As a local pilot, we actually use a lot of these as visual reference points to tell ATC where we are. They tend to be fairly large structures that stand out well from the air, but a lot of the other local pilots I've chatted with don't realise why.
LOL! Those floating oil platforms off the coast of Long Beach are literally called The Oil Islands. We all know they are pumping oil, but the islands do look rather nice from a distance. However, if you drive your boat up close to one if the islands, you'll see some gross foam in the water.
I always knew those windowless buildings in the middle of the city were sus.. people don't really think of LA as an oil hub - but growing up I had a family friend whose wealth came from their grandpa striking oil by surprise in his backyard.. they never had to work a day in their lives
I live a few blocks away from one of those oil drilling sites. Yes, it's ugly, but the good news for home owners is that the oil company who owns it must transport their oil from the well to a refinery using pipes. When those pipes go through your property, they have to pay your "rent" for the privilege of using your land. The amount they pay is proportionate to oil prices: high prices mean they may be paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Pretty nice side income for doing nothing.
In Ohio, they just buy your mineral/subsurface rights. But they don't buy them from you, because you never had them; somebody else sold those rights long ago, so they didn't come with the house when you bought it.
@@User31129 I think that's a fair comparison if you tweak it slightly. You've already got wind turbines up when you bought the property and just inherit then rights to the profits from them. It's a sweet deal unless you want to, say, put in a pool which would require digging up the yard, but you can't because the oil pipe is in the way and it can't be moved.
One of my favourite hidden pieces is for cellphone towers. They’re often disguised as palm trees in places like Hawaï, or pine trees in other places. Similarly they often get put alongside a church and disguise the tower as a giant cross.
the pine trees are hilarious cause theyre so bad. theyll put one up in an area with all oak trees and like no pine trees, and its also like 4x taller then all the surrounding trees. theyre just comically awful
@@Saladdressing67 Ikr I live a very forested area and the freaking pine tower is still 2-3times larger than the surrounding trees and has like 10 "branches" its so funny.
3:22 I'm a supervisor for the New York Subway. I've been to this building before. It is literally a shell of a building over the ventilation. It blew my mind when I first started working here and I was shown it. BTW, we in NYC pronounce it Joral-Lemon St, not Jor-a-lemon lol
In Switzerland, especially along the borders, there are fake barns/chalets/houses that are actually armoury stores, artillery guns or other military supplies. They’re disguised to blend into and some actually have slightly transparent windows and you can see into them Edit: you can tell which ones have artillery guns, they have a strong concrete lower floor, and the windows are the holes they stick the barrel through
I live in Huntington Beach, a bit south of LA, and I still see pumps everywhere on every day drives, even in the downtown area. The name for all the sports teams at my local Highschool was the “Oilers”
in civ 6, if you place a district on a hex that later is revealed to have a late game resource, it automatically gathers that resource when its discovered with the district remaining in place. doesnt matter if its the city center district, cultural wonder or even a housing district, it will still automatically work the resource when it pops up under it
Iraq IRL It sucks how badly Iraq got fucked over by Colonialism, Poverty, the Saddam Regime, and War. Basra could scarcely be more perfectly positioned to among the world's great metropolises.
Basra was one of the world’s greatest metropolises, I believe sometime right after WW2 Ireland was actually poorer than Iraq. Colonialism, foreign, and internal agendas messed that all up and on top of that Iraqis will have to deal with climate change, dwindling water resources, dying rivers, and desertification. There few countries my heart hurts harder for than Iraq.
My personal favorite is cell phone towers disguised as trees. They're always about 3-4 times taller than all the trees around them, and stand out as awkwardly as an undercover narcotics cop at a rave, but there's something hilariously charming about these failed attempts to blend in. Edit: Wow, this is undoubtedly my most liked and replied to comment I've ever made on TH-cam. And it's not even specifically about the video's subject. I guess people just really have thoughts on monopoles. Thanks everyone!
This is some good content my dude. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense that certain things need to exist but people don’t want to look at so they just hide them. Now down a rabbit hole trying to see if there’s anything in my country like this
I grew up two blocks from that "beige rectangle" and only recently discovered that my parents still receive quarterly checks because that kept the mineral rights when they sold my childhood home. So weird.
@@klayman2 yeah us too here in west TX. we have 8,000 acres with 37 pumps. Most of it is sold to California refiners because it's closer to Long Beach than Houston. Ours was $1,500 each well per year...so about $55,000 a year lease and the federal tax rate was high, but Biden administration made us cap the drilling when he got in office and put everyone out of work, so now nothing for us and the government gets no tax money, and now Long Beach has to get oil from overseas at a much higher rate and the oil is dirty oil and takes a lot more money to refine as opposed to Texas sweet crude which is cheap to refine, so the refineries have to pollute more to refine the dirty a$$ foreign oil so the price goes way up for gasoline and plastics because they don't use Texas crude anymore.
