Beverly Hills Oil Field
All drilling, pumping, and processing operations for the 97[1] currently active wells are done from within four large "drilling islands", visible on Pico and Olympic boulevards as large windowless buildings, from which wells slant diagonally into different parts of the producing formations, directly underneath the multimillion-dollar residences and commercial structures of one of the wealthiest cities in the United States.
[3] While the oil field is unusual for being entirely within the confines of a large city, it is but one of many in the Los Angeles basin which are now overbuilt by dense residential and commercial development.
The westernmost of these buildings, containing wells and which accesses the designated West Area of the field, is on the grounds of Beverly Hills High School at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Heath Avenue, just southeast of the baseball diamond.
[5] A facility similar to the one adjacent to Beverly Hills High School, operated by BreitBurn Energy, is north of Pico between Doheny Drive and Cardiff Ave.
[6] The operators of a fifth drilling island, located at the northern corner of Avenue of the Stars and Constellation Boulevard in Century City, finished abandoning it in 1990.
Originally constructed in the 1950s on what was then an unused back lot of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, its production steadily declined in the 1970s, and by 1989 the last well was shut down.
[4] The uppermost producing unit was the first to be discovered, and consists of oil-bearing structures called the Wolfskill Zone, within the Repetto Sands, a Pliocene-age feature principally in the western part of the field.
[11] In July 1900, W.W. Orcutt drilled into the Wolfskill zone of the Repetto Sands, about 2,500 feet (760 m) below ground surface, discovering the Beverly Hills Field.
The eastern portion of the field—known simply as the East Area—is the most productive, and is also the most recently discovered of all the major oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin, as it was not found until 1966.
Plaintiffs claimed that a "cluster" of 280 cancers—primarily Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and thyroid cancer, recorded over a period of about 30 years—were caused by emissions of volatile organic compounds (including benzene and toluene) from the drilling island, currently hidden behind sound walls.
"[16][17] Additionally, the University of Southern California Medical School stated that the particular cancers noted in the lawsuits are not known to be caused by exposure to petroleum and its byproducts.
