In the early days of oil drilling, when tools were basic and technology was lacking, every new oil well sunk into the ground ran the risk of a blowout. A blowout occurs when a high-pressure pocket of crude oil or natural gas is breached causing the oil or gas to shoot up the well and exit with an explosive force and create a “gusher”. Before the invention of blowout preventers, gushers were seen as natural consequences of oil drilling, an icon of oil exploration, and a symbol of new-found wealth.
Despite the romanticism, gushers were extremely dangerous and wasteful. They have killed workmen, destroyed equipment, and coated the landscape with millions of barrels of oil. The destruction to wildlife and to the environment is catastrophic.
The Lakeview Gusher reflected in a pool of oil spill.
One of history’s largest oil spills was the result of a blowout. On 15 March 1910, an oil well in the Midway-Sunset Oil Field in Kern County, California, erupted and flowed for 18 months before it was capped. By then, the gusher had spilled 9 million barrels of oil creating a lake large enough for people to raft on. The Lakeview gusher remains the largest accidental oil spill in history, bigger than the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and only eclipsed by the oil spills during the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi forces deliberately dumped massive amounts of oil into the Persian Gulf to thwart the US Marines from landing on Kuwait's coast. And when that didn’t work, the retreating forces set fire to hundreds of oil wells causing environmental damage on a staggering scale.
The Lakeview Oil Company started drilling on a promising piece of land called Midway-Sunset on New Year’s Day of 1909. Midway-Sunset is one of the largest oil reserves in the United States. The oil field runs diagonally across San Joaquin Valley in Central California for a length of 20 miles and covering more than 30 square miles. Within this area, there are nearly two dozen separate oil reservoirs at varying depths. Despite the riches the land held, the Lakeview drillers hit nothing but gas, and by the time the well reached 1,655 feet, the company had run out of funds. It was only through a partnership with the Union Oil Company, that drilling was resumed.
Oil from the Lakeview Gusher accumulating in a pool.
Rivers of oil from the Lakeview Gusher.
For fourteen months, the company drilled, but fortune still eluded them. The Union Company decided they didn’t want to sink any more time and money into what looked like a dry hole. So the Union assigned “Dry Hole” Charlie Woods, a driller with a notorious track record with “dusters”, to the well. Charlie was not a bad driller; but he was always assigned to drill poor prospects. But this time, Charlie’s luck was going to change.
On the morning of March 15, 1910, the Lakeview Number One had reached a depth of 2,225 feet when oil came roaring out of the ground. It blew the crown block off the top of the derrick and shot into the air to a height of 200 feet. The drillers were excited at the sudden windfall of fortune, but soon it became apparent that the well wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. In the initial days, the flow was estimated to around 125,000 barrels a day. Even after thirty days, the flow was still 90,000 barrels a day. The torrents of oil pouring out of the well created a river of crude oil that threatened to flow downhill towards Buena Vista Lake, eight miles away, whose water was used for irrigation. To stop the crude oil from contaminating the lake, workers built berms with sandbags. They also dug catch basins where the crude oil could accumulate.
A worker poses in front of the runaway oil well.
Two men raft on a pool of oil.
While the drillers were battling the unruly well, the company quickly built a four-inch pipeline to pump oil from the pools to eight large storage tanks erected about 2 miles away. From the tanks, an eight-inch line carried the oil to Port Avila on the California coast.
One month into the disaster, workers began building an enormous wooden box with 14-inch-thick timber hoping it would stifle the flow. But the gushers blew the box to smithereens. Then the ground beneath the well collapsed and everything on it, including all the drilling equipment, was completely swallowed up by the earth.
While gushers were common occurrence in San Joaquin Valley, no one had seen such a force of nature before. It became a national news and tourists came from all around California to see it. Some newspapers reported that the column of oil was so tall that it could be seen from Bakersfield, 35 miles away. A special train ran everyday bringing gawkers to the oil field. On windy days, these onlookers often got drenched in a mist of oil.
Crew construct a wooden box to plug the oil mouth.
The moment the wooden box was blown away.
It took 18 months to bring the gusher under control. Working under difficult conditions, workers built a 20-foot-high circular embankment of sandbags, a hundred-feet in diameter, around the well. The pool inside the dike was finally deep enough to reduce the gusher to a gurgling spout. Eventually, the bottom of the hole caved in on September 10, 1911, and the well died.
During the 544 days it flowed, the well produced 9.4 million barrels of oil. Less than half was this oil was saved. The rest evaporated off or seeped back into the ground. Despite the fact that millions of barrels of oil were lost, the Lakeview gusher created an oversupply that tanked the market causing the price of crude oil to fall by as much as 50 percent.
The Lakeview Gusher in its dying stages.
The Lakeview Gusher is surrounded by an embankment of sandbanks.
After the catastrophe was over, the Union Oil Company tried to tap into the subterranean reservoir that fed the Lakeview gusher, but all attempts to locate the source of the oil failed. Later studies revealed that the actual reservoir—a narrow, oil-filled channel of sandstone, only a few feet wide and about a mile long—was never breached by the drillers, but the underground oil was at such high pressure that it burst through the sandstone and up the well bore.
Traces of this remarkable event can still be found in this region. Just one hundred feet away from the gusher site are stratified layers of congealed crude oil, sand and soil, like solidified lava from an ancient eruption. There are also traces of the sandbag berm used to surround the well. The site is also marked by a historical marker and a bronze plaque.
Oil Strata from the 1910 Lakeview Gusher, taken almost a hundred years after the event. Photo: Antandrus/Wikimedia Commons
The historical marker at the site of the Lakeview Gusher. Photo: Wayne Hsieh/Flickr
References:
# Dan Brekke, The Chevron Oil Spill Is Big, But This One Was Bigger – a Lot Bigger, KQED
# The Lakeview Gusher, San Joaquin Valley Geology
# Looking Back On The Lakeview Gusher Of 1910, NPR
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