Updated: Season 2. Episode 11. The Wilmington Oil Field.

Transcript

📍 INTRO / OPEN

The train tracks run in and out of Wilmington.

Growing up, I used to climb up on the oil tankers in the depot. Wilmington is a waterfront community — but we don’t really have access to that water. I remember, before Banning’s Landing Park was built, I would go there when it was still just a brownfield. As a youth, I’d walk out to the pier, and that was my little cut of Wilmington water.

And crossing the railroad tracks — I’d climb up on the cargo containers, just look around… or climb up on the oil tankers and look around. I’d sit with the wind for a minute. And, you know those cobbles they use to keep the tracks in line? I’d pick up a couple, fill my pockets, and walk over to the pier.

Meanwhile, there’s the huge refinery brownfield… the port infrastructure to the left of me… and I’m just picking up my rocks, trying to get my little cut of the ocean.

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This three-part series is about more than pollution. It’s about power. It’s about truth. And it’s about who pays the price when profit is protected more fiercely than people.

Over the years, I’ve had conversations with folks who work in oil, who benefit from oil, who have built their livelihoods around these industries. Some of them listened when I spoke about environmental justice. Some didn’t. And in the process, I’ve lost a few relationships — maybe friends, or maybe people who were never really willing to sit with uncomfortable realities in the first place.

But here’s what I know for sure: truth matters more than comfort.

And I will never bow down to the idea that poisoning Black and Brown communities is justified simply because it comes with a paycheck.

Supporting workers does not mean defending corporate harm. Standing with unions does not require silence about environmental injustice. And solidarity should never come at the cost of community health.

We can fight for labor and fight for clean air. We can demand good jobs and safe neighborhoods. Those struggles are not in opposition. In fact, they are inseparable.

That’s why this series centers the work of Communities for a Better Environment — CBE.

CBE was born out of necessity, not convenience. Out of communities that were tired of being told to wait. Out of neighborhoods that were tired of being sacrificed.

Their mission is clear and uncompromising: to empower low-income communities and communities of color to fight for environmental health, economic justice, and political power. Not charity. Not symbolism. Power.

CBE’s history is rooted in organizing where systems have failed — in places like Wilmington, Richmond, East Oakland, and Southeast Los Angeles — where families live next to refineries, power plants, toxic storage sites, and industrial corridors that were never meant to coexist with human life.

And CBE doesn’t just respond to harm. It builds movements.

They organize residents to lead their own campaigns. They train community members to understand permitting, zoning, and regulatory systems. They use legal strategies to hold polluters accountable. They fight for climate policies that don’t leave frontline communities behind.

These services aren’t about managing damage — they’re about changing the rules so the damage stops happening in the first place.

To understand this fight, you have to understand Wilmington.

The Warren E&P site is not just another industrial facility. It’s part of a long and painful pattern — one where Wilmington has been treated as a convenient place to put what nobody else wants.

For generations, oil wells, refineries, pipelines, tank farms, and heavy industry were planted next to homes, schools, and parks — not because it was safe, but because it was politically easier. Because this was a working-class community… a community of color… a community decision-makers believed could be ignored.

Warren E&P represents that legacy. A reminder that zoning wasn’t natural — that land-use decisions were never accidental. That redlining didn’t just shape housing. It shaped where pollution lives.

And yet Wilmington has never been silent.

Residents have organized. They have testified. They have marched. They have demanded answers — not because it’s easy, but because survival leaves no other choice.

If anyone thinks environmental injustice is just history, let’s talk about what happened on December 24, 2025.

Just a few days ago, more than 100,000 gallons of sewage spilled into our coastal waters.

A stark reminder that environmental injustice doesn’t just come from smokestacks or oil rigs. Sometimes it comes from aging infrastructure, weak oversight, and systems that fail the public when they’re needed most.

And here’s where the story gets even more telling.

Every year in San Pedro, the Polar Plunge is a tradition — people coming together to run into the ocean, to celebrate community courage, and the coast we love.

