Ashley Hernandez was in middle school when her family moved into its first house, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington. For years, her undocumented parents had moved around in search of steady work, gone without meals, rented out too-small apartments. Finally, they had a place of their own, with three bedrooms and even a yard.
“My parents were really excited about that American dream that we’d always talked about,” Hernandez said.
But their new home was just 500 ft from an active oil drilling site.
It wasn’t long before the family learned to keep the windows shut so they wouldn’t breathe in particulate matter. Soot piled up on their cars. The lights and the noise from the oilfield made it hard to think. Hernandez regularly woke up to a pillow soaked through from a nosebleed that ran all night.
Wilmington is the home of the Port of Los Angeles, but it is also host to the largest oilfield in the state by production, the third-largest in the nation. Logos for oil companies such as Marathon and Valero crop up at the local library branch, the YMCA, even stamped on free pencils they give out in schools. Today, the 27-year-old Hernandez still lives with her family near the oil field and works as an advocate for residents who face health issues they blame on oil drilling. She’s also part of a coalition pushing California lawmakers to establish a setback: a minimum distance oil and gas developments must keep from homes, schools, hospitals, and other sites.
Experts say that more than a decade of research—including two new studies out of California and one on a Texas community—has made it clear that current setback distances, in states where they exist, are inadequate to protect public health. Now, political pressure to push oil and gas wells about half a mile from homes and other buildings is peaking across the country, over industry alarm that such measures could amount to a de facto ban on drilling.
A Patchwork of Regulations
In the United States, about 17.6 million people live within 1 mile of an oil or gas well. Yet, setbacks are largely a patchwork of state regulations and municipal ordinances; there is no federal standard.
Many states have a setback requirement, but most are in the range of 150 to 500 ft (45 to 152 m). The most stringent state rule among the major oil and gas producing states is Colorado’s: a 1,000-ft setback from high-occupancy buildings, such as schools and hospitals.
There are currently initiatives to expand setback requirements in several major oil- and gas-producing states. In Pennsylvania, a state grand jury recently released a report after a 2-year investigation into the hydraulic fracturing industry and the state’s handling of it. No. 1 among its eight recommendations: “Expanding no-drill zones in Pennsylvania from the required 500 ft (152 m) to 2,500 ft (762 m).” In Colorado, a citizen coalition is pursuing several options for a setback proposal in 2020 after a failed referendum it backed for a 2,500-ft setback became a flashpoint in the state’s 2018 midterm elections. And, in California, a bill that would force the state to establish a setback (currently there is none related to residences) of up to 2,500 ft has passed the state assembly and is working its way to a senate vote.
University of Pittsburgh radiation oncologist Marsha Haley started digging into setbacks after a hydraulic fracturing well was proposed in 2014 for a lot near her then 8-year-old daughter’s school in Mars, Pennsylvania—part of a five-school campus. Given her day job, Haley was concerned about the levels of radiation she had read were in hydraulic fracturing waste water. The more she read, the more worried she became.
“Putting it 500 ft from the school, it just seemed very counterintuitive,” she said. “I was curious how the state came up with that number.”
For a study she published with colleagues in 2016, Haley analyzed setback distances across heavily drilled natural gas shale regions in Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Setbacks, they concluded, were largely based not on data but on political compromise.
State and municipal setback distances set long ago were based more on “immediate quality-of-life concerns” than on a careful analysis of health effects at different distances, explained Ann Alexander, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Oil and gas wells are noisy and ugly, and they smell bad,” Alexander said. States and local governments trying to reach agreements with residents and industry players, she added, essentially “threw a dart at a board.”
“You ended up with setbacks that were way less than what the new science suggests is necessary.”