Los Angeles City Oil Field
Encyclopedia
The Los Angeles City Oil Field is a large oil field
north of Downtown Los Angeles
. Long and narrow, it extends from immediately south of Dodger Stadium
west to Vermont Avenue
, encompassing an area of about four miles (6 km) long by a quarter mile across. Its former productive area amounts to 780 acres (3.2 km²).
Discovered in 1890, and made famous by Edward Doheny's successful well in 1892, the field was once the top producing oil field in California, accounting for more than half of the state's oil in 1895. In its peak year of 1901, approximately 200 separate oil companies were active on the field, which is now entirely overbuilt by dense residential and commercial development. As of 2011 only one oil well remains active – behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue one block east of Alvarado Street
in the Westlake neighborhood, producing about 3.5 oilbbl/d. p. 94. The fortunes made during development of the field led directly to the discovery and exploitation of other fields in the Los Angeles Basin. Of the 1,250 wells once drilled on the field, and the forest of derricks that once covered the low hills north of Los Angeles from Elysian Park west, little above-ground trace remains.
and Beverly Hills
fields; to the south is the Los Angeles Downtown field. Ten miles east-southeast is the Brea-Olinda field
, the first to be worked in the region. Even larger fields are still productive in other parts of the basin, such as the giant Wilmington field
which stretches from Carson
to Long Beach
.
Terrain in the vicinity of the Los Angeles City field includes gently rolling hills cut by ravines draining south. Elevations range from around 250 to 500 feet (152.4 m) above sea level, with the highest elevations in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Urban development is dense in the part of Los Angeles containing the field's former productive area, with numerous apartment blocks mixed with commercial and light industrial structures. U.S. Highway 101, the Hollywood Freeway
, parallels part of the field to the north, and California State Route 110, the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway – the first freeway in the United States – cuts directly through the eastern part of the field immediately south of Dodger Stadium. The neighborhoods that contain the field include, from west to east, Koreatown, Westlake, Echo Park, Chinatown
, and Elysian Park.
Some significant public facilities built directly on the area of former oilfield operations include Shriners Hospital for Children, St. Vincent Medical Center
, Belmont High School
, and the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center.
-age Puente Formation. Covering the Puente Formation throughout most of the area is a thin layer of Pliocene
- and Pleistocene
-age alluvium and terrace deposits.
Structurally the field is a faulted anticline
which trends generally east to west, with oil accumulations trapped in sand units dipping south, ending to the north either at a fault – in the eastern part of the field – or at the surface as tar seeps, in the western area. Mechanisms of entrapment include pinchouts and local changes of permeability – forms of stratigraphic traps – and structural traps such as oil-bearing units blockaded by unrelated, impermeable units put there by motion along faults
. Three separate producing horizons, or vertical zones, are present in the Puente Formation, and are given ordinal numbers: First, Second, and Third zones. In addition to these zones, small pockets of oil have been found throughout the upper part of the Puente. The average depth of the three zones from top to bottom is 900, 1,100, and 1,500 feet. Although wells have been drilled to much greater depths – for example, Seaboard Oil Company of Delaware drilled over 7500 feet (2,286 m) into the Topanga Formation, of Miocene
age – no commercial quantities of oil have been found at these great depths.
The field is split into three geographic zones, unrelated to the three vertical zones. The Western Area contains seeps that were known prehistorically; it is separated from the Central zone by a fault. The Central Area, the first to be exploited, extends from the fault to approximately the intersection of the Hollywood and Pasadena Freeways, and the Eastern Area extends northeast from that intersection.
Oil in the field is generally heavy, with API gravity averaging about 14, and ranging overall from 12 to 20. An early assessment by Paul Prutzman (1913) rated the quality of the oil from the field as low, due to the high sulfur content and absence of light fractions suitable for refining. The main use for oil taken from the field during the first decades of the 20th century was fuel oil, and it was also sprayed onto the young city's dirt roads to settle the dust.