But this year, because of that sewage spill, the plunge couldn’t happen in the ocean. So instead of taking a stand on why 100,000 gallons of sewage ended up in the ocean in the first place, the event was recreated in a swimming pool: a pool plunge, a crown for a king and queen of the event.

A workaround instead of accountability.

And that right there is environmental injustice in real time. Different pollutant — same pattern.

According to U.S. News, on February 7, 2024, 8 million gallons of raw sewage spilled onto Los Angeles streets and beaches. The waste discharged into the Dominguez Channel and Compton Creek, which leads to the Los Angeles River and ends at Cabrillo Beach.

When systems fail, when infrastructure collapses, when agencies cut corners, it’s always the same communities that absorb the harm — the same neighborhoods told to stay away from the water. The same residents left asking how something so preventable keeps happening.

Environmental injustice isn’t just about oil fields and refineries. It’s about neglect. It’s about whose safety is treated as urgent — and whose is treated as optional.

That sewage spill didn’t create this crisis. It exposed it.

And I want to be clear about something else.

I support unions. I support workers. I support people fighting for fair wages and job security. But I also support the health and wellbeing of the very workers inside these industries — and the families living just outside their gates.

No one should have to choose between a job and their lungs. A paycheck and their children’s future. Economic survival and physical survival.

That choice? That’s a failure of leadership — not a natural law.

The idea that communities should accept harm because jobs are at stake is one of the most powerful silencing tools these industries have ever used — and I refuse to accept it.

We can demand better jobs. We can demand clean industries. We can demand real transition plans that don’t abandon workers or communities.

What we cannot accept is being told that suffering is the price of employment.

This series exists because silence has never saved a single community.

Environmental justice communities were shaped by redlining, racist zoning, and political decisions that made pollution someone else’s problem — usually Black, Brown, immigrant, and working-class neighborhoods.

Those lines were drawn on purpose, and industry followed them.

But here’s the part they didn’t plan for:

People who refuse to stay quiet. People who organize. People who document. People who demand more. People who understand that injustice is not given — it is taken back by those willing to fight for it.

Yes, speaking up has cost me relationships. Yes, it’s made people uncomfortable. Yes, it has changed how some people see me.

But comfort has never changed history. Truth has.

And if standing up for clean air, safe water, and dignified communities costs me a few, then that’s the price I’ll pay every time. Because what’s at stake is bigger than approval.

It’s about life. It’s about legacy. It’s about whether the next generation grows up breathing poison — or possibility.

This is part one of the three-part series with Tara and Morgan from Communities for a Better Environment, and this conversation starts now.

I’m your host, Joel Torrez Jr. Today’s episode focuses on the Wilmington oil field — how it operates, how it’s regulated, and how its impacts are experienced on the ground.

Joining me today are two people who bring different but deeply connected perspectives.

Morgan lives in Wilmington. He also works for Communities for a Better Environment, where they’re involved in organizing and advocacy around environmental health and accountability. Morgan understands this issue not as a case study, but as a lived reality.

We’re also joined by Tara. She’s an attorney at Communities for a Better Environment. Tara works on the legal side — challenging permits and pushing regulatory agencies to do what communities have been demanding for years.

Together, Morgan and Tara help connect the dots between what residents experience, what the law allows, and where the system continues to fall short.

Let’s get into it.

INTERVIEW

Joel: Tara, Morgan — welcome to The Harbor Area Podcast.

Morgan: Thanks for having us. Yeah, pleasure. My name’s Morgan Gonzalez. I’m with Communities for a Better Environment. I’m the Interim Youth Organizer. But I’m also a lifelong resident of Wilmington and San Pedro. I went to Phineas Banning High — I went to Broad Avenue — but yeah, I’ll pass it to our friend.

Tara: Yeah. Hi, I’m Tara Earl. I’m a Senior Staff Attorney with Communities for a Better Environment. I work with Morgan and our Wilmington team mainly on oil drilling issues as an environmental justice issue in Wilmington. And I’ve been with CBE — I’m coming up on eight years.

Joel: Wow. Amazing. Tara, I know we worked together when I was with the County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors as Environmental Health Deputy for Supervisor Janice Hahn — and that’s what led me to the privilege of working with you.

