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In 1942, Seaboard Oil Company proposed to drill for oil beneath Elysian Park in Los Angeles, arguing that the wells would help supply the war effort.Although support for the war ran very high, protests erupted immediately. Oil had brought a great deal of wealth to Los Angeles, but the petroleum industry had also caused a lot of damage: well-landscaped neighborhoods had turned into industrial zones, derricks loomed over cemeteries, and drilling took place in streets.1 Prospecting caused such destruction that Los Angeles outlawed oil wells near city parks almost as soon as the city’s oil industry began production in the early 1890s, and by the 1940s zoning laws protected parks and residential neighborhoods from drilling and its related development. Seaboard’s proposal should have had little hope of success. But World War II created an unusual context for American industries. Many land-use, labor, and industrial regulations seemed counterproductive, even quaint, amid total war.Federal agencies relaxed regulations and environmental protections to help the military or increase supplies of vital materials, eventually permitting salt mining in Death Valley National Monument and tungsten mining in Yosemite National Park, and loggers almost gained a free hand in Olympic National Park.2 In changing national environmental regulations, World War II also undercut local resistance to industrial production, opening the way in Los Angeles for oil drilling even in its densest neighborhoods. This set the stage for a postwar rollback of the regulatory state and an increase in industry’s dominance of the policy making at all levels of government. Oil development had begun in Los Angeles in 1892, when Edward L. Doheny drilled a shallow well about a mile from Los Angeles’s City Hall. Over the next eight years, more than a thousand wells were drilled in what became known as The Nature and Business of War Drilling for Oil in Wartime Los Angeles s a r a h e l K i n d [ 205 ] [ 206 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e the Los Angeles City Field. By 1909, California was the nation’s leading oil producer , and Los Angeles oil fields were among the state’s richest.3 While oil development brought incredible wealth to the city, it also caused a myriad of problems. New strikes brought stampedes for leases and drilling rights. Natural-gas explosions , runaway wells, noise, odor, and sprayed or spilled oil befouled the community and lowered residential property values. Fires raged out of control amongst tightly packed wooden derricks, open oil tanks, and spilled crude. One resident who stayed in Huntington Beach despite the bedlam there, complained:“These oil men have taken everything except the food in the icebox. . . . My back yard is an oil well, a sump hole. My fence is gone and the inside of my house is a mess.”4 To curb the worst excesses of oil development, in 1897 the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance that prohibited drilling within 800 feet of Elysian Park or Echo Park, or within 1,800 feet of Los Angeles’s other city parks.5 Subsequent rules forced oil companies to reduce the danger, odors, noise, and other nuisances associated with production. By the late 1920s, zoning regulations limited where oil companies could drill in Los Angeles but, as soon became clear in Venice Beach, these regulations could not withstand the onslaught of a rich oil strike. In 1929, oil was discovered at Venice Beach, which Los Angeles had annexed just three years earlier, ensuring that its industrial regulations applied there. But these were ignored in the rapid and chaotic drilling that followed. This was in part because locals fought against the implementation of those protective codes. In January 1930, some five thousand Del Mar and Venice residents attended mass meetings and public hearings to demand unrestricted drilling in the Venice-Del Mar oil field. Thousands more signed petitions urging the city planning commission to ignore rules which would have limited drilling in residential areas. Venice ’s former city attorney, who sought to lease his own land in the 1930s, claimed oil drilling was “possibly one of the most popular issues with the greatest unanimity of opinion in the area as has ever been heard of.”6 The Los Angeles City Council buckled before the pressure; according to the Los Angeles Times, “the desire to drill became so great in that district” that the city council could no longer refuse.7 Derricks, tanks...

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