The earliest known well on the field, called the "Dryden Well", was a relatively shallow hole hand-dug near the intersection of 3rd Street and Coronado Street in 1857. It produced some heavy oil, tar, and asphaltum during the next 30 years, but the amounts were not recorded. The growing town purchased the product from the well owner to oil the streets. Another early well, this one a failure, was dug to almost 400 feet (121.9 m) in 1865 near the intersection of Temple and Boylston, but the attempt was abandoned after encountering hydrogen sulfide gas from the oil deposits, which were not far below. More persistent drilling in 1890 by several groups of prospectors, including Maltman and Ruhland, succeeded in establishing production of several barrels of oil a day, and the California Department of Conservation credits these drillers with discovering the field. However, it was Edward Doheny and Cannon's well, begun on November 4, 1892, that brought the field instant fame. They had dug a well to 155 feet (47.2 m), halting because of the accumulation of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas in the hole; however the oil seeps they encountered encouraged them to continue. Doheny brought in a sharpened eucalyptus log and used it as an improvised percussion hammer to deepen the well, and shortly afterwards they punctured an oil reservoir, and began producing about seven barrels a day.
While hardly a gusher, their first well at the corner of Colton and Patton Streets was in the middle of an area of hundreds of small town lots that had been sold in a land boom of 1887. Since there were no regulations in California on well spacing at this time, anyone with a lot, and the $1,000 to $1,500 to drill an oil well, could potentially become rich – especially if they could get their well into production before their neighbors drained the oil reservoir. Within a year of the Doheny well there were 121 wells on the field interspersed with homes and businesses, and the field's cumulative production had reached 100000 barrels (15,898.7 m³). Well crowding was extreme: the town lots were often only 50' by 150', and sometimes contained as many as four wells. By the end of 1895, the field was producing 2000 barrels (318 m³) of oil a day, had produced 750000 barrels (119,240.5 m³) in the preceding year, and accounted for sixty percent of the state's oil production. But it was still expanding: in 1896 a new well found oil east of the fault zone near Sisters Hospital which had previously been considered to be the eastern boundary of the field. By the end of 1897, 270 wells had been drilled into this new area. Cumulative production from the entire field at the end of that year had passed a million barrels, from 551 wells.
The peak year for the field was 1901, during which 1,150 active wells pumped over 1.8 Moilbbl. Over 200 separate companies were in operation on the field at this time. Of these, the largest were Union Consolidated Crude Oil Company, L.A. Terminal & Transport, and Westlake Oil Company. Edward A. Clampitt, an eastern businessman who had come to Los Angeles to make a fortune in the oil industry, and who was allegedly the inspiration for Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies, was also one of the principal operators in the first decade of the 20th century. Production declined quickly after the peak; there were simply too many wells draining a reservoir of limited capacity and pressure, and less and less oil was able to be profitably extracted. After 1915 only two new wells were drilled on the field.
The early years on the field were not without mishap. In 1907, one of the gigantic redwood oil tanks near Echo Lake ruptured, and crude oil flooded downhill into the lake, catching fire and burning on the water for three days. The lake is now part of Echo Park, within the neighborhood of the same name. Lawlessness was a problem during the boom period as well, with oil thieves draining tanks overnight, stealing tools, and sabotaging wells of competitors.
As the boom years of the field occurred before the formation of regulatory agencies in California, record keeping was sometimes sparse, not only for oil production but for the very existence and location of the wells. R.E. Crowder, writing in 1961, counted 142 wells which likely existed, but could not be located; some may have been dry holes. A more recent survey suggested that up to 300 wells may have been drilled within the vicinity of the oil field but abandoned without a trace.
By 1961 most of the oil field was dedicated to redevelopment as a residential area, under the auspices of the Los Angeles Urban Renewal Association. At this time, 93 wells still remained active in the field, run by 22 separate companies. One by one the wells have been abandoned, with the one remaining well quietly pumping behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue.
in the Fairfax District in 1985, caused by an overnight accumulation of methane which had seeped up from the underlying Salt Lake Oil Field
, construction over Los Angeles's old oil fields became much more controversial and difficult. The city defined "methane zones" around all oil fields within its limits, and then enacted ordinances to ensure that new and existing structures within these zones were sufficiently ventilated to prevent the accumulation of explosive levels of methane. Mitigation systems for modern buildings include subsurface barriers, ventilation systems, methane detectors, and alarms. Thousands of buildings in the Los Angeles area have such systems, including the Staples Center
and Los Angeles Convention Center
.