Tara: Yeah. So I work on oil issues in the City of LA as well as the county. And our coalition was advocating for an expansion of the county’s phasing out oil drilling — expanding it to include the Inglewood Oil Field, which had been left out of that ordinance for a variety of very bureaucratic reasons. But that’s the campaign I remember that brought us together.

Joel: Yeah. And the work continues to move forward.

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Joel: So, Morgan, this question is for you — but Tara, feel free to answer as well.

Wilmington is often described as an industrial corridor, but it’s also a neighborhood where people raise families and build lives. What do you wish people from neighboring communities like San Pedro better understood about daily life in Wilmington?

Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. We do toxic tours at CBE. We did a tour for these German master’s students out of Frankfurt — they were studying urban planning. For their thesis, they decided to focus on environmental justice.

And Wilmington — we talk about “industrial corridor.” It’s in textbooks abroad. It’s the third-largest oil field by production in the continental United States, right, Tara?

Tara: Yeah, the stats change so much. I was going to say it’s definitely one of the biggest in the state. And it’s one of the largest urban oil fields too. It’s huge.

Morgan: But back to the German master’s students — they came in, and they were startled and amazed by all this industry, and people walking around just living their lives.

I remember this gentleman asked me, “How do you live here with the smell?” And I was like, “You’re calling my city something that smells? Like, are you serious?” But the reality is, it’s so normalized. It’s just regular for everybody living in and around the city.

Joel: And Morgan — what does it smell like?

Morgan: That’s the thing. We’re nose-blind at this point. I got acclimated to the smell when I went to school and came back from Northern California. The smell is hard to describe — it’s acrid. It stings a little bit.

That’s why it shook me so much — because I hardly notice it anymore. But even family visiting will say, “Oh, what’s that smell?” And I’m like, “What smell?” I just live here. It’s just my air at this point.

Joel: I know when I drive from home up the 110 and I’m passing through Wilmington, it almost smells like a rotten egg.

Morgan: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Tara: And that’s probably the refinery — Phillips 66 being right there by the highway. That’s a pretty common smell around any oil facility, whether it’s a refinery or an oil drilling site.

Wilmington has refineries surrounding it and within it — and hundreds of oil wells in the space of Wilmington. It also has the largest single drill site by number of wells in the City of Los Angeles.

Joel: Wow. Morgan, before we move on — anything else about daily life in Wilmington? Or what you saw with the German students?

Morgan: Oh, I mean, they were astounded. Another site that really shook them was going into Long Beach over the bridge — the open-air sulfur mounds for the refineries. That blew their minds. It blows my mind to this day. And the LA River is running right by it.

We did another toxic tour for activists from Africa. They came by — literally we’re doing our introduction: “Here’s Wilmington.” And the tankers were collecting oil, I believe, and we had to call South Coast AQMD. We’re making calls, and it smelled horrible.

We were trying to do our introduction — our “welcome to Wilmington” — and they got their welcome. Just terrible, noxious fumes. We literally had to walk away from the site where we were explaining the flare imaging and reporting that we do. I think they were servicing the well or something. I wasn’t on the tour, but I heard about it secondhand.

Joel: And this was the one at the Boys & Girls Club, right?

Morgan: Yes. Yeah.

And that’s the reality for everyone in Wilmington. We’re just living with it. People have lived here for decades. When you live somewhere for a long time, that’s your home. I want to set roots here — and people do. There are tons of multi-generational families here.

Joel: And what about the health implications? Have you experienced any health issues, Morgan?

Morgan: When I was younger, I had very severe childhood asthma. That’s a very common story. The health impacts are ubiquitous.

Even as I’m organizing with students — with the youth — I always ask: who knows someone with asthma, eczema, or some kind of autoimmune disorder? And the hands shoot up.

That’s why we’re here doing this work — to make sure that one day my kids don’t have to live with the smell and don’t have to face those health impacts.

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Joel: Tara, from a legal and advocacy perspective, how has Wilmington’s history shaped the environmental justice movement in Los Angeles Harbor communities?

