What is the significance of this event?

Question

The Lakeview gusher of San Joaquin Valley of California was America’s most spectacular oil gusher. On March 15 of 1910, it erupted spewing out about 9.4 million barrels of raw, crude oil over the California countryside for about 18 months. Crews rushed to contain the river of crude oil with a system of unprepared sand bag dams and dikes. Amazingly, the gusher never caught fire during its gassy, 18-month stint. Half the oil was captured a processed but the rest flowed into local rivers, agricultural lands, the air and the water table.

What was the significance of this event??

Answer 1

It was a huge waste of oil, for one, and it polluted the groundwater for decades. They should have found a way to contain it after a few months, you would think. Why didn't they? Likely because it would cost the company more money to do that than it could recover from the oil--a serious but typical stance by corporation even today. Scr--the environment.

Answer 2

Fifty or sixty million years ago, when Long Beach was underwater and the central valley was an inland sea, uncountable generations of plankton sifted downward, leaving tiny skeletons to be transmuted into oil. As these ancient deposits were discovered, one by one - the Doheny strike in Los Angeles in 1892, the Lakeview Gusher in the lower San Joaquin in 1910, the phenomenal find at Signal Hill near Long Beach in the early 1920s (in barrels per acre the riches in the world) - fortunes accumulated, both private and corporate, that far surpassed the wealth created by the Mother Lode. The timing, moreover, seems uncanny, because during the same era, while the substrata was releasing its hoard of black gold, California was developing as a world headquarters for the machine that would be a prime consumer: the automobile, with its own by-products, the car culture and the drive-in style of life.

In the early 1980s, seventy years after the Lakeview Gusher darkened the skies above Taft and Maricopa, Kern County alone still ranked 18th among the world's oil-producing regions, delivering more barrels per day than some of the OPEC nations. (And there were more registered vehicles in California than there were people in the seven nearest western states.)

Answer 3

Oil in small amounts on plants and u water it well will behave like fertilizer. Crude oil is not as bad as u think , I have lived and worked in it for many Years. I am 77 years old and do not have any health problems that I could blame on the crude.

Answer 4

Here is a description of this event: http://www.sjgs.com/lakeview.html

Apparently, the oil crews tried desperately to cap the well, but it was flowing with such force that they lacked any technology to do so.

Answer 5

It was a 'spontaneous' eruption not a man made drilling that caused the spewing??? which is an unusual event.