Construction of the Belmont Learning Center, now known as the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, "the nation's most expensive high school" began in 1988 adjacent to, and partially above, the former oil field, and within a methane zone. Soil tests in the early 1990s showed methane at high levels, possibly migrating up from old wellbores (not all of which were mapped, let alone abandoned to modern standards). Construction of the complex continued off and on, with partial demolition and reconstruction after additional contamination and an earthquake fault were found. The Learning Center eventually was completed at a cost of $377 million, not far from the area that was the field's center of operations a hundred years before.
Oil field
An oil field is a region with an abundance of oil wells extracting petroleum from below ground. Because the oil reservoirs typically extend over a large area, possibly several hundred kilometres across, full exploitation entails multiple wells scattered across the area...
north of Downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, United States, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area...
. Long and narrow, it extends from immediately south of Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium, also sometimes called Chavez Ravine, is a stadium in Los Angeles. Located adjacent to Downtown Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium has been the home ballpark of Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers team since 1962...
west to Vermont Avenue
Vermont Avenue
Vermont Avenue is one of the longest running north/south streets in Los Angeles, California with a length of about . Located just west of the Harbor Freeway for the major portion south of Downtown Los Angeles, it starts in Griffith Park at the Greek Theatre in the Los Feliz neighborhood as a...
, encompassing an area of about four miles (6 km) long by a quarter mile across. Its former productive area amounts to 780 acres (3.2 km²).
Discovered in 1890, and made famous by Edward Doheny's successful well in 1892, the field was once the top producing oil field in California, accounting for more than half of the state's oil in 1895. In its peak year of 1901, approximately 200 separate oil companies were active on the field, which is now entirely overbuilt by dense residential and commercial development. As of 2011 only one oil well remains active – behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue one block east of Alvarado Street
Alvarado Street
Alvarado Street is a north-south thoroughfare in the Greater Los Angeles Area.-Geography:North of Glendale Boulevard, it starts off as a residential street. It becomes a major thoroughfare south of Glendale Boulevard. Directly south of Pico Boulevard and north of Venice Boulevard, Alvarado Street...
in the Westlake neighborhood, producing about 3.5 oilbbl/d. p. 94. The fortunes made during development of the field led directly to the discovery and exploitation of other fields in the Los Angeles Basin. Of the 1,250 wells once drilled on the field, and the forest of derricks that once covered the low hills north of Los Angeles from Elysian Park west, little above-ground trace remains.
Setting
The Los Angeles City field is one of many in the Los Angeles Basin. To the west are the still-productive Salt LakeSalt Lake Oil Field
The Salt Lake Oil Field is an oil field underneath the city of Los Angeles, California. Discovered in 1902, and developed quickly in the following years, the Salt Lake field was once the most productive in California; over 50 million barrels of oil have been extracted from it, mostly in the first...
and Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills Oil Field
The Beverly Hills Oil Field is a large and currently active oil field underneath part of the city of Beverly Hills, California, USA, and portions of the adjacent city of Los Angeles...
fields; to the south is the Los Angeles Downtown field. Ten miles east-southeast is the Brea-Olinda field
Brea-Olinda Oil Field
The Brea-Olinda Oil Field is a large oil field in northern Orange County and Los Angeles County, California, along the southern edge of the Puente Hills, about four miles northeast of Fullerton, and adjacent to the city of Brea...