Tara: Wow. Big question. From the legal and advocacy side, I would say there’s a very rich history here. It goes back decades — and it goes beyond just CBE. There are so many key people and organizations doing this work.

I want to shout out Jesse Marquez, who passed away recently. It’s very sad.

Joel: Yes. 📍 And if you’d like to learn more about Jesse Marquez, please listen to the previous episode — it was dedicated to him.

Tara: I should start with the refineries, because at least with CBE, that’s the issue we got started with first.

In Wilmington, we also organize in another refinery community — Richmond, up in the Bay Area — with the Chevron refinery, which is the largest one in the Bay Area.

And here in Wilmington we have the Phillips 66 refinery, which is the one that’s closing. We have Marathon, which I believe is the largest on the West Coast, after a merger about… I want to say a decade ago, maybe a little less. And then there’s the Torrance refinery — and I forget who the owner is. They all shift owners every few years.

There’s been this history, at least with CBE, of pushing for more stringent and health-protective regulations across industries.

And with refineries, that often looks like advocacy at the South Coast Air Quality Management District — AQMD — a very powerful agency that your everyday person might not have heard of or think about, but it has tremendous influence in LA, where our air quality is kind of infamous.

We pushed in the ’90s and 2000s for stricter refinery-specific rules to reduce pollution. And there are more recent pushes for similar air-protective regulations — it gets really technical. It’s specific pieces of equipment, what their emission limit is, and then that limit determines the technology they’re supposed to use to control emissions.

And then there are storage tanks — those are a notorious source of fugitive emissions: leaks, and just stuff leaking into the atmosphere.

It’s a very complex industry to regulate — and to advocate for more protections.

And in some cases, regarding the oil wells that have been left open by industry that has moved out, making sure they’re not just going bankrupt and leaving taxpayers to pay for plugging and cleanup — that is essentially what has happened.

Joel: Yeah. You’ve identified a major issue with oil drilling generally, and here in California.

California and Los Angeles were actually some of the earliest places to have oil production. It’s been going on here since the 1890s — including here in Wilmington. And back then, it was literally the Wild West. There were no rules, no regulations — it was just: stick your straw in the ground, pull it out, do whatever.

So there are decades of that.

And often how it works with oil drilling is: any single well has a curve. The beginning of production is the spike — that’s the highest production. Then it falls off to a low trickle and stays there. How long you can produce oil out of a well varies — it can be 10 years, 20 years.

So we have wells that were done producing in the 1910s, 1920s.

And back then, when they wanted to close a well, they’d just leave it — or they’d throw random junk in it: telephone poles, newspapers, whatever.

It wasn’t until the ’60s or ’70s that there started to be a state regulatory regime that standardized practices around drilling and abandonment.

So there are thousands of plugged wells across the City of Los Angeles — thousands — and a varying degree of how well, no pun intended, they were plugged. And that’s one issue: potentially leaking, not properly plugged wells.

And then there’s another issue with the current regulatory scheme. The state sets requirements for plugging and abandoning wells — but there’s a business practice that’s pretty standard for the oil industry.

You have the big oil majors — Chevron, Exxon — they get the wells at the start, at their peak. They drilled in the ’60s and ’70s, got all this oil, and then there’s the drop-off.

Then they sell off to a smaller company, which continues to operate the well. Then they sell it to an even smaller company, and smaller, and smaller — until you end up with tiny operators who don’t have anywhere close to the required capital to properly remediate, plug, or clean up.

They’ve picked it up for passive income without planning for eventual closure. And often those companies go bankrupt when they’re told to plug.

Then you’re left with what we call an orphan well — no identifiable party responsible for plugging and abandonment. And then that falls onto the state to do, using taxpayer money.

There are way too many of those wells. And unfortunately, it’s a practice that continues. It’s an industry that takes advantage of the law to avoid obligations and pass the costs onto the public.

Joel: Sure. Sure.

There are so many laws and bureaucracies that have been created. In government, we have federal law, state law, city laws, county laws — overlapping jurisdiction — and then it gets very specific to whose jurisdiction the issue falls under.

