Mariners and coastal residents along the Pacific coastline have witnessed the annual gray whales migration from the Bering and Chukchi Seas southward towards the warm lagoons of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula for hundreds of years.  It was the regularity of this over 10,000 miles round trip journey that nearly brought gray whales to the brink of extinction. 

On March 12th we celebrate the 77th birthday of Liza Minnelli, a brilliant performer whose work includes Cabaret, Arthur, New York New York and Arrested Development to name a few.  Her parentage is extraordinary as her parents were Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli.  

In the early 1930’s a large deposit of oil was discovered underneath the waters of the Port of Long Beach and the City of Long Beach. This deposit, known as the Wilmington Oil Field, became one of the largest oil fields in the continental United States. Original estimates put the capacity of the oil field at 7 billion barrels. From the mid-1930’s to the mid-1950’s the oil was removed from the field without backfilling the vacant spaces below the surface. Eventually, this caused land above the extraction sites to sink, a geological effect known as subsidence. In 1956, a drilling moratorium was enacted, and the City of Long Beach began working with the oil production companies to study how to negate this effect.