

Better data, however, is necessary to actually drive effective policy, said Johnston, the USC professor.

“Regulators want data to push policy changes, but yet no one's going out and collecting the data that's needed,” she said. “And so, again, the burden has fallen on the community to have to prove that they're being harmed.”

If a minor leak is confirmed by an inspector, the air quality district sends a notice to the oil operator to fix it. If the leak hits more than 50,000 ppm, the inspector cites them with a violation, meaning the oil operator is subject to a fine and possible litigation. Operators have more time to fix smaller leaks — two weeks or more — whereas bigger leaks are required to be fixed as soon as within the day, according to the air quality district’s regulations.

Ivan Ortiz inputs data, from the FLIR camera, into an app. The data will also be submitted to regulators.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Ferrar said the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the state now have some of the most robust monitoring efforts in the country — including a mobile van owned by the air quality district that can document leaks at the street level, a state law that went into effect in 2018 that says any level of leaking methane is a violation, and new satellite monitoring of methane leaks — but it still doesn’t go far enough.

“The oil and gas industry says that they're able to extract oil and gas safely without leaks — well, we have yet to see it,” Ferrar said. “And the people, taxpayers, are the ones who are paying for the inspections, paying for all regulatory oversight of these industries.”

Whack-a-mole accountability

Even if the sites are inspected and the leaks fixed, they’re likely to leak again in another spot, so it’s a bit like whack-a-mole, Ferrar said.

“Many of these sites are producing very little oil but still have a lot of pressure down hole, so there's still a lot of leaks coming up and the potential for leaks to form is always there,” he said.

The real answer, he said, is shutting them down.

“These wells that are producing very little oil, they need to be shut down,” Ferrar said. “There's no reason for them to be operating this close to homes.”

That’s something many community members have wanted for years. As a result of that advocacy, back in 2022, the city of L.A. passed an ordinance to end new drilling and phase out existing drilling in the city over the next 20 years, but the effort has been stalled by lawsuits brought by oil companies. A Superior Court judge struck down the ordinance last year, citing state law.

The team heads out to monitor methane leaks from oil wells and tanks at a Wilmington park.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

What’s next

The settlement on that case is nearly final, and once it is, the city will reintroduce the ordinance, said City Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky.

“We have clear authority now from the state that we didn't have before, so we think it's important that we protect the public health of communities,” she told LAist.

That authority is a new state law passed last year that gives cities the explicit right to limit or prohibit oil drilling within their jurisdiction. Previously, only the state had that power.

But Yaroslavsky emphasized that there needs to be faster ways to shut down sites to address both the public health and climate harms of these leaky wells and tanks.

“We can't just rely on one strategy, and we shouldn't wait for the courts; the legal process will take time,” Yaroslavsky said. “We know that the oil industry has very deep pockets, really limitless pockets, and they will sue on everything. So we're actively testing a couple of different models.”

One model is not renewing a pipeline franchise agreement, which allows an operator to move oil via underground pipelines. That’s what happened earlier this year at a drill site in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood that has a long history of violations. Now, the company that owns that site is coming to the table to discuss how to redevelop the site with community input, Yaroslavsky said. The city is also exploring other regulatory avenues to shut down other sites, she said.

“There's a lot of data that shows that urban oil drilling has negative health impacts on surrounding communities, so even low levels [of leaks] aren't acceptable feet from where people are going to school or work or living,” Yaroslavsky said. “There are these legacy polluters in the middle of neighborhoods, and we can't continue to normalize their presence.”

From left, Ortiz, Aguirre and Silber monitor an active oil pumpjack next to a Boys and Girls Club in Wilmington.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

If you suspect a leak

You can submit air quality complaints by calling South Coast Air Quality Management District’s hotline (800) CUT-SMOG (288-7664), by using AQMD's online form, or through the agency’s mobile app. Complaints can be filed anonymously.

You can search the record of violations for regulated facilities, such as oil wells, near you via the air district's F.I.N.D. tool.