So if it wasn’t in the county’s jurisdiction, I might say, “Hey, not our jurisdiction — go speak to X agency.” Or if there wasn’t information readily available, I might say, “There’s no update at this time — I’ll get back to you as soon as I hear something.” But sometimes agencies might not even call you back.

Tara: Yeah. Often.

Oh my goodness — you’re describing the bane of all my work as an environmental justice attorney. And honestly, any EJ advocate. One of the memes I deploy the most at work is literally Spider-Man pointing at each other — because it’s so common.

You talk to one agency and they’re like, “Oh, that’s not our jurisdiction — that’s that department.” Then you go to that department and they point right back. And neither of them is doing it.

So yeah, it’s a complicated regulatory scheme.

I can run it from the top down:

At the federal level, petroleum is exempted from so many of our environmental laws.

Joel: Wow.

Tara: Yeah. It’s treated separately. You have looser standards — for example, it’s not treated as hazardous waste under the Toxic Substances Control Act or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The Clean Water Act — mind you, they still have obligations. Refineries have major air permits called Title V permits under the Clean Air Act.

But there are carve-outs — lighter obligations put on the industry at the federal level.

Then at the state level — for oil drilling — the state regulator is the California Geologic Energy Management Division, aka CalGEM.

Joel: CalGEM, that’s right.

Tara: They’re within the Department of Conservation. They’re considered the main regulator: permitting, oversight of plugging and abandonment, standards.

Then there’s local jurisdiction.

Since Wilmington is part of the City of Los Angeles, the City of LA also has jurisdiction. Oil drilling has been in LA for so long that regulations have been on the books for decades — some since the ’30s and ’50s.

Local jurisdictions also have land-use authority — zoning decisions.

And for a long time, it was basically a rubber stamp: “Yeah, great, we need oil. It’s next to people’s homes? Who cares?”

That continued up until around 2006 or 2007. Warren — a Texas company — came in and bought this site. It’s like one city block. It has homes on several sides, businesses on another…

Joel: Wow. And a baseball field right on it.

Tara: Yeah. That’s incredible.

They took the site over and started drilling much more intensely than before. The site had been used for oil drilling before — but they drilled hundreds of wells in this one block.

Neighbors came to CBE like, “This is insane.” Noise, dust, oil splattering — people reported it splattering on their cars, on their homes, on their property.

Joel: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tara: It was wild. That was when CBE first began to mobilize around oil drilling — starting with the Warren site, around 2008.

There was a zoning hearing about Warren’s approval. Conditions were put on the site — mostly construction-related: noise blankets, dust rules, things like that.

But they still rubber-stamped it: “Yeah, you can drill up to 500-plus wells over the next 15 years.”

That’s recent memory. That’s not ancient history. And community was being ignored — like they were telling their story, saying, “This is impacting us,” and the city was putting conditions that were less than the bare minimum.

Not really considering: why is this here in the first place? Why have you allowed extremely heavy industrial operations right next to homes? It’s such a clear example of incompatible land uses.

Morgan: I want to point to the Warren oil pipeline burst. That’s like a key example of what people fear: industrial disaster.

But these disasters come and go regularly here. They had an oil pipeline that was supposed to be serviced and replaced years ago — but it stayed in use. I don’t know what the decision-making behind that was, but they let it go into such disrepair that it eventually burst.

If you’re familiar with the Anaheim Street corridor — there’s the Warren site, the pipeline, there’s Rudy’s.

Joel: This was last year?

Morgan: Yes. Literally. It’s terrible. People were trapped inside Eat at Rudy’s — it’s like a community center, people go there, a lot of industry folks too. Patrons and workers were trapped inside cars covered in oil.

Workers around the site were telling people not to record. It was terrible. And this is how industrial uses impact us — on a disaster scale. This oil-and-sand aerosol burst. It fouled everything.

Tara: Trying to get information after that spill was really difficult. I was taking the lead on that for CBE, because we were working on it together.

The bureaucracy was unbelievable. The thing that drove me nuts — and made me feel a little stupid as a lawyer — was: why is the lead agency on this cleanup the California Department of Fish and Wildlife?