Thank you for finally putting my mind to rest. I always knew that the "Synagogue" near Pico x Robertson was an oil derrick but I never knew the massive building near Pico x Fairfax was one too, I always just assumed it was the world's most depressing-looking office building.
Alright, now that episode of Saved By The Bell where a company was going to put an oil rig in the middle of their football field makes sense. I thought it was a ludicrous premise.
Woops!! The judge granted a summary judgement against the plaintiff and the school district was reimbursed $450,000 for legal fees. One of the lawyers who helped in the Erin Brockovich PG&E case was Tom Girardi who's character was Kurt Potter still owes money to the estate of Ed Masry
London doesn't only have vents for the tube, they have entire plots bought to have open tunnels on, where the smoke could exit the system (from back when they had steam locomotives pulling the carriages in a pretty enclosed tunnel). And for it not to be just a hole between 2 Victorian houses with TRAINS going up and down, they put up Victorian looking hose facades made of essentially cardboard (Same idea as seen in Coyote and the Roadrunner)
Most cities also put transformers, telephone switches and other public utilities in buildings that look exactly like all the other neighboring buildings. For years I thought a house near mine was really just a house, but one day as I was walking my dog I caught a peek inside as a Pepco utility worker pulled his truck into the garage and I could see there was no wall between the garage and the house, and all kinds of transformers and big cables. They even built light boxes around the front windows which had curtains and everything, so they could have lights go on an off to make it look lived in.
He didn't mention the London building because it's probably the most over mentioned one of the lot. In fact it is mentioned so much that it kind of defeats the whole purpose of covering it up in the first place. The real special "fake facades" are the ones we still don't know about.
The Long Beach oil platforms were designed to look like hotels and were actually designed to blend into the Long Beach skyline. And they kinda do a good job because practically every visitor asks how they can go visit them (spoiler: you can’t)
I remember being a teen and Signal Hill when oil derricks became housing. At nights we'd occasionally wander around the construction site and climb on the equipment
my “neighbor” is one of those electricity houses in Toronto. i love it honestly, only have one neighbor to worry about, and they’re a really cool family. no noise pollution either. couple trucks once in a while but thats it
We have facade buildings in London for when the subway trains used to use steam and needed somewhere to vent. Somewhat ironically most of them are in the more expensive neighbourhoods, where residents didn't want a subway tunnel passing through when they were originally built.
fun fact: at exactly 2:00 at that curvy intersection near the middle-lower left hand corner, the bottom right of that intersection with the small parking lot is the shwarma place where they filmed the 2012 Avengers post-credits scene of them eating shwarma.
I worked in the communication tower business for 12 years and yeah, they're not very attractive. One tower owner decided that they'd have their 180' tower painted a shade of blue that matched the sky. It stood out worse than the standard galvanized finish.
There are some in my area that are disguised as older coniferous trees and they pass pretty well. Wouldn't even cross your mind until you scrutinize them more, since it isn't exactly unheard of for there to be tall elder trees at the tops of hills. I've heard that success can be a bit more mixed for other sorts, though.
In New England many cell phone ground stations are inside the steeples of old churches on hills. If the church didn’t have an adequate steeple for the purpose or had no steeple, the ground station operator paid to construct what’s needed. The ground station operators pay handsome rent to the churches whose steeples they utilize.
No, you are actually right. Los Angeles is all of the infrastructure, mainly the highways, but also all of the other stuff like this. The buildings just happen to be there. The capital of Los Angeles is Interstate 405, because California sucks, Los Angeles sucks harder, and Interstate 405 is the hardest sucking thing in existence.
@@TheWeekndGaming Are you being serious or joking? Have you actually visited Pico-Union, Lincoln Heights, Paicoma, El Sereno, Sylmar, West Adams, Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Figueroa Corridor, Ethiopian Corridor, El Salvador Corridor, Filipinotown, Koreatown, Tehrangeles, Virgil Village, Cypress Park, Heritage Square, Lakeview Terrance-Hansen Dam, Green Meadows, Vermont Knolls, Vermont Square, Central-Alameda, Harbor Gateway, Wilmington, San Pedro, Boyle Heights, etc; of Los Angeles, CA?
@@SuperEgo1989 The effect is greater if you can successfully use the phrase in a conversation that someone else starts. That's really tricky to get right, but has a huge payoff if the joke lands.
It's very common for companies to hide or disguise things that most would consider unsightly. Cell phone towers in urban settings are one of the most common. I've seen some that look like flag poles, palm trees, fir trees and some antennas are just cleverly hidden by making them look like part of the façade of a building. These are referred to as "stealth" towers and many people walk right past them and don't even realize they are there.
I actually once was watching a program that had a collection of interurban trains from California when they existed and when the program was showing videos of the former Pacific Electric railroad, the narrator at one point mentioned that one of the stations was near an oil well somewhere off screen. I didn't give it much of a second thought and assumed that the oil there eventually dried up. When I watched this video that oil wells are still all over LA but in disguise, I was honestly so surprised since I've been to LA a few times before and didn't notice anything resembling something oil related, or if I did see anything oil related, I don't remember it
The fact that he keeps calling the Wells Derricks is killing me. As a derrickhand, I can confirm that the Derrick is the tower they end up removing because it's just there to drill down.
