Fairfax Disaster Recalls Heyday of Los Angeles Oil Drilling Boom

The Fairfax District was little more than bean fields at the turn of the century when Arthur Fremont Gilmore set out to dig a well on his 256-acre dairy farm near West 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue. But instead of water, Gilmore struck oil.

His 1901 discovery is credited with prompting an oil exploration boom in the area--later called the Salt Lake oil fields after one of the area’s major oil producers. Gilmore launched one of the first independent oil companies in the West, and later helped build the Fairfax area into one of the city’s best-known commercial areas.

The company Gilmore founded still owns the Farmers Market, the popular tourist attraction just across the street from the site of a fiery explosion Sunday at a discount clothing store. The blast injured 22 people.

Investigators are now trying to determine whether the natural gas deposits from the oil wells that Gilmore and others dug led to Sunday’s disaster.

Despite the unexplained explosion, spokesmen for two major proposed projects in the area--Metro Rail and new development at Farmers Market--said they expected no immediate effect on their plans.

“It will have no impact at all on Metro Rail,” said James E. Crawley, director of engineering transit facilities for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, the agency planning to build the 18-mile subway for the city of Los Angeles. The project’s fate remains unclear because the Reagan Administration has refused to include funding for the project in its fiscal 1986 budget.

The subway’s proposed route would pass through the Salt Lake oil field, as well as through or near five other oil fields that may also have natural gas deposits, Crawley said. But the agency has taken particular care to pinpoint the oil and natural gas deposits along the project’s route in preparation for starting construction of the multibillion dollar project, he said.

Crawley said that gas-detecting probes installed at oil fields along the proposed route have consistently shown the highest gas pressure and gas concentration levels at the Salt Lake field.

“We’ve already identified all possibilities and know of no additional precautions that would be required,” he said. Crawley added that state regulations dictating procedures for construction in gassy areas, such as oil fields, call for adequate ventilation of tunnels and use of equipment with no sparking potential. These are precautions that the agency has incorporated into its plans, he said.

The Fairfax explosion, he said, “reinforces for us (the belief) that the precautions we’ve taken have been warranted and make us doubly aware that this (hazardous) potential exists and can be disastrous.”

A spokesman for CBS Studios and the A. F. Gilmore Co., which have announced plans for a proposed large-scale development of the Farmers Market, said it is too early to determine what impact, if any, the explosion will have on the project, which is still in preliminary stages.

Plans call for a major business and entertainment complex on 52 acres of land, including a hotel, expanded studio space, theaters, restaurants, shops and offices.

Oil is still being drilled in the Fairfax District today, but it is a far cry from the heyday of the Salt Lake field, when 350 oil wells produced thousands of barrels of oil a day.

Today, McFarland Energy Inc. operates 34 wells on two acres near the site of the old Gilmore wells.

The wells, all drilled in the 1960s, generate about 400 barrels of oil a day, said company spokesman George Eckert.

The Salt Lake field was virtually shut down in the 1920s, when drilling became less profitable because the price of oil was very low and the land became more valuable for building.

Twenty years later, however, the demand for oil was back up, as World War II increased the country’s need for petroleum. Although most of the old oil field had been turned into residential and commercial property by 1943, companies began trying to find new oil producing zones from among the abandoned shallow wells.

They had limited success, and after the war, the pumping subsided. Then, in 1956, the Los Angeles City Council approved efforts to revive the field, granting a Beverly Hills company permission to sink wells under 43 acres on West 3rd Street near La Cienega Boulevard.

The Fairfax area drilling field is only one of several oil fields in the county. There were 6,165 oil producing wells in Los Angeles County in 1983, the last year for which figures were available from the California Conservation Department’s division of oil and gas, which regulates the state’s oil industry.

Some Still Producing

Although the biggest oil producing fields are now in the Wilmington, Huntington Beach and Long Beach area, there are still several oil fields in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills.

Oil production was about 62 million barrels in 1983, making Los Angeles the second largest oil-producing county in the state, after Kern County, said Don Lande, a spokesman for the division of oil and gas.

The division, which has been called in as a consultant to the City Fire Department in its investigation of the Fairfax explosion, oversees the drilling, production and abandonment of wells, Lande said. But because many of the wells in the explosion area were abandoned before the era of strict regulations, it is impossible to determine whether they were properly capped.

Lande said that when the agency pinpoints gas escaping from an abandoned oil well, the agency quickly moves in to clean out any oil residue and to seal it by pumping cement into it.

Investigators have not pinpointed where the gas responsible for Sunday’s explosion came from, but McFarland spokesman Eckert said the oil could have seeped from natural underground oil supplies rather than an abandoned well.

In 1942, newspapers recounted an instance of crude oil seeping into a basement of a home in the area. Workmen dug an eight-foot pit near the house and hauled away a barrel or two of oil a day from it. Yet, a study of early drilling in the old Salt Lake field is said to have indicated that no well was ever drilled within half-a-mile of this location.

Times librarian Doug Conner and Times archivists Carolyn Strickler and Craig St. Clair assisted in preparing this article.