As fracking moves from remote mountainsides to the suburbs and cities of America, more and more Americans are living next door to oil drills and diesel trucks. But in Los Angeles, oil wells have been a ubiquitous part of the city’s landscape for nearly a century. Formerly the center of global oil production, today one in three Angelenos live within a mile of a drilling site. But what once was a landscape perforated with wells is now home to an industry landscaped into anonymity: One rig is camouflaged as an innocuous office building about a mile off the city’s famous Museum Row, another hides behind a massive wall at a shopping mall in West Hollywood.

That’s why the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak came as a shock to many residents. The leak—decried as the worst in California history—at a storage facility in Los Angeles County has spewed toxic chemicals into Southern California’s air for over 100 days, emitting 80,000 metric tons of methane and forcing thousands of residents in the affluent neighborhood of Porter Ranch to evacuate. It took over a month of pressure from politicians, media, and residents for the responsible utility company, Southern California Gas Company, to begin working to staunch the leak, and another month for Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency.

As dire as the Porter Ranch emergency is, it’s hardly an isolated environmental disaster. Like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Porter Ranch is the story of a government unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from basic infrastructure malfunctions, of regulatory bodies so fractured that no responsible party emerges. As these simultaneous disasters have shown, it’s a story that could happen all across America.

Los Angeles is the largest urban oil field in the country, home to over 5,000 oil and gas wells, both active and storage, that account for over 100,000 jobs and $8 million annually of the county’s economy. Most of these wells are, unlike Porter Ranch, located in poor or minority communities who live with the health and environmental consequences on a daily basis, often times unknowingly. For these communities, Porter Ranch is a high-profile example of the problems they’ve struggled with for years in a city and county where ineffectual guidelines and a bureaucratic quagmire have derailed attempts at regulation.

In Los Angeles, 70 percent of wells are located within 1,500 feet of “sensitive” land uses like schools and hospitals. That proximity makes problems with L.A.’s vague regulation and lax implementation nearly inevitable. Current laws allow oil companies to convert wells built for storage into active sites, and vice versa, without considering the complex geological requirements needed for each. The leaking Aliso Canyon well, for instance, was originally built for oil production in the 1950s, but converted to storage in the ’70s without an update.