I wish you would have included the El Segundo Offshore Terminal. To maintain the attractiveness on the shore from Santa Monica to Manhattan Beach, chevrons oil refinery in El Segundo has underground pipes that go a few miles out under the beaches and into the ocean. Oil tanker ships like the one I used to work on drop anchor at the end of these pipes and the refinery specifically employs people whose job it is to get on a launch boat and connect the ship while it is anchored in the ocean. The oil keeps flowing and the beachgoers have no idea.
@@GAURAV25855ify yep add in Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, for a bit New York, some in Idaho, Colorado, some in Montana, pretty a bunch of the East Coast. (There is actually the potential for a north sea sized field off the east coast but people don't want rigs in thier backyard).
This happens more than people realize. I was a truck driver for oil rig supplies and the company I worked for one time drilled a well right in front of a grocery store, in the parking lot. It was insane
As someone who has lived near an abandoned looking house in Toronto for most of my life. I’ve never been able to find an answer to my that house was abandoned but not for sale. Constantly overgrown lawn people visiting maybe every few months. That house being a secret substation makes way more sense
This video triggered memories of working in an auto parts store in the vary late 80s to early 90s where I saw the word "synthetic" used on the labels of "motor oil", that as that auto parts store chain was going out of business thus the "oil shelves" went empty! However, obviously, "synthetic" oil can be produced in a laboratory rather than drilled up out of the Earth - for much less money!
Vancouver does this too, but with those BC Hydro boxes/transformers typ eshit that just sit on the sidewalks. Their painted with some graphic to look like some grass or some random art shit. Its not supposed to actually blend in, but its supposed to be barely noticeable.
I had a friend from Texas who was living in the LA area for years, who had no idea about this, even though at the entrance to his job was a very poorly hidden one across the street.
I’ve always wondered what those towers in The Long Beach islands were. They seemed like bird preservations or something. They looked ominous or hiding something.
One way that cell phone towers are "hidden" in the Middle East is by making them look like palm trees. Of course it's easy to tell that they aren't palm trees because of how much taller and straight they are.
In New England many cell phone ground stations are inside the steeples of old churches on hills. If the church didn’t have an adequate steeple for the purpose or had no steeple, the ground station operator paid to construct what’s needed. The ground station operators pay handsome rent to the churches whose steeples they utilize.
They've also started disguising cellphone towers as plastic trees. I hate it. There is an authentic beauty to industrial architecture, an unapologetic paean to function and utilitarianism. I don't need my infrastructure to look like ticky-tacky suburban kitsch.
In the 1940s the Victorian State Electricity Commission built an entire town to house the families of workers employed in the open cut brown coal mines. By the late 1960s the Commission realised the town was built on top of a massive coal deposit. The town was levelled, overburden removed and the coal dug up. The town was called Yallorn, in south eastern Victoria, Australia. The mine still operates 24/7.
I live in Toronto and used to have one of those hidden substations next to my condo. It was demolished a few years back and I moved from the area shortly thereafter, but I've always wondered what they did with the space. The plot of land was between two residential buildings and too small to do a lot with. I assume it has something to do with the Eglinton Crosstown LRT but I'm not sure.
In the east end, it was also really common to not know where your Bell CO or Rogers distribution building was, because they're often hidden in storefronts or doctor's office buildings, like the Bell one near where I used to live at Danforth and Main.
Whoever writes the scrips for HAI is a legitimate comedic genius. These videos are always just as humorous as they are interesting.. Keep up the stellar work, gentlemen.
I'm from Houston, TX (yeah! our cRaP) is right there out in the open. When I was a little boy going on vaycay to Southern California as we landed in the 70's I was surprised to see so many pumping jacks or nodding donkeys as they are called. We are "proud" of ours. Even so far as to decorate them. Now you don't see a lot of derricks, there are a butt load of flare stacks!
I'm in Toronto & my wife & I lived across the street from a Uranium Processing Plant for a *year* & we only learned that it existed from a newspaper article about 3 years after we moved away from that address.
My grandpa put up a lot of oil derricks along the 57 just north of Yorba Linda back in the 60’s. They’re not covered up and most are still in operation today.
2:56 wow an oil derrick really gives me hope for the future, especially when global warming and pollution will just disappear when you can’t see it directly
This is actually extremely smart strategically too. Imagine an enemy wanting to destroy oil rigs, they either need to find them to target them, or bomb the whole city of civilians...
@@RobinMueller1 Wobei ich ja fast alles über die U-Bahn weiß, aber das mit dem Brunnen war tatsächlich etwas neues für mich, ich wusste zwar, dass da die U-Bahn fährt, aber dass der Brunnen was mit der U-Bahn zu tun hat war mir nicht klar.
