Thanks to decades of oil drilling, Long Beach is sinking. And when the oil is gone, who’s going to pay to keep our city above water?
By Dave Wielenga

Finally made my first visit to the Aquarium of the Pacific last week, and as I watched thousands of beautiful sea creatures floating in next-best-to-natural habitats behind massive panes of glass that held back a million gallons of water I was overwhelmed with wonder . . . as in, “I wonder whether those suckers are about to break.”

Doesn’t everybody?

“Heavens, what a thing to bring up!” hissed the mother of a couple of young children, after making sure her tykes hadn’t heard my question.

“Excuse us,” said the twentysomething couple taking pictures of each other beside a small octopus that had attached itself to the glass, “but we’re trying to have a nice day.”

Okay, so I guess it’s pretty much just me—or me and Donald Clarke, the guy who first got me fretting about a worst-case scenario involving all that water behind all that glass. That was in the spring of 1998, a few months before the Aquarium of the Pacific opened. Back then, Clarke was a City of Long Beach geologist, and he expressed some reservations about building a delicate, complicated, water-based tourist attraction on a geological seesaw—a landfill created in an area already vulnerable to earthquakes and already destabilized by decades of oil extraction.

“I’m very much for this aquarium,” Clarke told me at the time, “but they picked a very difficult place to put it. It’s on an old oilfield with a history of subsidence problems.”

Long Beach’s history of subsidence problems—the sinking of its land as vast stores of oil are withdrawn thousands of feet below—has been a big part of the city’s history, period, almost since the first wells were drilled in the mid-1930s. Its price tag—in damage suits, repair bills and the never-ending cost of staving off more subsidence—is much higher than famous earthquake of 1933. And with the end of Long Beach’s petroleum era probably not that far over the horizon, debate still rages among scientists, politicians, the business community and bureaucrats about what is to be done—and who is qualified to decide—when the price of keeping our heads above water can no longer be skimmed off the top of oil profits.

“The land in some places sank 29 feet before the 1950s, when we began pumping in water to stop it,” Clarke said. “We really don’t know how much more it would have sunk. 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.”
From that moment on, it’s been one of my nightmares, too, as well as one of the reasons I’d never visited the Aquarium of the Pacific—that and the fact that the entire project, from its obviously unfeasible feasibility study to a slimy financing scheme that used public money to guarantee bonds that the public couldn’t even buy, began as a kettle of fishy statistics.

Anyway, I finally dropped in last week, but not before contacting Clarke again, just to be sure I wouldn’t be walking into a watery deathtrap. I mean, I hadn’t heard of any problems. . . .

“No, no, they designed the aquarium’s foundation beautifully—and I know, because I was the geotechnical on that project,” said Clarke, 57, who retired in 2005 after 26 years as a city geologist. He now works as a private consultant from an office in Bellflower. “They were building it on land that had not been compacted, that had not been consolidated, but they engineered around it.”

Clarke explained how guys in hard hats hammered 2,000 rock columns (each three feet wide) deep into the earth (from 45 to 85 feet down), and then laid a foundation atop those columns, a concrete mat atop which the aquarium sits.

Learning that certainly took a load off my . . .

“Still, its tolerances are very small—about a half-inch across the base,” Clarke continued, and of course I didn’t know what he was talking about. “That means if the foundation tips a half-inch from when it was built—that’s a fraction of a degree from one edge to the other—it is out of tolerances . . . and then it’s in danger, because those water tanks are made to sit a certain way. Any shift puts more water in a place that’s not designed to take it.”

And what could cause something like that?

“Subsidence,” said Clarke. “If we had subsidence, and if the subsidence caused one end to fall, even a little, then instead of the weight bearing straight down, it’s going sideways against the edges of the aquarium, and if that happens . . . Well . . .” And here he pauses before concluding: “The tanks could break. It’s a very critical thing to monitor.”

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

The Gas and Oil Department has had a few different names over the years, but its current designation—and especially its acronym: GOD—seems to best describe its importance to Long Beach. During the last 70 years, oil companies have sucked some 2.6 billion barrels of oil from the Wilmington field alone. Production is waning there, but thanks to newer fields the net profit on all Long Beach operations last year was roughly $300 million, of which the city’s cut was about $20 million.

GOD oversees all things related to black gold in Long Beach. It’s a responsibility that might not have required anybody more qualified than Jed Clampett—except for the challenge of subsidence. Instead, the department relies on profoundly educated scientists—geologists and engineers with deep knowledge of the unstable earth below the city and an appreciation of how to maintain a precise balancing act.

For the past 50 years, the crucial component has been a massive system of pumps that these days injects 1.2 million barrels of water into the earth every day—replacing the 1.2 million barrels of oil-carrying water it extracts—to keep the ground from sinking.

“At 42 gallons a barrel, that’s a huge amount of water,” Clarke fairly whispers. “At between 11 and 15 cents a barrel, that’s a lot of money.”

