Environment
The Kids Trying to Green One of L.A.'s Most Polluted Neighborhoods
For generations, oil refineries brought jobs—and pollution—to the residents of Wilmington. Can a new generation of youthful activists make it a healthier place to grow up?
Among the homes, schools, daycare centers, and churches of Los Angeles’s Wilmington neighborhood, hundreds of pumpjacks extract oil, their dinosaur-like heads bobbing up and down.
A predominately working-class and Latino immigrant community of 58,000, Wilmington sits atop the third-largest oil field in the continental U.S. Five oil refineries release steam from nearly 200-foot stacks, their pipes and tanks clanging and hissing. Many of Wilmington’s residents work in the oil industry or in the nearby port, one of the country’s busiest. The Los Angeles Times called the neighborhood, wedged between freeways and the port about five miles from Long Beach, “an island in a sea of petroleum.”