That's a decent effort, but I have to admit that oil platforms look way too cool to cover up. Land derrecks, not so much though. And living in Shipyard Town, Oil Sate, I get to see them in't harbour quite often. Though the drilling is done out of view in the middle of the ocean, I only see them when they're not operating.
I walked past the fountain in Nuremberg today, as so many times before, and never knew that it‘s purpose was ventilation for the subway. Again what learned, as Lothar would say.
I knew a dude who discovered what he thought was a oil spill in his yard was actually an oil well. He sold it and retired and the company who developed it put the equipment in a mock up of his house and they pay the neighbors to put up with the noise.
Huh, so that episode of saved by the bell where they find oil at Bayside wasnt as unrealistic as I always thought it was…….. well the finding oil part, the fact they didn’t end up drilling is still unbelievable
I live in the country side of CT. We have a "dairy farm" that is actually a chemical plant/warehouse. Its hard to get info on it actually. Other than there not being cows out front, you would never know though. They restrict their trucks to night as well.
It will be cool of new open-world games would use these as collectibles. Instead of looking for some obscure random graffiti in the middle of a dark alley, you would observe every structure you could see and figure out if any of them feels "off". It's a great way to encourage exploration without making it seem like a chore.
@@qactustick Well for one, they're basically huge, but just hidden in plain sight. You don't really need to go to every nook and cranny like most standard collectibles do. You can simply look for them by just looking at the skyline whenever you're driving off to somewhere else.
There is a steam pump facility in downtown Denver that looks like a windowless office building, near the convention center. Non discript buildings hiding what's inside are EVERYWHERE
Living in Nuremberg, Germany for a decade now, passing by the sculpture probably 1000 times, I had to watch a TH-cam Video to find out that this is a ventilation shaft…
I live a couple blocks away from one of the many oil derricks in LA, but it's not cleverly hidden at all, and it's actually a huge issue for the community from a health perspective.
@@sandersson2813 A study in Colorado found that people living within 500 feet of an oil and gas facility have a lifetime excess cancer risk eight times higher than the upper limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Denver Post article from 2018
@@Am-Not-Jarvis Theres similar studies for everything, for example peolle who live near to pylons, granite deposits, coal deposits, rubbish dumps etc. Who cares and who the fuck live just 500ft from an oil facility? 😂 😂 😂 😂 You might as well say studies show higher rates of ill health among those who live at Chernobyl
@@sandersson2813 You are very dishonest, you asked "why is it a health risk" and he answered. Who lives 500ft from an oil facility? Well apparently a lot of people.
Big mood. (Though my father also listens to this channel and thus we often team up to just go on about a thing we learned about that's super cool and possibly annoying everyone else in the process who is not also like us.)
I know!!! It a citing a school newspaper, so it was a bunch of high-schoolers making that joke. It was their friends who were getting cancer, so I guess they're entitled to their humor.
This video just reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of the TV show Emergency! Season 4, Episode 2 "I'll Fix It". In that episode, they rescue someone trapped in a house that is flooding with oil because it was built on an "inactive" oil well that started erupting.
Imagine breaking into a house, planning to steal some valuables, but instead finding an electrical substation.
steal the electrical substation
You seem to have mistaken Toronto for an American city ;)
With the price of copper today, gutting transformers is way better business than breaking into pretty much anything else.
Texas has those.
@@chrisbourque8196 alot of houses get broken into in toronto too lol
As a local pilot, we actually use a lot of these as visual reference points to tell ATC where we are. They tend to be fairly large structures that stand out well from the air, but a lot of the other local pilots I've chatted with don't realise why.
Not true I'm a pilot of 45 years recently retired and that is a load of mumbo jumbo
LOL! Those floating oil platforms off the coast of Long Beach are literally called The Oil Islands. We all know they are pumping oil, but the islands do look rather nice from a distance. However, if you drive your boat up close to one if the islands, you'll see some gross foam in the water.
Why didn't you guys call it The Oilands
@@Amlaeuxrai that's how Scottish people say islands anyway
Yeah from Long Beach you can see them right from the beach
@@noisycarlos lmao
Arent they litterally ruining the beach and water then?
I always knew those windowless buildings in the middle of the city were sus..
people don't really think of LA as an oil hub - but growing up I had a family friend whose wealth came from their grandpa striking oil by surprise in his backyard.. they never had to work a day in their lives
'Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea...'
I live a few blocks away from one of those oil drilling sites. Yes, it's ugly, but the good news for home owners is that the oil company who owns it must transport their oil from the well to a refinery using pipes. When those pipes go through your property, they have to pay your "rent" for the privilege of using your land. The amount they pay is proportionate to oil prices: high prices mean they may be paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Pretty nice side income for doing nothing.
In Ohio, they just buy your mineral/subsurface rights. But they don't buy them from you, because you never had them; somebody else sold those rights long ago, so they didn't come with the house when you bought it.
I suppose that would offset the potential impact oil rigs have on home values
passive income 😈
Kind of like being a farmer and letting the power company put wind turbines on your land. I'd do that if I was a farmer.
