Why California Built Fake Islands to Hide an Oil Field

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This video is sponsored by Delete Me.

[00:00:02]Off the coast of Long Beach, California, four small islands sit in the harbor like something out of a resort brochure.

[00:00:08]A place where palm trees sway along their edges as colorful towers rise above the waterline. And yet beneath those palm trees and behind the towers, the islands are honeycombed with industrial machinery quietly drawing crude oil from one of the most productive geological formations in North American history. The waterfalls aren't decorative. They're acoustic camouflage. The towers aren't a design statement. They're sound dampening structures built to muffle drilling equipment. And the islands themselves don't even naturally exist. They were built. So, how did four oil platforms disguised as tropical islands end up sitting in a California harbor? And what exactly is happening out there today?

[00:00:50]Stay tuned to find out as we uncover the history of Thumbs Islands. I'm your host, Ryan Soash, and you're watching Its History.

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[00:02:07]Activate your plan and reclaim your privacy. Now, to understand why these islands were built, you first need to understand what lies beneath Long Beach itself. And that story starts not in the post-war oil boom, but in 1892 when a prospector named Edward Dohini drove a sharpened eucalyptus log into the ground near what is now downtown Los Angeles and struck oil. Dhini's discovery triggered one of the most chaotic resource rushes in California history.

[00:02:36]Within 2 years, more than 200 wells had been sunk across the Los Angeles basin and the city. Though you need to understand the context as Los Angeles was still a modest agricultural town of roughly just 50,000 people and yet it suddenly stranger skyline overnight. Then in 1920, workers drilling near Signal Hill, a modest rise just inland from the Long Beach coastline, struck an enormous pressurized reservoir deep in the earth.

[00:03:16]The well came in with such force that it was visible for miles, and within months, Signal Hill was covered with derks, so dense that contemporary accounts compared the skyline to a pin cushion. What they had found was the Wilmington oil field, a vast geological formation stretching miles beneath the harbor and extending far out under the ocean floor. At its peak, it would be recognized as one of the largest oil fields ever discovered in the continental US, ultimately producing over 2.5 billion barrels of crude.

[00:03:50]Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the city drew enormous revenue from oil royalties since much of the land above the field was municipally owned. As for Long Beach, well, they used that income aggressively, funding civic infrastructure, parks, and public works at a pace that most California cities couldn't match. But extraction at that scale also carried consequences. And by the 1940s, a deeply alarming one had become impossible to ignore. The land was sinking. By the early 1950s, the worst affected areas near the harbor had dropped more than 25 ft from their original elevation. Naval facilities at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard were compromised. Streets buckled, buildings cracked, and this is where the federal government, which operated installations in that area, threatened legal action.

[00:04:44]The city was forced to spend tens of millions of dollars on emergency regrading, new seaw walls, and infrastructure repairs while also trying to work out how to stabilize the ground, but without abandoning the fields. Now, curiously, the solution that they came upon was called water injection or pumping seawater back into the depleted rock formations to maintain subsurface pressure. The concept worked, arresting most of the subsidance by the late 1950s. But even with the issue resolved, the episode left a lasting political sensitivity around oil extraction in Long Beach. Remember, the ground had literally collapsed beneath the city's ambitions, and the residents remembered this. With that in mind, California state law had long restricted oil drilling and tidal lands, the submerged coastal areas that the state controlled for public benefit. And yet, the Wilmington field didn't respect those boundaries. Its geological structure extended well out beneath the harbor floor and engineers knew that the oil sitting under the state controlled offshore waters was both accessible and enormously valuable. So in 1964 the state decided to authorize offshore drilling in Long Beach under a carefully constructed arrangement. The city of Long Beach would act as operator leasing drilling rights to a consortium of four privatelyowned companies. Texico, Humble Oil, which later became Exxon, Union Oil, and Mobile. And what made this arrangement politically viable was the revenue structure. Proceeds from the operation would flow into a trust fund dedicated specifically for financing construction and operation of California State University. And I want you to reflect on that for a moment. This oil money wasn't simply enriching private shareholders. It was building a university. That framing mattered enormously in the public debate that followed. Even so, there was one prospect that no one accepted. Visible industrial drilling platforms sitting in Long Beach Harbor. It was a genuine political problem. At this point, the California coastline was already becoming a flash point. A flash point that would basically explode in 1969 with the Santa Barbara oil spill galvanizing the American environmental movement into something with real legislative teeth. And city officials understood that four conventional offshore platforms bristling with derks and flare stacks anchored within sight of the beach would generate fierce and sustained opposition. This is where an LA based designer named Joseph Lanesh was brought in to solve the problem. And he approached the commission with a question his clients hadn't quite expected. He asked, "What if the platform didn't look like a platform at all?" He proposed building these drilling structures not as open industrial rigs, but as four artificial islands, each one sculpted, landscaped, and dressed to resemble leisure destinations rather than extraction points. Beyond that, the drilling equipment would be enclosed within structures that mimicked resort architecture as the noise would be engineered away rather than simply tolerated. Construction began in 1965.

