Oil Wells Hidden in Plain Sight in L.A | Hacker News Reader

Oil Wells Hidden in Plain Sight in L.A

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155 pointsgeorgecmu44 comments

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Pump stations disguised as homes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-house-pumping-stations-...

https://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/pump-station-dis...

https://triblive.com/local/new-pump-station-in-hampton-strat...

Of course, cell towers are often disguised.

What other things are hidden in plain sight in urban environments?

The fake houses used to hide London Underground cuttings are pretty interesting: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7533383/Behind-fa-a...

Similarly, NY’s MTA and their fake brownstone https://untappedcities.com/2013/04/05/fake-brownstone-brookl...

> What other things are hidden in plain sight in urban environments?

The internet.

https://gizmodo.com/how-to-see-the-internet-hiding-in-plain-...

"The book is a delightful guide to the many facets of the internet that are hidden in plain view—from the the small graffiti like utility markings sprayed on to asphalt, to the gigantic “Carrier Hotel” skyscrapers that house telecom switches. Some of the symbols and objects are easier to spot than others, but once you know they’re there, you can’t stop seeing them."

Trevor Paglen has some interesting work about surveillance and showing the internet as a physical entity rather than some abstract tube full of 1s and 0s that you might see in a newspaper article.

Ventilation shafts for the Paris metro https://matadornetwork.com/read/paris-fake-buildings/

Electricity substations disguised as houses in Toronto

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/neighborhood-transfor...

I don't think it quite counts because they aren't disguised per se, but they are in plane sight: Backyard approaching lighting at Adelaide Airport [1].

https://wongm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Adelaide-Approa...

[1] https://wongm.com/2022/04/backyard-approaching-lighting-adel...

> they are in plane sight

I see what you did there.

Okay, you have residences with water supplied to them, I guess you need pumping stations, you don't like an ugly industrial building, so you make them blend in, got it. Somehow the oil wells seem a lot more nefarious, since they aren't needed to be there, and it's a surprising zoning decision (to me) for them to be there. So, do we all think they're at the same level as the pumping stations? Were they just trying to blend in, but otherwise well-understood to be there? Or were these covert operations? I have so many questions, I guess :-)

Many if not all of the oil wells were there long before the people were - so it's more of a "hide existing infrastructure" than "random oil well out of freaking nowhere" being hidden.

As people move in and out of the area that knowledge is lost; so new inhabitants may be surprised to find that they're right next to a rig.

Old telco central offices were often designed to blend-in, architecturally: http://www.co-buildings.com/oh/513/

Very interesting examples - though I’m really not a fan of this kind of practice. Just feels kind of dishonest… Sometimes (such as cell towers poorly disguised as fake trees and the like) I think it can actually look ridiculous and worse than just raw infrastructure!

I think it’s possible to put these kind of things in buildings that look good but that don’t “lie” about their purpose… But maybe that’s just me - I know I’m definitely am much more interested in seeing and understanding the infrastructure that makes the world work than the vast majority of people probably are!

There's some nice fake buildings in Edinburgh, Scotland

There's a fake "house" at the end of my street. It's actually a telephone exchange: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9050155,-3.2075701,3a,75y,...

There's normally an Openreach van or two parked outside, which gives the game away, but driving past you wouldn't notice.

My favourite is Dewer Place sub-station, despite the fancy frontage it was purpose built in 1894 as a sub-station: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@55.9465325,-3.2112386,3a,75y,...

I went on a tour round a few years ago and it was notable for using Gas Insulated Transformers, which are unusual outside of Japan if I remember rightly. There were amazingly strict planning regs that required the installation to be super quiet, so the building had a surprising amount of sound insulation.

Somewhat relevant:

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-05/deserte...

> Deserted oil wells haunt Los Angeles with toxic fumes and enormous cleanup costs

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-resid...

> More than 2 million California residents live within 2,500 feet of an operational oil and gas well.

I wonder what the “weird cancers” rate is like in LA. I grew up in a pulp mill town… renown for having too many kids getting cancer. I imagine LA must be similarly affected.

I was going to ask how they dealt with the hydrogen sulfide. That's the weird part of having an oil well in a residential area, not what the building looks like.

I guess the answer is "they don't".

My grandmother owned a home near one of those. Every year she'd get a small check from the oil company to compensate her for the oil that was under her home that they had pumped out. It was kind of cool and funny.

That's interesting. How much was 'small'? Was it a constant amount or a royalty that fluctuated?