In fact, GOD can’t quantify—not exactly—how much it costs to keep the pumps running. “By itself, no, we don’t have a number,” says Curtis Henderson, a geologist who manages GOD’s oil operations. “To run the whole field costs $600 million a year in total expenses. The cost of water injection is in there.”

Also included is whatever it costs for a network of Global Positioning System monitors that measure and record the fluctuations in Long Beach’s terra not-so-firma.

“We monitor elevations twice a year,” says Michael Henry, a geologist who is manager of subsidence. “The idea is to maintain stable elevations. We have been quite stable for many years now.”

That’s quite a feat, considering all the instability that plagued Long Beach for so many years, triggered when oil was discovered on the west side of town in 1932. The first well was drilled in 1936; by 1939 production was so substantial that it could be called an industry; in 1941 a study revealed that part of Terminal Island had sunk 18 inches.

Experts seem to have worked hard not to connect the dots. That 1941 report described the bowl-shaped indentation as “mysterious.” In 1942, when Long Beach city engineer J.R. McHenry reported that the city was beginning to tilt—and move horizontally—toward Terminal Island, he emphasized that the movements were “exceedingly small and represented no reason for public alarm.”

The land began to sink faster, but even when people started to concede that sucking oil out of the earth might have something to do with it, few wanted to consider the implications. Long Beach already relied on the income and employment oil provided. Similarly, although the subsiding land immediately began causing problems for the $65 million Long Beach Naval Shipyard when it was completed in 1943, the Navy restrained its complaints because World War II was raging and the military appreciated having massive quantities of oil so conveniently available.

When the war ended in 1945, however, the Navy’s tone changed. Officials took seriously a report that the land around the shipyard had sunk more than four feet. In 1949, when facilities began to flood at high tide, things got heavy. “The time has come for action, quick decisive action!” proclaimed Commander L.C. Coxe of the Long Beach base. “Subsidence waits for no man!”

Beneath that bluster, Coxe wanted the city to admit its oil wells were at fault and accept the burden of solving the problem, preferably by undertaking the massive—and massively expensive—geo-engineering feat of propping up the land by replacing the extracted oil with water. The city countered by insisting no one could prove the cause of subsidence—suggesting that excavation on the Navy dry dock may have been responsible—and just kept filling its coffers with oil money.

Only when the Secretary of the Navy threatened Long Beach financially—ruling that the Naval Shipyard be deactivated, jeopardizing 5,800 jobs, and filing a lawsuit—did the city act. But that ignited a debate over private ownership versus public welfare that centered on how to legally pump water into dozens of wells of varying sizes and with different owners. The desired solution was something called “unitization,” which through state law and changes in the city charter would combine the oil interests and grant the city the power of eminent domain.

As the controversy raged, the rate of subsidence increased. In the early 1950s, the land was sinking two and a half feet per year, turning the harbor and oil fields into a maze of berms and sloughs built as protection and diversion from the encroaching tides. The sinking land inundated wharves, warped railroad lines, cracked streets and bridges, left buildings uninhabitable, and shut down hundreds of oil wells. Effects began to appear downtown, too, where windows cracked in Pine Avenue shops, plumbing fixtures popped and landmarks—from the Riviera Hotel to Poly High—began to lose elevation. In 1957, Time magazine wrote a story about Long Beach that was headlined “The Sinking City.”

About that time, the Employees Association of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard sponsored an essay contest for high school students, asking them to write about “What Subsidence Means to Our Harbor Area and How It Can Be Prevented.” The winner of the $500 prize was a bright Banning High School senior who dramatically compared Long Beach’s predicament to a legendary ancient disaster:

“Will subsidence be our Vesuvius and will the Pacific Ocean one day flow over what is now Long Beach as did the white-hot lava on Pompeii?” the boy wrote. “The time is in sight when Linden Ave. and the Municipal Auditorium will be under water.”
The student stridently advocated water and gas injection, impatiently scolded private oil field owners and unequivocally called for a law that would compel them to act in the public interest. “Unitization will be our weapon,” he finished with a flourish, “and we will stave off the tides of the mighty Pacific.”

The kid—who was right, by the way; that’s exactly how it came down—was named James C. Hankla. Today, Hankla serves as president of the Long Beach Harbor Commission; 10 years ago he was the Long Beach city manager, and the guy most responsible for situating the Aquarium of the Pacific on a landfill in an earthquake zone with a history of subsidence.

GOD insists that the aquarium is safe—that Long Beach is safe—and Clarke agrees . . . although he can’t help suggesting that it could be safer.

“I suggested that we put a permanent GPS on the aquarium,” he says. “They said fine on that. But then it went through a bunch of political things, where political people for some reason didn’t want that. I think if something’s going wrong you ought to have a good heads-up—you know: BEEEEEP! IT’S GOING WRONG! You’d know it right away.

“But they thought that would be something that would scare people. So that never got fully implemented. It’s still not.”
Suggest to Clarke that this sounds like fear mongering, and he reacts sharply.

