Residents Harmed by Oil Drilling May Soon Receive Reparations Under New California Law

Only until she was grown did she begin to see a possible connection between growing up on top of the nation’s largest urban oil drilling field and her own sickness and the asthma that affected her sister.

For over a century in Los Angeles and across the nation, Black people have been disproportionately likely to live near oil wells, the machinery that draws oil from deep underground. The pollution from these drilling sites are connected to birth complications, child development issues, respiratory illnesses, and cancer.

Now, a new California state law moves to turn that lived experience into a broader public-policy question: What does a state owe communities exposed to pollution for generations? And what happens when you can’t offer support to every family that has struggled through the harm?