, the first to be worked in the region. Even larger fields are still productive in other parts of the basin, such as the giant Wilmington field
Wilmington Oil Field
The Wilmington Oil Field is a large petroleum field in Los Angeles County in southern California in the United States in terms of cumulative oil produced. Discovered in 1932, it is the third largest oil field in the United States...
which stretches from Carson
Carson, California
Carson is a city in Los Angeles County, California. As of the 2010 census, Carson had a total population of 91,714. Located south of downtown Los Angeles and approximately 14 miles away from the Los Angeles International Airport, it is known as a suburb of the city....
to Long Beach
Long Beach, California
Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...
.
Terrain in the vicinity of the Los Angeles City field includes gently rolling hills cut by ravines draining south. Elevations range from around 250 to 500 feet (152.4 m) above sea level, with the highest elevations in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Urban development is dense in the part of Los Angeles containing the field's former productive area, with numerous apartment blocks mixed with commercial and light industrial structures. U.S. Highway 101, the Hollywood Freeway
Hollywood Freeway
The Hollywood Freeway is one of the principal freeways of Los Angeles, California and one of the busiest in the United States. It is the principal route over the Cahuenga Pass, the primary shortcut between the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley...
, parallels part of the field to the north, and California State Route 110, the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway – the first freeway in the United States – cuts directly through the eastern part of the field immediately south of Dodger Stadium. The neighborhoods that contain the field include, from west to east, Koreatown, Westlake, Echo Park, Chinatown
Chinatown, Los Angeles
Chinatown in Los Angeles, California is located in the city's downtown area. Built in 1938, it is the second Chinatown to be constructed in Los Angeles. The original historic Chinatown was founded in the late 19th century, but was demolished to make room for Union Station, the city's major rail...
, and Elysian Park.
Some significant public facilities built directly on the area of former oilfield operations include Shriners Hospital for Children, St. Vincent Medical Center
St. Vincent Medical Center (Los Angeles)
St. Vincent Medical Center is a hospital in Los Angeles, California.-History:Originally founded in 1856 as the Los Angeles Infirmary by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Vincent Medical Center was the first hospital in Los Angeles. The name was changed in 1918 to St. Vincent's...
, Belmont High School
Belmont High School (Los Angeles, California)
Belmont Senior High School is a public high school located at 1575 West 2nd Street in the Westlake community of Los Angeles, California. The school, which serves grades 9 through 12, is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.-History:...
, and the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center.
Geology
Oil in the Los Angeles City field is relatively close to the surface. Every productive deposit has been in a single geologic unit, the shallow MioceneMiocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...
-age Puente Formation. Covering the Puente Formation throughout most of the area is a thin layer of Pliocene
Pliocene
The Pliocene Epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 2.588 million years before present. It is the second and youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Pliocene follows the Miocene Epoch and is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch...
- and Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
-age alluvium and terrace deposits.
Structurally the field is a faulted anticline
Anticline
In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is convex up and has its oldest beds at its core. The term is not to be confused with antiform, which is a purely descriptive term for any fold that is convex up. Therefore if age relationships In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is...
which trends generally east to west, with oil accumulations trapped in sand units dipping south, ending to the north either at a fault – in the eastern part of the field – or at the surface as tar seeps, in the western area. Mechanisms of entrapment include pinchouts and local changes of permeability – forms of stratigraphic traps – and structural traps such as oil-bearing units blockaded by unrelated, impermeable units put there by motion along faults
Geologic fault
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock, across which there has been significant displacement along the fractures as a result of earth movement. Large faults within the Earth's crust result from the action of tectonic forces...
. Three separate producing horizons, or vertical zones, are present in the Puente Formation, and are given ordinal numbers: First, Second, and Third zones. In addition to these zones, small pockets of oil have been found throughout the upper part of the Puente. The average depth of the three zones from top to bottom is 900, 1,100, and 1,500 feet. Although wells have been drilled to much greater depths – for example, Seaboard Oil Company of Delaware drilled over 7500 feet (2,286 m) into the Topanga Formation, of Miocene
Miocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...
age – no commercial quantities of oil have been found at these great depths.
