Drilling for "black gold" — a.k.a. oil — helped Los Angeles grow to what it is today. The days of oil rigs dotting our shoreline and lining all of our streets may be long gone, but oil drilling hasn’t disappeared entirely from the region. In fact, Los Angeles is still America’s biggest urban oil field — and 580,000 Angelenos live within a quarter-mile of a well. As both the City of L.A. and L.A. County back off from oil drilling and begin to decommission old oil wells and ban new ones, vulnerable communities are still experiencing the negative health effects of being in such close proximity to oil drilling.
