Hundreds of deserted oil and gas wells in Southern California could soon get plugged
One apparently is hiding under the driveway of a million-dollar home in Placentia. Another lurks beneath a parking lot at Ontario International Airport. And another is under a commercial building in Culver City — much to the surprise of the upscale window company doing business there. Thanks to its once expansive, 150-year-old oil and gas industry, Southern California has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of so-called “orphan wells,” or wells that companies abandoned without first plugging them up for safety. The state has documented nearly 2,000 orphan wells in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties alone, while estimating that thousands more could be paved over, unrecorded, and waiting to be rediscovered.
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