The field is split into three geographic zones, unrelated to the three vertical zones. The Western Area contains seeps that were known prehistorically; it is separated from the Central zone by a fault. The Central Area, the first to be exploited, extends from the fault to approximately the intersection of the Hollywood and Pasadena Freeways, and the Eastern Area extends northeast from that intersection.
Oil in the field is generally heavy, with API gravity averaging about 14, and ranging overall from 12 to 20. An early assessment by Paul Prutzman (1913) rated the quality of the oil from the field as low, due to the high sulfur content and absence of light fractions suitable for refining. The main use for oil taken from the field during the first decades of the 20th century was fuel oil, and it was also sprayed onto the young city's dirt roads to settle the dust.
History, production, and operations
Early development
Tar seeps have been known in the area from prehistoric times, and the Native American population of the Los Angeles basin used the tar for waterproofing and other purposes. The Spanish settlers used it for their lamps, as a sealant for roofs, and as grease for wagon wheels.The earliest known well on the field, called the "Dryden Well", was a relatively shallow hole hand-dug near the intersection of 3rd Street and Coronado Street in 1857. It produced some heavy oil, tar, and asphaltum during the next 30 years, but the amounts were not recorded. The growing town purchased the product from the well owner to oil the streets. Another early well, this one a failure, was dug to almost 400 feet (121.9 m) in 1865 near the intersection of Temple and Boylston, but the attempt was abandoned after encountering hydrogen sulfide gas from the oil deposits, which were not far below. More persistent drilling in 1890 by several groups of prospectors, including Maltman and Ruhland, succeeded in establishing production of several barrels of oil a day, and the California Department of Conservation credits these drillers with discovering the field. However, it was Edward Doheny and Cannon's well, begun on November 4, 1892, that brought the field instant fame. They had dug a well to 155 feet (47.2 m), halting because of the accumulation of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas in the hole; however the oil seeps they encountered encouraged them to continue. Doheny brought in a sharpened eucalyptus log and used it as an improvised percussion hammer to deepen the well, and shortly afterwards they punctured an oil reservoir, and began producing about seven barrels a day.
While hardly a gusher, their first well at the corner of Colton and Patton Streets was in the middle of an area of hundreds of small town lots that had been sold in a land boom of 1887. Since there were no regulations in California on well spacing at this time, anyone with a lot, and the $1,000 to $1,500 to drill an oil well, could potentially become rich – especially if they could get their well into production before their neighbors drained the oil reservoir. Within a year of the Doheny well there were 121 wells on the field interspersed with homes and businesses, and the field's cumulative production had reached 100000 barrels (15,898.7 m³). Well crowding was extreme: the town lots were often only 50' by 150', and sometimes contained as many as four wells. By the end of 1895, the field was producing 2000 barrels (318 m³) of oil a day, had produced 750000 barrels (119,240.5 m³) in the preceding year, and accounted for sixty percent of the state's oil production. But it was still expanding: in 1896 a new well found oil east of the fault zone near Sisters Hospital which had previously been considered to be the eastern boundary of the field. By the end of 1897, 270 wells had been drilled into this new area. Cumulative production from the entire field at the end of that year had passed a million barrels, from 551 wells.
The "Oil Queen of California"; peak years
During the early development of the field, no single firm had a dominant share. Drillers started their own companies, flooding the local stock exchange with shares of start-up oil firms. There were so many of these that the Los Angeles Stock Exchange had to open a separate facility just to deal with oil stocks. By far the most successful entrepreneur on the field, however, was a piano teacher from Kentucky named Emma Summers, soon nicknamed the "Oil Queen of California." She purchased a half-interest in an oil well for $700 in the area of the present-day Civic Center, using the proceeds from her piano lessons, and then purchased some others on credit. As her wells became successful, she shrewdly acquired others, forcing other operators out of business, and selling her oil to various local power companies, hotels, and utilities, all while doing her own accounting and continuing to give piano lessons at night. When the price of oil peaked around $1.80 a barrel, she controlled about half of the wells on the central portion of the field. In 1903 the boom briefly turned to bust as the price of oil dropped to only fifteen cents a barrel, due to abundant oil flooding the market from the Los Angeles field and others just opening up both in the Los Angeles basin and in the San Joaquin Valley.The peak year for the field was 1901, during which 1,150 active wells pumped over 1.8 Moilbbl. Over 200 separate companies were in operation on the field at this time. Of these, the largest were Union Consolidated Crude Oil Company, L.A. Terminal & Transport, and Westlake Oil Company. Edward A. Clampitt, an eastern businessman who had come to Los Angeles to make a fortune in the oil industry, and who was allegedly the inspiration for Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies, was also one of the principal operators in the first decade of the 20th century. Production declined quickly after the peak; there were simply too many wells draining a reservoir of limited capacity and pressure, and less and less oil was able to be profitably extracted. After 1915 only two new wells were drilled on the field.
