Oil wells abut national parks
The Santa Monica mountains lead nation in abandoned fossil fuel facilities nearby.
The Santa Monica mountains have more than 5,700 orphaned fossil fuel facilities within 30 miles.
June has barely come to an end, and parts of the West are already suffering through unprecedented heat, punishing drought and rapidly spreading wildfire — a harrowing preview of life on a planet that is only getting more chaotic.
In Vancouver, police responded to 65 sudden deaths over four days as temperatures soared. A town even farther north obliterated Canada’s all-time temperature record with a 121-degree reading, which also would have shattered the record high in Las Vegas.
Portland broke its heat record three days in a row, ultimately reaching 116 degrees. In Seattle, where fewer than half of homes have air conditioning, the temperature hit 108 degrees, also an all-time high. There are at least 80 deaths being reported as potentially heat-related in the Pacific Northwest, and that number is expected to grow. Pay close attention to Spokane, in eastern Washington, where thousands of people lost power as the heat forced an electric utility to implement rolling blackouts.
It was so hot that roads buckled in Washington, and a Portland-area transit agency was forced to suspend light-rail service.
Then there are the fires. We’re not yet seeing the kinds of landscape-devouring, sky-turns-orange megablazes that made last summer so nightmarish, but we’re already ahead of last year’s pace in terms of acres burned in the West.
In Northern California’s Siskiyou County, the lightning-sparked Lava fire forced thousands of people to evacuate. The Inyo Creek fire closed the Mt. Whitney trailhead, and the Willow fire burned in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur.
Making matters worse, the federal government has had trouble keeping firefighting crews fully staffed because pay is so low and the job is more grueling than ever. President Biden last week boosted firefighter pay to at least $15 an hour.
Climate change is the underlying condition connecting all these threads.
It’s also why fires, drought and heat provide an ominous backdrop for a new analysis by the National Parks Conservation Assn., finding there are more than 31,000 “orphaned” oil and gas wells within 30 miles of national park sites nationwide.
These are wells that are no longer producing and yet haven’t been properly plugged, and whose operators are defunct or can’t be found, and thus can’t be forced to pay for cleanup. California is littered with idle wells at risk of becoming orphaned, and cleaning them up could cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Left unplugged, they can spew planet-warming methane into the atmosphere, expose communities to toxic fumes and contaminate groundwater aquifers.
It’s no huge shock that many of these risky wells are near national park sites, considering how many park units there are — more than 400 overseen by the National Park Service. Working with FracTracker Alliance, and using state-by-state orphaned-well data, the National Parks Conservation Assn. estimated there are 214,538 orphaned wells across the country, including 31,737 within 30 miles of a national park.
The park with the highest number of risky wells nearby: Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, with 5,705 orphaned oil and gas wells within 30 miles.
The Santa Monicas are popular with hikers, and they’re a national treasure, stretching from Point Mugu to the Hollywood Hills. They offer jutting sandstone cliffs, foggy ocean views and a feeling of immense wilderness just steps from a sprawling metropolis.
National parks advocates worry that abandoned oil and gas wells could pollute air and water within parks and in surrounding towns. They also know that rising global temperatures are already beginning to decimate beloved landscapes, causing ice to melt in Glacier National Park, snowfall to plummet in Yellowstone and Joshua trees to start dying off in the park that bears their name.
The Santa Monica Mountains are no exception. A recent climate change planning document from the National Park Service features a photo of the burn scar from the 2018 Woolsey fire in the Santa Monicas, alongside a warning that, across the country, “it will not be possible to safeguard all park resources, processes, assets, and values in their current form or context over the long term.”
In addition to growing fire risk in the Santa Monicas, global warming could limit the range’s suitability for dozens of bird species and potentially harm plant life, mountain streams and natural ecosystems more broadly, according to the park service.
Here are the 10 national parks with the most orphaned oil and gas wells within 30 miles, per the conservation group’s analysis:
■ Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (California): 5,705
■ Harry S Truman National Historic Site (Missouri): 2,962
■ George Rogers Clark National Historic Park (Indiana): 2,873
■ Channel Islands National Park (California): 1,920
■ Scotts Bluff National Monument (Nebraska): 1,751 ■ President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site (Arkansas): 1,588 ■ Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota): 1,585 ■ Mammoth Cave National Park (Kentucky): 1,313
■ Fort Scott National Historic Site (Kansas): 1,189
■ Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area (Tennessee): 1,187
Zooming in on Southern California in an online map created alongside the analysis, it becomes clear why the Santa Monica Mountains top the list. The park is sprawling, and drawing a 30mile buffer zone around it encompasses Los Angeles, as well as the oil fields of Ventura County. If you ever need a reminder that L.A. is an oil town, this is it.
America Fitzpatrick, energy program manager at the National Parks Conservation Assn., cautioned that the analysis is based on state-specific data that vary in quality. And in a place like Southern California, the freeway capital of the world, orphaned oil and gas wells are likely only a small contributor to air pollution and climate emissions.
Still, these abandoned wells are a problem worth tackling — and by some estimations, an economic opportunity.
Researchers from Columbia University and the think tank Resources for the Future found last year that the federal government could create as many as 120,000 jobs through a program to plug half a million orphaned wells, potentially keeping oil and gas workers employed as the fossil fuel industry shrinks.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet reintroduced a bill last month that would put $8 billion toward cleaning up orphaned wells over the next decade and require oil and gas companies to set aside more money for cleanup before they’re allowed to drill.
As for the Santa Monicas, there are only a few orphaned wells within the park’s boundaries. But in a twist, the proposed Rim of the Valley expansion — which is currently working its way through Congress — would add the site of Southern California’s first commercially successful oil well, known as Pico No. 4, to the park.
Whether that oil well ultimately serves as a monument to a long-gone era of fossil fuel extraction — or as a cruel reminder of our inability to save ourselves, and our parks, from worsening heat, drought and fire — is yet to be seen.