@@User31129 I think that's a fair comparison if you tweak it slightly. You've already got wind turbines up when you bought the property and just inherit then rights to the profits from them. It's a sweet deal unless you want to, say, put in a pool which would require digging up the yard, but you can't because the oil pipe is in the way and it can't be moved.
One of my favourite hidden pieces is for cellphone towers. They’re often disguised as palm trees in places like Hawaï, or pine trees in other places. Similarly they often get put alongside a church and disguise the tower as a giant cross.
the pine trees are hilarious cause theyre so bad. theyll put one up in an area with all oak trees and like no pine trees, and its also like 4x taller then all the surrounding trees. theyre just comically awful
@@Saladdressing67 Ikr I live a very forested area and the freaking pine tower is still 2-3times larger than the surrounding trees and has like 10 "branches" its so funny.
@@Saladdressing67
I love in Hawaii, and those disguised cell towers are a joke
Its like they aren't even trying
So interesting side note, not all of the oil rigs are hidden, especially in east L.A. it's really not weird to see totally normal looking oil rigs
Now I've got the Cheech Marin song playing in my head. :-P
Do u know what happens if they have a blowout in the building?
Yeah, because wealthy people don't live in East LA ese!
yep. lots of oil rigs east and northeast of mirror park
@@andie_pants low ride ER
3:22 I'm a supervisor for the New York Subway. I've been to this building before. It is literally a shell of a building over the ventilation. It blew my mind when I first started working here and I was shown it. BTW, we in NYC pronounce it Joral-Lemon St, not Jor-a-lemon lol
In Switzerland, especially along the borders, there are fake barns/chalets/houses that are actually armoury stores, artillery guns or other military supplies. They’re disguised to blend into and some actually have slightly transparent windows and you can see into them
Edit: you can tell which ones have artillery guns, they have a strong concrete lower floor, and the windows are the holes they stick the barrel through
Round these parts brother you just go to any old Walmart and they'll have the same supplies
Well, they are not designed that way to look pretty, but to confuse any particularly confused french army that accidentality invades.
That's cool. Other countries should take note
Yes, for example "The Tim Traveller" made a video on a fort disguised as a house on the road between Geneva and Nyon.
they also have airbases disguised as motorway tunnels and so many bunkers disguised as other things that's difficult to count them all.
I live in Huntington Beach, a bit south of LA, and I still see pumps everywhere on every day drives, even in the downtown area. The name for all the sports teams at my local Highschool was the “Oilers”
This is like when you build a city in Civ V but then after oil is revealed on the map it turns out that your city is on top of it
"I know we got like 12 pop here, but in 10 turns, all of you will have become settlers, or else."
in civ 6, if you place a district on a hex that later is revealed to have a late game resource, it automatically gathers that resource when its discovered with the district remaining in place. doesnt matter if its the city center district, cultural wonder or even a housing district, it will still automatically work the resource when it pops up under it
@@Deilwynna well, like this video then.
Iraq IRL
It sucks how badly Iraq got fucked over by Colonialism, Poverty, the Saddam Regime, and War. Basra could scarcely be more perfectly positioned to among the world's great metropolises.
Basra was one of the world’s greatest metropolises, I believe sometime right after WW2 Ireland was actually poorer than Iraq. Colonialism, foreign, and internal agendas messed that all up and on top of that Iraqis will have to deal with climate change, dwindling water resources, dying rivers, and desertification. There few countries my heart hurts harder for than Iraq.
i lost it at the “tower of hope you dont get cancer”🤣🤣
My personal favorite is cell phone towers disguised as trees. They're always about 3-4 times taller than all the trees around them, and stand out as awkwardly as an undercover narcotics cop at a rave, but there's something hilariously charming about these failed attempts to blend in.
Edit: Wow, this is undoubtedly my most liked and replied to comment I've ever made on TH-cam. And it's not even specifically about the video's subject. I guess people just really have thoughts on monopoles. Thanks everyone!
Ya and they have like four branches at the top
they have these in aus too they look really dumb
the ones around here are made to look like palm trees, but only so much as I can tell what they are supposed to look like
I noticed these years ago in Connecticut. Also flagpole antennas.
I think it’s in El Monte, but there’s one that someone put the branches on a “pine tree” wrong, so it looks like an upside down triangle 😆
This is some good content my dude. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense that certain things need to exist but people don’t want to look at so they just hide them. Now down a rabbit hole trying to see if there’s anything in my country like this
I grew up two blocks from that "beige rectangle" and only recently discovered that my parents still receive quarterly checks because that kept the mineral rights when they sold my childhood home. So weird.
how much is it every quarter?