That’s not an agency I’ve ever worked with. It’s usually CalGEM. Meanwhile people had oil splashed on them — their yards, their cars — and they’re being told to deal with Fish and Wildlife.

Later, I learned because of Warren’s proximity to the ocean, it fell within a zone where it’s not considered an inland oil site regulated strictly by CalGEM.

Fish and Wildlife has an Oil Spill Prevention and Response Division — OSPR — and they were in charge.

That structure comes from dramatic offshore oil spills — Exxon Valdez, and others. California has had many with offshore platforms. And you can see in the law how politicians were more concerned with images of birds covered in oil than people’s health.

Trying to get in touch with agencies was extremely difficult — including Fish and Wildlife.

Then the following week, one of our organizers who lives right next to Warren — Ashley Hernandez — she was on sabbatical and Morgan was filling in. She noticed a City of LA cleaning truck at a storm drain by her house.

Some of the oil had gone into storm drains. They contained some, some made it to the harbor — but they were doing cleanup.

She took pictures, posted on social media: “What’s going on here?”

And that’s when we first heard from Fish and Wildlife — because they commented: “This is unrelated, please take this down.”

And it was like — oh, now you’re giving us information? And you’re chastising people for guessing, because there’s no flow of information.

I had to sign up for their mailing list to get these flyers they were posting online. They handed out maybe a handful at a corner. They did not go to neighbors. They did not go door to door.

Morgan: I can literally speak to that.

I took some of the youth out — because we had the Office of the Zoning Administrator hearing recently — and we were canvassing, talking to community members directly around the site.

Some people didn’t even know the pipeline had burst. It startled them. I remember a woman coming out like, “What are these kids doing, knocking on my door?” And we showed her pictures. We showed her the site. And she was like, “Oh my God — this happened? I didn’t even realize.”

And they definitely didn’t know about the OZA hearing or the cleanup.

Information asymmetry is part of what keeps the community the way it is. Because when people don’t have knowledge, when people don’t have information — and especially when the people responsible for giving them that information don’t do it — how do you address a problem you don’t even know about?

Joel: I want to do a quick rundown of Wilmington demographics for folks listening.

You could Google “Wilmington, California demographic.” You’ll find Wikipedia, which gets its data from the census.

Wilmington — and the LA Harbor Area — is predominantly Hispanic/Latino, around 90%, with a high foreign-born population and a relatively young median age around 33.

Wilmington has a population of about 53,000 to 55,000. A high percentage of renters — around 63%. Overwhelmingly Hispanic/Latino with Mexican ancestry; a high percentage of foreign-born residents from Mexico. Education levels are below county averages for advanced degrees — but public schools are rated above average.

This matters when we talk about big oil organizations that have millions, billions — and some, trillions — of dollars, and their ability to drown out the voices of Brown communities severely impacted by the harm big oil generates.

Next, I want to talk about programs that were available to you at no cost as a child and student in Wilmington and San Pedro.

Morgan: A lot of it was leadership development — building skills, academics, swim during a summer program, yoga, things like that.

But it’s very like: “Here’s your programs — let’s do yoga, keep you active.” Even Youth in Government through the YMCA was subsidized through oil money.

A lot of programs throughout Wilmington and the Harbor Area benefit from these resources. And so when you stand in opposition, you jeopardize the funding to these programs and services.

Youth in Government in particular — I attribute my public speaking, putting myself out there, learning about government and systems, law in general — it helped me understand there’s a dynamic outside of just my small town.

It’s frustrating because these are excellent services. But at the same time, the future of those programs is being held hostage.

And it’s a shame that you’re expected to sit in silence — and in that silence, be complicit.

But that’s why I’m out here now. I’m taking those skills, and I’m doing my advocacy. I will be the mouthpiece. I can be a funnel. You have to stand as a leader and as an advocate.

Joel: What were the big names you saw? Valero, Phillips 66 — big oil, especially here in the Harbor Area. So they funded leadership programs for communities like Wilmington and San Pedro.

And they said: “Here, we’re going to give you the tools to educate yourself.” But there was something special about these programs — because what they didn’t want you to do was badmouth the oil industry.