[00:08:01]Sand and rock were dredged from the harbor floor and used to build up four discrete land masses, each given a roughly oval footprint and surrounded by rip wrap to hold the edges against wave action. The total area of the four islands came to approximately 39 acres.

[00:08:18]a modest footprint given what it concealed. From there, each island was assigned a name drawn from NASA's early astronaut corps. A choice that neatly captured the optimistic technological mood of the 1960s. Now, the disguised Lanesh design operated on multiple levels simultaneously. Each island was planted with hundreds of palm trees, tropical shrubs, and ornamental grasses arranged to suggest a resort environment rather than an industrial compound. and they really went deep with the details.

[00:08:47]For example, flower beds were maintained along the perimeter walks. So, with that in mind, the effect from a distance was genuinely convincing and deliberately so. The island sat close enough to the shore that the details were visible to the naked eye, but the industrial chaos happening behind it was basically out of sight. Though, the landscaping alone couldn't address the noise. Industrial drilling generates a persistent mechanical roar that travels well across the water. So, Lanesh designed a series of tall, multi-sided towers on each island, clad in panels engineered to absorb and deflect sound. These towers were painted in bold contrasting colors, burnt orange against cream, deep blue alongside gold, giving them the appearance of a modernist sculptural installation rather than acoustic buffers. At night, they were lit from below, reinforcing that resort illusion from the shoreline. Then the waterfalls addressed what the towers couldn't. You see, cascading water generates broadband white noise that effectively masks the lower frequency mechanical sounds carried across the harbor. From a reasonable distance, they appeared to be the type of thing that was purely ornamental, something that a luxury property might install. With everything in place, drilling began in 1966, the year after construction was completed. Within the first few years, Thumbs had brought dozens of wells into production across the four islands, angling the drilling strings outward at steep angles to reach different parts of the formation from the fixed surface locations. This directional drilling technique, still widely used in offshore extraction today, meant that a relatively small island footprint could access a surprisingly wide underground area. And so the project was a massive success. Throughout the late 1960s and into the 70s, the islands produced oil at rates that consistently exceeded initial projections. By the mid1 1970s, production across the Wilmington oil field as a whole was generating enough revenue to fund not just the university endowment, but a range of other municipal programs. And the royalty stream had become a structural feature of Long Beach's annual budget. Though not everyone remained convinced that this was a good idea. As we mentioned before, that 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, which dumped roughly 3 million gallons of crude into the Pacific, sent a wave of regulatory anxiety through California's political class.

[00:11:16]Environmentalists who had been arguing against coastal drilling for years now had a visceral, widely photographed catastrophe to point to. The subsequent passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and California's own coastal protection legislation created a regulatory environment that would have made the Thumbs project essentially impossible to approve just a few years after it was built. Though the islands had a saving grace, they were grandfathered in as they predated that framework that would have essentially blocked them now. Not to mention that they were generating too much public revenue to dismiss easily. Anyhow, by 1990, operational control passed to a company called the Thumbs Long Beach Company, which continued extraction under the existing framework. By then, the island had settled into an odd cultural status, a known secret. Long Beach residents weren't fooled by this.

[00:12:09]They broadly understood that the decorative islands in the harbor were oil platforms. To be fair, the disguises themselves were never intended to survive close inspection. It was really intended to just soften the view from the shoreline and make that industrial presence a little bit more tolerable.

[00:12:25]The islands also evolved physically over the decades. Environmental regulations required upgrades to the containment systems, spill response equipment and wellcasting integrity. Some of the original landscaping was also refreshed and the colored towers weathered by years of salt air were repainted and maintained. Also, there was a small visitor program which operated briefly, allowing members of the public to tour the facility and see the machinery behind the palms, though this access was eventually discontinued for safety and operational reasons.

[00:12:56]Today, the islands remain active. The Wilmington field, after more than half a century of production, still holds recoverable reserves, and modern directional drilling technology allows operators to reach formations that earlier equipment couldn't access from these same surface locations. However, the island's future is genuinely uncertain. California has been steadily tightening its regulations on oil and gas extraction, driven by both environmental concerns and the state's legally binding commitments to carbon neutrality. by 2045. In 2021, the governor ordered state regulators to work towards ending new oil and gas permitting and discussions about the eventual decommissioning of legacy offshore and nearshore operations, including the islands, have become more frequent. What decommissioning for artificial islands actually involves is a question with no settled answer. The structures are real, built from dredged material and reinforced over decades, and they sit within a harbor that has organized itself around their presence.

[00:14:00]Removing them would be an engineering challenge of considerable scale, while leaving them in place post-p production raises questions about what purpose, if any, they could serve. Some observers have proposed converting the sites into maritime research stations or artificial reef structures, whereas others argue that the land could eventually be used to support renewable energy infrastructure. Anyhow, we'll leave it there for today. And if you're wondering why I have sunglasses on, it's because I'm in a hotel room out filming the new episode of What's Inside the Castle.

[00:14:34]And uh yeah, basically my setup doesn't permit me to look at the camera cuz I don't have a teleprompter. So, mystery uncovered. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you subscribe to see what we do next. Otherwise, as always, this is Ryan Socash signing off.