Very cool
@@443DM depends how much is pumped out, when i was in Texas we got $300 every quarter for our rights
@@breakingthemasks 😂😂😂
@@klayman2 yeah us too here in west TX. we have 8,000 acres with 37 pumps. Most of it is sold to California refiners because it's closer to Long Beach than Houston. Ours was $1,500 each well per year...so about $55,000 a year lease and the federal tax rate was high, but Biden administration made us cap the drilling when he got in office and put everyone out of work, so now nothing for us and the government gets no tax money, and now Long Beach has to get oil from overseas at a much higher rate and the oil is dirty oil and takes a lot more money to refine as opposed to Texas sweet crude which is cheap to refine, so the refineries have to pollute more to refine the dirty a$$ foreign oil so the price goes way up for gasoline and plastics because they don't use Texas crude anymore.
Thank you for finally putting my mind to rest. I always knew that the "Synagogue" near Pico x Robertson was an oil derrick but I never knew the massive building near Pico x Fairfax was one too, I always just assumed it was the world's most depressing-looking office building.
if you’ve ever driven from LAX to hollywood on city streets you’ll also see just the massive, still out in the open oil fields dotting the hillside
well that’s kenneth hahn for ya 🤷♂️
@@Stevie-J would you walk the 2 and a half miles across the inglewood oil fields?
@@THRDNL underrated park imo, but i’m glad the oil fields keep people away because the views on that park are phenomenal
you seem them through the north side of ORange county, as well.
In watts too
Alright, now that episode of Saved By The Bell where a company was going to put an oil rig in the middle of their football field makes sense. I thought it was a ludicrous premise.
Woops!! The judge granted a summary judgement against the plaintiff and the school district was reimbursed $450,000 for legal fees. One of the lawyers who helped in the Erin Brockovich PG&E case was Tom Girardi who's character was Kurt Potter still owes money to the estate of Ed Masry
London doesn't only have vents for the tube, they have entire plots bought to have open tunnels on, where the smoke could exit the system (from back when they had steam locomotives pulling the carriages in a pretty enclosed tunnel). And for it not to be just a hole between 2 Victorian houses with TRAINS going up and down, they put up Victorian looking hose facades made of essentially cardboard (Same idea as seen in Coyote and the Roadrunner)
the lie of leinster gardens! I was so disappointed Sam didn't mention this.
@@Lemonaitor same, there's also all the ventillation shafts for the central line and co. dotting the streets of central london.
Most cities also put transformers, telephone switches and other public utilities in buildings that look exactly like all the other neighboring buildings. For years I thought a house near mine was really just a house, but one day as I was walking my dog I caught a peek inside as a Pepco utility worker pulled his truck into the garage and I could see there was no wall between the garage and the house, and all kinds of transformers and big cables.
They even built light boxes around the front windows which had curtains and everything, so they could have lights go on an off to make it look lived in.
He didn't mention the London building because it's probably the most over mentioned one of the lot. In fact it is mentioned so much that it kind of defeats the whole purpose of covering it up in the first place.
The real special "fake facades" are the ones we still don't know about.
Ah yes, that old prank pulled on junior postmen! Go and deliver post to No.14 Leinster Gardens (that is the right house number, isn't it?)
“And most of them are digging for that sweet black, dinosaur vinegar.” Beautiful. 😂
The Long Beach oil platforms were designed to look like hotels and were actually designed to blend into the Long Beach skyline. And they kinda do a good job because practically every visitor asks how they can go visit them (spoiler: you can’t)
Just swim over 🤣
@@Network126 not worth it haha
I wonder if some hotel would make more money than a drillling site...
Living in the middle of a massive oil field and paying some of the highest gas prices in the nation…
Midland?
i'm glad to see that the oil industry is putting their infinite amount of money to good use!
If only it were infinite.
@@hamsandwichindahouse ...and how'd that work out for Venezuela?
@@hamsandwichindahouse lol. I see what you did there.
@@hamsandwichindahouse id rather not be like venezuela
@@hamsandwichindahouse lol!! funny!
As a Texan, I can confirm that the schools definitely describe crude oil as a vegetable. Part of the food pyramid.
*food derrick
*crude pyramid
I hope this is a hyperbole. I've heard it said seriously twice now.
*To make sure you consume your daily oil and minerals.
@@s9josh778 I was only half joking when I made the comment, lol
I remember being a teen and Signal Hill when oil derricks became housing. At nights we'd occasionally wander around the construction site and climb on the equipment
my “neighbor” is one of those electricity houses in Toronto. i love it honestly, only have one neighbor to worry about, and they’re a really cool family. no noise pollution either. couple trucks once in a while but thats it
Imagine planning to go to an air show but it gets cancelled because of an oil spill
@GABRIELLA what?
It was a huge bummer because it was one of the incredibly rare shows where both the blue angels and thunderbirds were going to perform.
@@usensitivead Its a bot.
It was super disappointing. I was waiting the entire year for it and 😭
2 words for the Deepwater Horizon
Texas public schools also consider people who live in LA vegetables
We have facade buildings in London for when the subway trains used to use steam and needed somewhere to vent.
Somewhat ironically most of them are in the more expensive neighbourhoods, where residents didn't want a subway tunnel passing through when they were originally built.
@GABRIELLA wasteman
Subway? Underground you mean
Imagine that......