Can you explain that?

Morgan: Yeah, of course.

As a youth, part of my journey into being politically involved — I think back to the photo ops with executives. I’m at the pool learning how to swim, “Oh wow, here’s an art class.” And then it’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna do a quick photo on the banner. Here’s P66. Here’s Valero.” Oil execs, all these people.

And I’m smiling big, with a chimuelo out — but I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what impact their work is having on my community.

Joel: What would the repercussions be, Morgan, if you did say something negative about oil — or they caught you advocating, wearing another hat… just being a resident of Wilmington?

Morgan: That’s another component of it: raising folks who feel like, “Well, I benefited so much from these oil companies. They’ve given me so much.”

And it’s frustrating because you do benefit. These programs help develop strong leaders. They give skills that others don’t have access to because of educational barriers and lack of resources. The fact that it’s free — in a low-income community of color — it’s beneficial.

So how do you badmouth that?

It’s really… it’s dastardly.

I mean even with the Warren site, right — the baseball field. We have community members actively impacted, but that field gives a little bit of joy. People gather there.

But at the same time, you’re gathered next to a point emission source. Youth are exerting themselves, breathing it in, exacerbating impacts.

Joel: So to add more context: John Mendez Baseball Park is directly adjacent to Warren E&P’s Wilmington Town Lot Unit oil facility. The northern boundary of the oil operation borders the park itself.

The park has existed since at least the 1970s and was even purchased by Warren at one point.

This comes from the South Coast AQMD District State Clearinghouse Final Supplemental Negative Declaration, published August 2014. It states the baseball field is situated right beside active oil extraction operations, oil wells, and processing equipment.

For example, separation facilities and pipelines to refineries are visible and operational immediately across the property line from the park. Residents and youth baseball players have reported fumes, odors, and emissions from the nearby oil facility — including smells often described as rotten egg, which are typical of hydrogen sulfide and other volatile organic compounds, also known as VOCs, associated with oil and gas operations.

There is no documented dedicated community emission monitoring post or station located inside the baseball park that is publicly noted in regulatory documents. However, South Coast AQMD requires facilities to self-monitor and report certain emissions. Operators like Warren may install equipment such as meters or gas analyzers on site as part of compliance with permit conditions.

The measurements are typically performed within the operational boundaries of the oil facility — not in adjacent community spaces such as parks.

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Morgan: But it’s like… I grew up here. This is my little corner of the earth. This is what I have — and I’m gonna protect it.

📍 OUTRO / CLOSE

That’s where we’ll pause for now — not at the end of the story, but at the truth of it.

Part one of this series isn’t just about the Wilmington oil field. It’s about how power decides whose health matters, whose neighborhoods get protected, and whose lives are treated as expendable.

It’s about a community that has carried the weight of industry for generations — and still refuses to stay silent.

In the next part, we’ll go deeper into the systems, the policies, and the decisions that keep this cycle going — and more importantly, into how residents and advocates are pushing back.

Demanding more than workarounds. Demanding justice.

Because Wilmington isn’t asking for sympathy.

Wilmington is asking for accountability.

Hey folks — thanks for listening. Stay tuned. In two weeks, I’ll be dropping part two of the Wilmington Oil Field series.

SOURCES:

Communities for a Better Environment (CBE). “About Us / Mission.” CBE California. 

South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). Final Subsequent Mitigated Negative Declaration for Warren E&P, Inc., WTU Central Facility, New Equipment Project. (CEQA document, PDF). 

South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). CBE Comments on Warren E&P Proposed Supplemental Negative Declaration (WTI Central Facility New Equipment Project). June 10, 2014 (PDF). 

Los Angeles Times. “Pounding rains trigger flood of raw sewage in L.A. County.” February 7, 2024. 

LAist. “Major Raw Sewage Spill Grows As Storm Continues.” February 6, 2024. 

Los Angeles Department of City Planning. Wilmington — Neighborhood Data / Standard Report (ACS 2016–2020). (PDF). 

Wikipedia. “Wilmington, Los Angeles.” (Demographics and background; census-based summary.)