Long Beach is Sinking!

Long Beach is still sinking, physically.

The notion that extracting a certain layer of the earth would cause layers above it to sink escaped the oil companies of the 1930s, when major offshore drilling projects commenced. The city literally sank, in some places, up to 29 feet before the 1950s!

Geographically, Long Beach is a complex coastline with major human interference. The city surrounds an offshore fault system, gets the majority of storm-drain pollution runoff from many cities north of it and has a long history of coastline exploitation. Oil drilling further complicated its history.

‘Black gold’ was found in Wilmington Oil Field in San Pedro Bay circa 1932, and is still being pumped out at a rate of nearly 30,000 barrels of oil per day. That’s right, those landscaped islands aren’t floating resort towns; they’re oil wells.

To correct the subsidence problem, engineers designed a water-injection process that would fill the spaces where oil was extracted, and the substantial sinking halted. This introduced only a temporary solution, however. What happens when there’s no more oil to pump, to gain revenue from and pay for the water injections?

In The District Weekly article, local geologist Donald Clarke said, “We really don’t know how much more it [Long Beach] would have sunk [if water wasn’t pumped in]. We really don’t know how we’re going to maintain the very sensitive pressures in those underground reservoirs when we stop producing oil in the next 20 years or so. It’s one of my biggest nightmares.”

In 1999, an experimental ‘steam-flooding’ program was instituted, where steam was injected into the sand to try and soak up the oil. The experiment ceased, but subsidence almost immediately began again, and, little by little, parts of Long Beach are submerging, even today.

Press Telegram article:

http://www.presstelegram.com/search/ci_5674790

The District Weekly’s article:

http://thedistrictweekly.com/dwweb/?p=114