The most elaborate oil cover-ups ever

Press, 24 October 1984, Page 6

The most elaborate oil cover-ups ever

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles The new style Beverly Hillbillies of southern California have their oil gushing inside banks, luxurious apartment blocks, insurance buildings, and even a lighthouse. It is California’s answer to how to earn oil fortunes without having rigs spoiling the countryside, a problem that has become a public issue in a number of new oil countries. Oil companies in the socalled lotus land of southern California with its sundrenched beaches and millionaires’ desert playgrounds have employed architects to design what a company executive described a probably the most elaborate oil cover-up in the world At the insistence of landowners and civic organisations in expensive areas, oil rigs are being disguised as buildings. Southern California, with a staggering potential of 20 billion barrels of oil underground, is at present producing a million barrels a day onshore and could be heading for a boom to rival the Texas wildcat days of nearly a century ago. In the tradition of the

internationally-shown television series “The Beverly Hillbillies,” in which the Clampett family moved to Beverly Hills after striking oil, the oil families of southern California also do not want to see rigs from their lounge windows. Occidental Petroleum was the first to cover-up. It built a mock insurance office building on the outskirts of Beverly Hills to house the rigs of 10 wells, pumping silently and without any smell. An oil rig, camouflaged to look like a pyramid and surrounded by a brick wall, pumps 1700 barrels of oil a day from beneath the playground of Beverly Hills High School. The oil brings in $1.2 million a year to the school. “We are pleased to be a part of the boom,” the school superintendent, Leon Lessinger, said. “There is no noise, no smell, we can’t see the rig, and it is a big plus financially for our school.” Standard Oil Company of California built a 70m long dummy bank building costing $3.5 million to house two electric drilling rigs. A mock lighthouse conceals a rig in the coastal town of Venice.

In one of the most ambitious schemes, five manmade islands, each covering four hectares, have been laid out in Long Beach harbour with waterfalls, palm trees, and giant dummy apartment buildings. Newcomers seeking houses in the area often ask estate agents if there are apartments vacant on the islands. But the buildings house only oil rigs. The coastal community of Huntington Beach insists that its oil rigs be painted a neutral colour and hidden by trees and fences. The superintendent of oil production in Signal Hills, Oliver Covall, has warned other towns what will happen to them if they do not safeguard the appearance of their countryside. Signal Hills, which had one of the world’s richest oilfields in the 19205, has been left looking at the bald side of a mountain. “You have to be strict with oil companies or they will run pipelines through your front rooms,” Covall said. Inhabitants of some areas have insisted on core drilling in which an exploratory well is drilled and the site

then returned to its previous appearance. If oil is found, the company drills a slant hole from as far as a mile away and the oil is pumped to this point and then taken away by pipeline. In industrial areas and in poorer communities, oil rigs are left in the open. There are 17,000 pumps in southern California, including the family-owned small grasshopper pumps perched on hillsides and along streets. Amateur artists have painted some of these small pumps to look like butterflies or bees, their heads endlessly moving up and down as the oil is pumped.

One town that has resisted aU approaches by oilmen is Pacific PaUsades, where President Reagan owned a house before he moved to the White House. An oE company offered to put up a mock mission building with a belltower, but inhabitants, including the film star, Walter Matthau, have led the fight against oil intrusion.

“We don’t want to wind up with an bil version of the slag heaps of coal mines,” said a town official — with a shudder.