'It could be catastrophic': Woman says natural supplement contained hidden painkiller drug
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously on Friday to ban drilling of new oil and gas wells and phase out existing ones over the next 20 years.
The vote comes after more than a decade of complaints from city residents that pollution drifting from wells was affecting their health.
"Hundreds of thousands of Angelenos have had to raise their kids, go to work, prepare their meals (and) go to neighborhood parks in the shadows of oil and gas production," said Los Angeles City Council president Paul Krekorian, one of the councilmembers who introduced this measure. "The time has come .... when we end oil and gas production in the city of Los Angeles."
Two engineers with Yorke Engineering, a California-based company that does air quality and environmental compliance review, spoke in opposition to the ordinance. They said a ban and phase out will have a negative effect because oil and gas operators will abandon wells. They said this is being underestimated by the city. If they walk away, that will mean increased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, they said.
But Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said these claims are "not credible," citing a review by Impact Sciences, another California-based firm that performed an environmental analysis of the ordinance for the city.
Los Angeles was once a booming oil town. Many of its oilfields are now played out but it still has several productive ones.
According to the city controller's office there were 780 active and 287 idle wells within city boundaries in 2018. An idle well is one that is not operating, but neither has it been permanently sealed, so it could be brought back into production.
Near Long Beach there's the very prolific Wilmington oil field, which yielded more than 10 million barrels of crude oil in 2019, according to state records.
Hundreds of the still active wells in that field are concentrated in Wilmington, a predominantly Latino part of Los Angeles. Several clusters of the active wells, located near homes, ballfields and childcare facilities, are operated by companies like E&B Natural Resources Management Corporation and Warren Resources.
Warren Resources CEO and president James A. Watt said in a statement to The Associated Press that the company has invested US$400 million in its oil and gas operations. "We intend to use all available legal resources to protect our major investment from this unlawful taking," he said.
Many more wells lie just outside Los Angeles city limits, in Carson, Inglewood and Long Beach.
Some studies look at the possible effects of pollution emanating from the city's existing oil and gas wells.
Researchers from the University of Southern California in a study in 2021 found that people living near wells in two Los Angeles neighbourhoods -- University Park and Jefferson Park -- reported significantly higher rates of wheezing, eye and nose irritation, sore throat and dizziness than neighbours living farther away. Both of those communities are predominantly non-white with large Black and Latino communities, according to the U.S. Census.
The push to ban drilling in the City of Los Angeles is part of a region-wide effort to shut down oil and gas extraction throughout the county of Los Angeles, with similar measures covering Culver City and unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County passed in 2021.
"In Los Angeles, we sit on the largest urban oil deposit in the world," said councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson ahead of the vote. "So if Los Angeles can do it, cities around the world can do it."
------
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
A Manitoba woman thought she found a miracle natural supplement, but said a hidden ingredient wreaked havoc on her health.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
The World Health Organization is likely to issue a wider warning about contaminated Johnson and Johnson-made children's cough syrup found in Nigeria last week, it said in an email.
Police have released video footage of a dramatic takedown of a group of teens wanted in connection with an attempted carjacking in Markham earlier this month.
Canada called for 'all parties' to de-escalate rising tensions in the Mideast following an apparent Israeli drone attack against Iran overnight.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
American millionaire Jonathan Lehrer, one of two men charged in the killings of a Canadian couple in Dominica, has been denied bail.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.