@@maquettemusic1623 sub = under. Way = road. So maybe, but maybe those lines go specifically under roads, which would make them technically a subway
@@maquettemusic1623 they call it the tube over there though
fun fact: at exactly 2:00 at that curvy intersection near the middle-lower left hand corner, the bottom right of that intersection with the small parking lot is the shwarma place where they filmed the 2012 Avengers post-credits scene of them eating shwarma.
Cool fact
I didn’t know that thxs 😊
How?!?!
I worked in the communication tower business for 12 years and yeah, they're not very attractive. One tower owner decided that they'd have their 180' tower painted a shade of blue that matched the sky. It stood out worse than the standard galvanized finish.
There are some in my area that are disguised as older coniferous trees and they pass pretty well. Wouldn't even cross your mind until you scrutinize them more, since it isn't exactly unheard of for there to be tall elder trees at the tops of hills. I've heard that success can be a bit more mixed for other sorts, though.
I've seen GSM towers disguised as palm trees in tropical areas
You would think that would be an aircraft hazard
@@juliogonzo2718 Its probably so badly done its not even a hazard😂. Big blue tower on a cloudy day
@@juliogonzo2718 I suspect they are shorter than the height the FAA requires one to consider for aircraft.
3:30 lol I literally live 2mins away from that sculpture and never noticed.
In New England many cell phone ground stations are inside the steeples of old churches on hills. If the church didn’t have an adequate steeple for the purpose or had no steeple, the ground station operator paid to construct what’s needed. The ground station operators pay handsome rent to the churches whose steeples they utilize.
lol they pay rent to god, in a manner of speaking
Just casually dropping my hometown Nürnberg XD awesome to hear it!!
I thought LA was fake in the first place, thanks for clearing up that it isn’t
No, you are actually right. Los Angeles is all of the infrastructure, mainly the highways, but also all of the other stuff like this. The buildings just happen to be there. The capital of Los Angeles is Interstate 405, because California sucks, Los Angeles sucks harder, and Interstate 405 is the hardest sucking thing in existence.
No that's Bielefeld, Germany
the lakers are a fake team so would make sense for the whole city to be fake
@@TheWeekndGaming
Are you being serious or joking?
Have you actually visited Pico-Union, Lincoln Heights, Paicoma, El Sereno, Sylmar, West Adams, Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Figueroa Corridor, Ethiopian Corridor, El Salvador Corridor, Filipinotown, Koreatown, Tehrangeles, Virgil Village, Cypress Park, Heritage Square, Lakeview Terrance-Hansen Dam, Green Meadows, Vermont Knolls, Vermont Square, Central-Alameda, Harbor Gateway, Wilmington, San Pedro, Boyle Heights, etc; of Los Angeles, CA?
@@whathell6t no i havent cause it’s not real
Wow I would have never imagined how widespread this practice is - Awesome video!
"sipping that spicy jurassic juice" is beautiful. i am going to try my hardest to work this phrase into conversation
@@SuperEgo1989 The effect is greater if you can successfully use the phrase in a conversation that someone else starts. That's really tricky to get right, but has a huge payoff if the joke lands.
More like Pleistocene juice since that's when all the La Brea fossils come from
It's very common for companies to hide or disguise things that most would consider unsightly. Cell phone towers in urban settings are one of the most common. I've seen some that look like flag poles, palm trees, fir trees and some antennas are just cleverly hidden by making them look like part of the façade of a building.
These are referred to as "stealth" towers and many people walk right past them and don't even realize they are there.
I live somewhat close to LA and its perfectly normal to see a bunch of those see-sawing oil things just off the freeway
Those are called pumpjacks, you probably don't care but there is the name
@@Findeeney the more you know
I call them nodding donkeys.
@@katieandkevinsears7724 I called them rope hammers
I actually once was watching a program that had a collection of interurban trains from California when they existed and when the program was showing videos of the former Pacific Electric railroad, the narrator at one point mentioned that one of the stations was near an oil well somewhere off screen. I didn't give it much of a second thought and assumed that the oil there eventually dried up. When I watched this video that oil wells are still all over LA but in disguise, I was honestly so surprised since I've been to LA a few times before and didn't notice anything resembling something oil related, or if I did see anything oil related, I don't remember it
as a houstonian I must say the oil rigs + other facilities are more on the way to Galveston/surfside than like right by the city
The fact that he keeps calling the Wells Derricks is killing me. As a derrickhand, I can confirm that the Derrick is the tower they end up removing because it's just there to drill down.
I wish you would have included the El Segundo Offshore Terminal. To maintain the attractiveness on the shore from Santa Monica to Manhattan Beach, chevrons oil refinery in El Segundo has underground pipes that go a few miles out under the beaches and into the ocean. Oil tanker ships like the one I used to work on drop anchor at the end of these pipes and the refinery specifically employs people whose job it is to get on a launch boat and connect the ship while it is anchored in the ocean. The oil keeps flowing and the beachgoers have no idea.
