Baldwin Hills resident concerned fracking may be causing earthquakes

BALDWIN HILLS, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- After another earthquake rattled parts of the Southland on Sunday, some residents who live near Baldwin Hills are starting to question the cause of the shaking.

The magnitude-3.8 earthquake struck early Sunday morning and was the third in a month.

Gary Gless lives in Baldwin Hills and is concerned the earthquakes are somehow related to all the oil drilling that is going on in the area. He showed Eyewitness News a map of underground drilling that he said crisscrosses the community.

"When you're putting that much pressure into the ground, no matter where it is in the fault line, it has to be linked somehow into the fault formation," he said.

He said the big concern is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, where water and chemicals are sent into the ground to break up rock and release oil. But an oil industry spokesman said there is no fracturing.

"There haven't been any hydraulic fracturing jobs occurring near the Inglewood oil field or near Baldwin Hills anytime in the recent past. So definitively there's no link between hydraulic fracturing or any of the seismic events that happened over the weekend," he said.

Seismologists at CalTech said they do not know what type of work the oil companies are doing in Baldwing Hills, but add that the string of earthquakes occurred deep underground, which is typical for Southern California earthquakes.

The first quake was a little more than seven miles deep and the two quakes that happened in April were about nine miles deep, which are deeper than the oil reservoirs, according to Dr. Jennifer Andrews.

Still, Gless and other residents want officials to investigate.

"Actually I'd like to see our elected officials actually take note and see what's going on," he said.