[URBAN NOTE] "The Fiery Underground Oil Pit Eating L.A."

[rfmcdonald]

The Daily Beast's Geoff Manaugh describes the extent to which, unbeknownst to me, the city of Los Angeles actually sits on top of a sea of tar and oil. Almost unearthly, this.

Sliding around beneath the surface of Los Angeles is something dark, primordial, and without form. It seeps up into the city from below, through even the smallest cracks and drains. Infernal, it can cause fires and explosions; toxic, it can debilitate, poison, and kill.

Near downtown Los Angeles, at 14th Place and Hill Street, a small extraction firm called the St. James Oil Corporation runs an active oil well. In 2006, the firm presided over a routine steam-injection procedure known as “well stimulation.” The purpose was simple: a careful and sustained application of steam would heat up, liquefy, and thus make available for easier harvesting some of the thick petroleum deposits, or heavy oil, beneath the neighborhood.

But things didn’t quite go as planned. As explained by the Center for Land Use Interpretation—a local non-profit group dedicated to documenting and analyzing land usage throughout the United States—“the subterranean pressure forced oily ooze and smells out of the ground,” causing toxic “goo” to bubble over “into storm drains, streets, and basements.” The sudden appearance of this nauseating black tide actually destabilized the nearby road surface, leading to its emergency closure, and 130 people had to be evacuated. It took weeks to pump dangerous petroleum byproducts out of the basements and to resurface the street; the firm itself was later sued by the city.

Tar pushes up through cracks in the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard, near the La Brea Tar Pits. (Geoff Manaugh)

While this was an industrial accident, hydrocarbons are, in fact, almost constantly breaking through the surface of the city, both in liquid and gaseous form. These are commonly known as seeps, and the most famous one is an international tourist attraction: the La Brea Tar Pits, with its family-friendly museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The “tar” here is actually liquid asphalt or pitch, and it is one of many reasons why humans settled the region in the first place. Useful both for waterproofing and for its flammability, this sticky substance has been exploited by humans in the region for literally thousands of years—and it has also given L.A. some of its most impressive paleontological finds.

In other words, precisely because they are so dangerous, the tar pits are a veritable archive of extinct species; these include mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, and dire wolves, examples of which have been found fatally mired in the black mess seeping up from the deep. Groups of these now long-dead creatures once wandered across an otherworldly landscape of earthquakes and extinct volcanoes, an active terrain pockmarked with eerie bubbling cauldrons of flammable liquid asphalt.