Imagine 36 oil wells in your neighborhood, spewing toxicity and ill will literally yards from the nearest house and bordering the school attended by your children.
For the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Exposition Park, the unimaginable was a reality, a 60-year carcinogenic nightmare characterized by rotten-eggs odor, headaches, nosebleeds and miscarriages, until a few local angels took up the David versus Goliath struggle against a multibillion-dollar corporation, and after more than a generation-and-a-half have come out the winners.
Since moving to the neighborhood in 1986 to attend the University of Southern California and staying put ever since, David Parks devoted himself to creating a safe, nurturing and vibrant community. As president and founder of Redeemer Community Partnership—a faith-based organization—he has guided the nonprofit in efforts to enhance public health and safety. These efforts have included planting trees, painting murals, installing LED street lighting, closing a crime-sparking liquor store—later replaced by a community market—and winning the closure and clean-up of the toxic, neighborhood oil drilling site.
“You think about Jesus’ words that if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move,’ and it will move,” Parks said.
That “mountain”—which was the Sentinel Peak Resources oil corporation—moved last month, and, thanks to a $10 million state grant to purchase the property, thus heading off outside developers who would have torn down homes and driven out longtime residents, the land stayed in the community.
For Parks—who also belongs, with his wife and three children, to the Redeemer Community Church—the next steps, now that the drillers have exited, is the site’s clean-up and ultimate redevelopment into a new park and planned community center.
Those next steps, too, require funding, and for that, applications must be made to California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control for clean-up, and to the state for funds for the new park.
Parks has also partnered with the Neighborhood Housing Services of L.A. County (NHS) to fulfill a dream of erecting affordable housing on the parts of the property where there were no wells.
For long-term Exposition Park residents such as Corissa Pacillas, who fought for years for more stringent protections from the toxic site, the purchase of the land by the community and the plans going forward are all particularly sweet.
“It was encouraging to see that when people really intentionally organize and speak up, and are persistent ... passionate and have good leadership ... that change can happen,” said Pacillas, who spent years documenting the facility’s activities from the porch of her second-floor apartment. “I’m just so excited that the property ... is going to go toward really benefiting the community.”
Adds Parks, “God is giving us beauty for ashes.”
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