The Inglewood Oil Field grew rapidly. By February 1925, “experienced oil men” considered it “one of the most desirable fields … in the entire State,” and Standard Oil had begun construction on a pipeline to its refinery in El Segundo (a city so named because it was the second refinery Standard Oil built in California). It was cheap and easy drilling for shallow, quality oil. Associated Oil, Fifty-Seven Petroleum, Oscar Howard, Mohawk Oil, Pacific, Pan-American Petroleum, Petroleum Midway, Superior Oil, Universal Oil, Wilshire Oil and W.W. Bush all joined the rush. Edward L. Doheny’s Petroleum Securities Company drilled one well — it only had to go down 1,414 feet deep — in a remarkable 18 days.
Pumps worked up a frenzy and black gold surged from the depths. Two thousand barrels per day came out of the ground in March 1925, 3,400 in April. Inglewood had “suddenly leaped into prominence as one of the most active oil fields in the State.” By May, 39 wells were producing nearly 19,000 barrels per day. In July, there were 109 wells pumping 110,000 barrels daily, and by then it had become the largest oil producer in California. In just one week that month, the field’s workers got nine new wells up and running and increased overall production by 12.5%, or 12,300 barrels per day.
Oil was a booming industry for the whole state in those years. Throughout the 1920s, California produced between 20% and 25% of the global oil supply. In 1923, oil from the Signal Hill field alone doubled the ship traffic in the Panama Canal, and in 1924, oil surpassed agriculture as California’s largest industry. “California leads universe in petroleum production,” the Times breathlessly boasted in early 1925. Production grew with such vigor and speed, with new fields discovered seemingly all the time, that one Californian complained at the time that the industry was “being choked, and strangled, and gagged, by the very thing most wanted—oil!”
The more than 1 million Angelenos who live within five miles of the Inglewood Oil Field might agree with the description of being choked, strangled and gagged by fossil fuels. Today, the 1,000-acre oil field hosts 436 active producing wells (and many more inactive wells), the largest urban oil extraction complex in the United States. Nationwide, according to a 2017 paper in Environmental Health Perspectives, 17.6 million Americans live within a mile of an active oil or gas well, or a little more than 5% of the population. In Los Angeles County, approximately a third of residents live that close to one of the region’s 3,890 active or 3,475 idle oil wells.