A community poisoned by oil

[Nevilledog]

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Adam Mahoney (he/him)
@AdamLMahoney
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Jun 22, 2022
In the early 60s, Jennifer’s grandma moved to Wilmington, a formerly redlined neighborhood in Los Angeles’ massive oil basin

In the decades since, a half-dozen cancer diagnoses, lung disease, and chronic illness has followed.

This is life when home is next to an oil refinery
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Adam Mahoney (he/him)
@AdamLMahoney
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For 6 months, I canvassed the 2 mile radius surrounding the Phillips66 refinery in Wilmington, including my family home.

I wanted answers to a loaded Q:

What is it like to live next to an oil refinery?

75 responses later, this is what I found:

https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-pollution-a-community-poisoned-by-oil

When I visited Christina Gonzalez and her family in April, she sat slumped in her family’s worn black faux-leather couch, trying to recall which explosion had shaken her neighborhood the most. The seven decades they’ve lived in Wilmington, California, are marked by the dates of the high-octane industrial fires that have erupted at each of the five refineries that surround their home.

There were so many disasters, she and her husband, Paul, both 73, told me. Was it the one in ’84? Or maybe the one in ’92 or ’96? Each fire painted the sky in different shades of black and orange. Paul believes the biggest one might have been later — closer to ’01, maybe, or even 2007 or 2009. He shifted uncomfortably in their living room; a recent procedure on his hip still made sitting difficult. “When that refinery blew, there were black dots everywhere,” Christina said, her short dark red hair framing her face, which was marked by lines from the stress. “All over the cars, the house, our fruit trees and patio furniture.

“It was raining oil,” she said. She retired soon after that.

She had worked in the attendance office at Wilmington’s Banning High School. She remembered how often students came through, their faces flushed with sickness. “I’d see it in their notes,” she said. “Gone to the doctor, asthma, breathing issues, coughing — all the time. It was kind of heartbreaking to see these kids have to suffer as teenagers, and you could see it in their faces, how they didn’t feel well.” That was around the time her second-youngest grandchild was born.

Poor health, she says, is a painful but routine fact of life in her South Los Angeles community, an 8.5-square-mile tract surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in California, as well as the third-largest oil field in the U.S., and the largest port in North America. A recent Grist investigation found that since 2020, Wilmington has experienced a dramatic rise in deaths related to Alzheimer’s, liver disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes and diabetes — all conditions known to be exacerbated by high levels of pollution.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

Whenever I had to go to one of the refineries these, I would feel a horrible sense of hopelessness about people trapped in those neighborhoods.

California is no place to be needing housing and have little or no means, people without manageable wealth aren't supposed to exist.