“No, it’s not that!” he says. “Safety is safety! You’re getting me off on one of my pet peeves here.”

Clarke’s point is that the pressures threatening the stability of Long Beach’s land aren’t all geological.

“We’re talking about lots of money in the oilfield, astronomical amounts of money,” he says. “If you can do something like pump the water into a cheaper place—the same amount of water, so you match up statistically, but maybe not in the place you removed [the oil from]—you’re financially better off. There’s always some oil-company engineer who figures out something like that, hoping to become a hero. And that’s where the city has to ride them.”

Henderson agrees that scientists must be vigilant against the influence of economic forces, but he says that there are economic counterweights as well.

“There can be pressures based on economics where you want to maximize profits for the field, but in the end we’re not going to compromise on anything that would affect subsidence,” he says. “That just won’t happen. We won’t compromise. You look at downtown construction, the aquarium, the port—there is too much infrastructure here to consider that. There is too much at stake. Economics dictate that you can’t do that. Irrespective of the profit from the oilfield, the question is: Can you pay for problems that occur because of it?”

Some of the same tugs-of-war are played out against the forces of politics.

“Over my 26 years with the city I had a number of ethical challenges,” Clarke acknowledges, “especially with politicians who have ideas about what they want. Maybe a city manager comes in and says, ‘You’ll do something differently.’ I had some significant problems with this many years ago. There are battles to fight.

“But the political people are only there for a few years, and they want what makes them look good now. They don’t mind leaving the problem for whoever will be there a few years later. Standing up to that, there are times when it’s tough. Yes, I had my job threatened. Multiple times. But I held my ground.”

Although he considers himself a person of integrity, Clarke says his education and training—not to mention a state license that made him financially responsible for his decisions—provided a little extra incentive to make the right ones.

“When I was in charge of the subsidence section, it was my license, reputation, my name, my pocketbook on the line,” he says. “It was me, personally.”

In that regard, Clarke is concerned about Chris Garner, the man who currently heads GOD.

“Chris doesn’t have a background in geology or engineering at all; he’s just an administrator,” says Clarke. “Do you think that an administrator—somebody who may want to be the next city manager—is going to look out for the best science? That was always my worry.”

Long Beach city manager Jerry Miller, who will be retiring this summer, appointed Garner to lead GOD, and stands by his choice.
“Chris has been with the department since 1984—he came up through the ranks—and he has had a fairly impeccable career,” says Miller. “I don’t need a geologist to run the oil properties; I need someone to manage the business operations. Chris relies on the scientists working for him, the same way somebody running a hospital relies on doctors. The person running the hospital is rarely a doctor, but the hospital’s surgeon is absolutely reliant on that person to be sure the facilities are there. That’s how it is with Chris.”

Garner, meanwhile, denies that he is or will be a candidate for city manager.

But Clarke isn’t swayed.

“Chris is a nice, wonderful guy, but he’s in the wrong place, and he doesn’t know it,” he charges. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but an incompetent is somebody who doesn’t know that they don’t know. It’s one thing to know you can’t do something—you’re not incompetent then. But if you don’t know that you don’t know, then you’re incompetent. And Chris doesn’t know. If a crisis happens, the city of Long Beach is going to pay big.”

Nobody knows how far Long Beach would have sunk if the city hadn’t begun pumping water into the ground 50 years ago to stabilize it. Some say only a couple more feet. Others say as many as 70.

But it’s certain that the problem has not gone away. In 1999, an experimental oil-extraction project called steam-flooding—basically, injecting steam into the earth to soak oil from the sand—was ordered shut down by GOD when parts of the city began to sink again. Even after the operation stopped, the subsidence continued—almost two inches from November 2001 to January 2003 and in lesser increments since. In the port, a stretch along Henry Ford Avenue subsided 1.9 inches. The Carnival Cruise terminal on Pier J sank 1.08 inches. The Pike at Rainbow Harbor development dropped 0.6 inches.

This presents a mysterious dilemma for the future, when there’s no more oil worth pumping. Will water be injected into the earth eternally? Will the land be allowed to sink? Nobody—not the scientists, not the administrators—knows for sure. But everybody knows that, either way, the costs will be high.

“Approximately $140 million has been set aside for injections after oil production ceases,” says Henderson. “But we don’t know how long that will last or whether we’ll even need it all. There are three scenarios that range from injection for three or four years, to injection for 10 to 15 years, to injecting forever—although I think the latter is highly unlikely.”

Meanwhile, back at the aquarium, I am distracted from the serene watery world behind the glass by the sound of . . . a John Philip Sousa march? Yep, “The Stars & Stripes Forever,” I think it is—all crashing cymbals, bombastic brass and chirping piccolos—is being piped into the Great Hall of the Pacific. About 25 young children are holding little models of sea creatures above their heads and parading past the tanks, stamping their little feet so furiously that I . . . I could almost swear the floor is . . . vibrating . . . you know, just a little . . . isn’t it?