I was only a kid, so I don't remember details. I know it was a royalty that fluctuated because the amount was random. I also remember being told that it was only enough to buy a "nice" birthday present. So I'd guess $80 a year in the late 80s? I could be way off though.

Thank you for sharing. The price of oil in early 1980s was high at US$35 and US$10 in the late 80s. So sounds like she might have got a barrel or two's worth of oil :)

With inflation $80 in 1980 would be $279 today.

Anyone know if there are dangers to being around these in terms of toxicity not the more practical dangers of accidents.

My grandfather almost bought property on Signal Hill. Just before this:

https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/620710

Which is why you've never heard of Bright Oil Co.

The first discoverers / owners of many such findings died poor.

The classic example would be Henry Comstock, after whom the Comstock Lode is named. Died broke.

And he didn't even discover it --- he was the second owner, after the Grosh brothers. Who also died broke.

It was Adolph Sutro, after whom the Sutro Baths and Sutro Tower are named who ultimately profited most from the find.

"Colonel" Edwin Drake and Columbus Marion "Dad" Joiner are amongst the other notable names in oil who kicked off major finds (Oil Creek, near Titusville, PA, and the East Texas Oil Field, near Tyler, TX, respectively), who similarly failed to profit spectacularly.

So don't feel too bad.

Of greater relevance:

"The Curious Case of Amazon Rainforest Oil Discovered in L.A. Gasoline"

https://www.lamag.com/article/amazon-rainforest-oil-los-ange...

The lawyer that tried to take these companies to task for the environmental disaster Biol Oil left on the amazon.... has now lost it all

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-...

He’s free now. Vindicated but unclear if he will get his career back.

Freed after serving his sentence, on 22 April 2022 (nine days ago).

He is not legally vindiacated in that his sentence was not commuted, pardoned, or otherwise reduced.

The Wikipedia article is vague on all of this, but Democracy Now states:

Last year, the judge in the case found Donziger in criminal contempt of court after he refused to turn over his computer and cellphone, sentencing him to six months in prison for contempt of court — a misdemeanor. In an extremely unusual legal twist, the judge had appointed a private law firm with ties to Chevron to prosecute Donziger, after federal prosecutors declined to bring charges. After 45 days in prison, he returned to house arrest — until Monday, when he finished his sentence and was released, after about a thousand days under house arrest.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/26/steven_donziger_freed...

Donziger remains disbarred in New York state. His current campaign is to have the Ecuadorian judgement against Exxon-Mobil reinstated and enforced.

He got a lot of sympathetic coverage because of the goals of his campaign, but if you look into the details he is clearly in fact guilty of bribery, corruption, and fabrication of evidence in Ecuador. Do the ends justify the means? He was also likely going to make a huge amount of money, it wasn’t quite as noble as it seems.

A friend of mine was arrested for flying a quadcopter into one of these.

What were the charges and were they convicted?

Arrested != charged

As the other commenter pointed out, no charges. This was in the early days of remote pilotry. After a long night of police questioning, culminating in LAPD speaking to his parents on the phone, LAPD presumed he wasn't a terrorist, and instead just an impulsive and inquisitive youth, so he was free to go. His quadcopter was confiscated and not returned, he apologized to the oil company, and that was pretty much the end of it, although I'm sure he ended up in some sorts of undesirable databases. Somewhat funnily once the FAA regs caught up he became a legitimate remote pilot and has performed many oil and gas related inspections, although not in LA.

As the Mythbusters so generously taught us, "the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

I'm curious at the legal principle which permits confiscating private property without charge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

This happens all the time, property gets seized at the merest suspicion of crime (whether or not it was actually prosecuted) and is often not returned. Jon Oliver did a piece on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks

As the other commenters pointed out, this is established legal principle in USA.

The police will even gleefully crush with a bulldozer such property: https://mobile.twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/73262865294963916...

If you liked that, you might also enjoy reading about the oil islands off Long Beach, CA

https://la.curbed.com/2018/9/28/17858248/history-long-beach-...

Street View offers an opportunity to sneak peek inside one of these buildings, due to a truck offloading some equipment from inside: https://goo.gl/maps/BtPKn5RMdRiEv5n6A

"Island" offshore Long Beach. Some are disguised oil wells.

>The Pico-Robertson neighborhood has been a Jewish enclave since the end of World War II, so it makes sense that then-owner Occidental Petroleum disguised this drilling site at Pico and Cardiff as a synagogue in 1966

The cynicism hasn't gone amiss on this one

They have to protect it in a better way. This thing cost a lot of money nowadays

Long Beach is full of abandoned derricks.

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