Oil Drilling a Life and Death Issue for Some : Inglewood: Residents near cemetery say wells would be disruptive and potentially dangerous. They are trying to overturn the City Council’s OK for the project.

Roberta and Albert Reddick fear they may never rest in peace--in life or in death.

For nearly three decades, the Reddicks have lived on the eastern edge of the Inglewood Park Cemetery, a tranquil 340-acre tract along the border of Inglewood and Los Angeles. The couple also own plots in the cemetery, where they plan to be buried.

Now, however, they worry that both their home and future grave sites will suffer if a decision by the Inglewood City Council to allow oil drilling in the cemetery is allowed to stand.

“Where they are planning to drill is surrounded on three sides by residential (streets),” said Roberta Reddick, one of about two dozen homeowners who demonstrated in front of the cemetery gates Tuesday morning to call attention to the issue.

Says Albert Reddick: “I don’t want the possibility of an explosion across the street from me.”

The Reddicks and other nearby homeowners failed last fall to prevent the City Council from giving Noble Oil Co. of Pasadena a permit to dig up to five exploratory wells, even though the city’s Planning Commission had earlier refused to grant the permit.

The financially strapped city stands to gain from the project. It will get 22 cents for every barrel of oil pumped, which could mean from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year in revenues, according to a Planning Department report.

The residents, however, have refused to give up the fight. They have enlisted the support of two prominent elected officials--Assemblyman Curtis Tucker (D-Inglewood) and Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

They have also joined forces with the Coalition Against The Pipeline, a Los Angeles-based community group that has fought the construction of crude oil pipelines leading to Los Angeles.

Last month, the coalition filed a motion in Los Angeles Superior Court asking that the drilling, which has not yet begun, be prohibited. The coalition wants the court to invalidate the city permit on grounds that the city failed to require an environmental impact report for the project. The motion is scheduled to be heard Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. in Department 86 in downtown Los Angeles.

Drilling opponents argue that everything from noise to earthquake danger should be explored before drilling is allowed.

When it granted the exploratory permit last fall, the City Council said that if oil is discovered and production wells and a pipeline have to be built, the city will require Noble Oil, which has since been joined in the venture by another firm called Vortex, to submit an impact report.

The coalition’s lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, suggests in a brief filed with the court that any drilling along the Inglewood-Newport earthquake fault might cause the fault to shift, triggering a disaster akin to the collapse in 1963 of the Baldwin Hills dam. That accident, which some experts blamed on subsidence and fault movement, killed five people and destroyed dozens of homes.

However, city and cemetery representatives, as well as the oil company lawyer, say there is no danger, that oil is often found along faults and that the exploratory drilling will hardly be noticed.

The lawyer for Noble and Vortex, John Quirk of Glendale, dismisses the criticism. He says the opponents are reacting as if a refinery were being built. A few wells, he says, are not going to upset the ambience of the area.

Nor, Quirk says, would the drilling increase the risk of an earthquake or contribute to a disaster should a quake occur. “I defy anyone to point to a prior indecent where an earthquake has caused any kind of an oil tragedy,” he said.

Homeowners disagree.

“It’s more than just the noise,” says one, Andrew Wakefield, who last August paid $230,000 for a house next door to the cemetery. “There is the possibility of them upsetting one of the fault lines that does definitely run down through that area.”

Despite such opposition, there are some neighbors, hoping for a gusher, who have leased their mineral rights to the oil company. They made it clear to the council last fall that they want the drilling to commence.