The early years on the field were not without mishap. In 1907, one of the gigantic redwood oil tanks near Echo Lake ruptured, and crude oil flooded downhill into the lake, catching fire and burning on the water for three days. The lake is now part of Echo Park, within the neighborhood of the same name. Lawlessness was a problem during the boom period as well, with oil thieves draining tanks overnight, stealing tools, and sabotaging wells of competitors.
As the boom years of the field occurred before the formation of regulatory agencies in California, record keeping was sometimes sparse, not only for oil production but for the very existence and location of the wells. R.E. Crowder, writing in 1961, counted 142 wells which likely existed, but could not be located; some may have been dry holes. A more recent survey suggested that up to 300 wells may have been drilled within the vicinity of the oil field but abandoned without a trace.
By 1961 most of the oil field was dedicated to redevelopment as a residential area, under the auspices of the Los Angeles Urban Renewal Association. At this time, 93 wells still remained active in the field, run by 22 separate companies. One by one the wells have been abandoned, with the one remaining well quietly pumping behind a fence on South Mountain View Avenue.
Recent land use controversies
After an explosion which leveled a Ross Dress for LessRoss Dress For Less
Ross Stores, Inc. , is a chain of American off-price department stores headquartered in Pleasanton, California, operating under the name Ross Dress for Less. It is the third largest off-price retailer in the United States, behind T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, both of which are owned by TJX Companies.As...
in the Fairfax District in 1985, caused by an overnight accumulation of methane which had seeped up from the underlying Salt Lake Oil Field
Salt Lake Oil Field
The Salt Lake Oil Field is an oil field underneath the city of Los Angeles, California. Discovered in 1902, and developed quickly in the following years, the Salt Lake field was once the most productive in California; over 50 million barrels of oil have been extracted from it, mostly in the first...
, construction over Los Angeles's old oil fields became much more controversial and difficult. The city defined "methane zones" around all oil fields within its limits, and then enacted ordinances to ensure that new and existing structures within these zones were sufficiently ventilated to prevent the accumulation of explosive levels of methane. Mitigation systems for modern buildings include subsurface barriers, ventilation systems, methane detectors, and alarms. Thousands of buildings in the Los Angeles area have such systems, including the Staples Center
Staples Center
Staples Center is a multi-purpose sports arena in Downtown Los Angeles. Adjacent to the L.A. Live development, it is located next to the Los Angeles Convention Center complex along Figueroa Street. Opening on October 17, 1999, it is one of the major sporting facilities in the Greater Los Angeles...
and Los Angeles Convention Center
Los Angeles Convention Center
The Los Angeles Convention Center is a convention center in the southwest portion of downtown Los Angeles. The LACC hosts annual events such as the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show and Anime Expo, and is best known to video games fans as host to E3...
.
Construction of the Belmont Learning Center, now known as the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, "the nation's most expensive high school" began in 1988 adjacent to, and partially above, the former oil field, and within a methane zone. Soil tests in the early 1990s showed methane at high levels, possibly migrating up from old wellbores (not all of which were mapped, let alone abandoned to modern standards). Construction of the complex continued off and on, with partial demolition and reconstruction after additional contamination and an earthquake fault were found. The Learning Center eventually was completed at a cost of $377 million, not far from the area that was the field's center of operations a hundred years before.