Outside the Page Museum of Los Angeles, life-size replicas of several extinct mammals are featured at the Rancho La Brea in Hancock Park. Although commonly called the “tar pits,” the pools are actually comprised of asphalt.

The La Brea “tar pits,” discovered on August 3, 1769, by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola, exemplify the many natural petroleum seeps of southern California.

“We proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote,” Franciscan friar Juan Crespi noted in a diary of the expedition. “We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.” Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s an oil spill every day off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, where oil is seeping naturally from cracks in the seafloor into the ocean,” notes the the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1969, an oil spill from a California offshore platform will lead to creation of the modern environmental movement. Today, some Santa Barbara County residents want to lift the state’s drilling ban – to reduce the relentless flow of the region’s underwater natural oil seeps.

“The techniques, equipment and resources necessary to combat an oil spill of this magnitude did not exist at the time,” notes one expert about the 1969 well blowout.

On January 28, after drilling 3,500 below the ocean floor, a Union Oil Company drilling platform six miles off Santa Barbara, suffered a blowout.

Between 80,000 barrels and 100,000 barrels of oil flowed into the Pacific Ocean and onto beaches, including Summerland – where the U.S. offshore industry began in 1896 with wells drilled from piers.

Problems at the Union Oil platform began when roughnecks began to retrieve the pipe in order to replace a drill bit and pressure became dangerously low,  according to a report by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

“A natural gas blowout occurred. An initial attempt to cap the hole was successful but led to a tremendous buildup of pressure. The expanding mass created five breaks in an east-west fault on the ocean floor, releasing oil and gas from deep beneath the earth,” UCSB noted. Read the rest of this entry »

“A woman with a genius for affairs – it may sound paradoxical, but the fact exists. If Mrs. Emma A. Summers were less than a genius she could not, as she does today, control the Los Angeles oil markets.”  – The San Francisco Call, July 21, 1901

She would become a lady to be reckoned with in the rough and tumble world of the Los Angeles oil patch.

Emma Summers’ “genius for affairs” put her in control of the Los Angeles City oilfield’s production and earned her oil queen title.

Emma A. (McCutchen) Summers, a refined southern lady who graduated from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, moved to Los Angeles in 1893 to teach piano. She was soon caught up in the excitement of California’s new petroleum exploration industry.

With her home not far from where Edward Doheny had discovered the Los Angeles City field just a year before, Summers invested $700 for half interest in a well just a few blocks from Doheny’s producer.

Her well was between Court and Temple Streets, about a mile west of today’s Dodger Stadium. It didn’t go well. The casing collapsed and tools were lost, but she persevered. She borrowed another $1,800 to continue drilling the well and “Night after night, by the light of a flaring torch, she hovered over it, as if it were a sick babe’s cradle.”

Weeks dragged on as the money dwindled, but the well finally came in. Encouraged, Summers drilled another well, and another, and another. She later recalled, “When I found myself $10,000 in debt, I thought if I ever got that paid and as much more in the bank, I would be glad to quit.”

But she didn’t quit. Summers became a constant presence in the forest of oil rigs that had turned the heart of Los Angeles into a “vibrant, oil-soaked little canyon.” The population doubled between 1890 and 1900 and her oil business prospered. Read the rest of this entry »

Signal Hill circa 1930 – at the corner of 1st Street and Belmont Street. Photo courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.

In the summer of 1921, one of the world’s most famous wells strikes oil on the southeast side of Signal Hill, 20 miles south of Los Angeles. On June 23, Alamitos No. 1 well erupts “black gold,” announcing the discovery of California’s prolific Long Beach oilfield.

The natural gas pressure is so great that the gusher rises 114 feet. The well produces almost 600 barrels a day when it is completed on June 25. It will eventually produce 700,000 barrels. The oilfield it reveals still produces 1.5 million barrels of oil every year.

Signal Hill, incorporated three years after the Alamitos discovery well, remains the only city in America completely surrounded by another city – Long Beach. More than one billion barrels of oil have been pumped from the Long Beach oilfield since the original strike. Read the rest of this entry »