Diu know Louisiana Oklahoma and Alaska are also oil and gas driven states as well Oklahoma is a vineyard for rich Texans
@@GAURAV25855ify the difference is none of them have 10 million people living right on top of the industry.
@@GAURAV25855ify yep add in Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, for a bit New York, some in Idaho, Colorado, some in Montana, pretty a bunch of the East Coast. (There is actually the potential for a north sea sized field off the east coast but people don't want rigs in thier backyard).
This happens more than people realize. I was a truck driver for oil rig supplies and the company I worked for one time drilled a well right in front of a grocery store, in the parking lot. It was insane
“Which knowing my audience is probably most of you”
I feel so called out
As someone who has lived near an abandoned looking house in Toronto for most of my life. I’ve never been able to find an answer to my that house was abandoned but not for sale. Constantly overgrown lawn people visiting maybe every few months. That house being a secret substation makes way more sense
"The most american solution :
Keep drilling for oil and just cover it up ! Like literally... cover it up"
I had a good laugh from this one 🤣
They're just hiding it from Karen.
Why not? Its hidden not because they are covering it up, but to make it look more attractive.
This video triggered memories of working in an auto parts store in the vary late 80s to early 90s where I saw the word "synthetic" used on the labels of "motor oil", that as that auto parts store chain was going out of business thus the "oil shelves" went empty! However, obviously, "synthetic" oil can be produced in a laboratory rather than drilled up out of the Earth - for much less money!
Sam Yorty calling a petroleum derrick "civic beauty" is EXTREMELY on-brand.
Sam Yorty was LA's first part-time, absentee mayor. The second was Eric Garcetti.
@@Am-Not-Jarvis As a great man once said to LA pols, "I yield my time, fuck you."
How civic is civic beauty in honda civics?
@@theyoutubecommentator7733 depends on how well you tune it
@@theyoutubecommentator7733 rice/10
Vancouver does this too, but with those BC Hydro boxes/transformers typ eshit that just sit on the sidewalks.
Their painted with some graphic to look like some grass or some random art shit.
Its not supposed to actually blend in, but its supposed to be barely noticeable.
I had a friend from Texas who was living in the LA area for years, who had no idea about this, even though at the entrance to his job was a very poorly hidden one across the street.
Texas tea
I’ve always wondered what those towers in The Long Beach islands were. They seemed like bird preservations or something. They looked ominous or hiding something.
One way that cell phone towers are "hidden" in the Middle East is by making them look like palm trees. Of course it's easy to tell that they aren't palm trees because of how much taller and straight they are.
They do that in L.A., too.
They do that in Mexico too.
Guess they do that everywhere.
I've seen that in New Jersey and in Maryland, along (or on the medians of) highways.
In New England many cell phone ground stations are inside the steeples of old churches on hills. If the church didn’t have an adequate steeple for the purpose or had no steeple, the ground station operator paid to construct what’s needed. The ground station operators pay handsome rent to the churches whose steeples they utilize.
@@Stevie-J LOL! I never thought of it that way. If the signal is bad, should one ask for forgiveness or for a blessing?
They've also started disguising cellphone towers as plastic trees. I hate it. There is an authentic beauty to industrial architecture, an unapologetic paean to function and utilitarianism. I don't need my infrastructure to look like ticky-tacky suburban kitsch.
Started? My friend, that's been going on for at least a decade.
They've been doing this for ages m8
People don't notice anything above their head unless they are looking for something
In the 1940s the Victorian State Electricity Commission built an entire town to house the families of workers employed in the open cut brown coal mines. By the late 1960s the Commission realised the town was built on top of a massive coal deposit. The town was levelled, overburden removed and the coal dug up. The town was called Yallorn, in south eastern Victoria, Australia. The mine still operates 24/7.
I live in Toronto and used to have one of those hidden substations next to my condo. It was demolished a few years back and I moved from the area shortly thereafter, but I've always wondered what they did with the space. The plot of land was between two residential buildings and too small to do a lot with. I assume it has something to do with the Eglinton Crosstown LRT but I'm not sure.
No offense Toronto has no oil
Riggs
In the east end, it was also really common to not know where your Bell CO or Rogers distribution building was, because they're often hidden in storefronts or doctor's office buildings, like the Bell one near where I used to live at Danforth and Main.
What's crazy is they even did a cover up in King of the Hill. Where they built a home around a sub station to keep their street looking good.
Whee, oil wells, fake facades, and possibly intrigue! This sounds like the setup for a movie.
Whoever writes the scrips for HAI is a legitimate comedic genius. These videos are always just as humorous as they are interesting.. Keep up the stellar work, gentlemen.
LA really is one of the worlds stickiest cities
that and Las Vegas
Immediately after the Great Molasses flood, it was Boston
@@vincenttt8289 this guy Sam O' Nellas
Especially the Valley. Avoid couches.
must be all the crap on the floor
I'm from Houston, TX (yeah! our cRaP) is right there out in the open. When I was a little boy going on vaycay to Southern California as we landed in the 70's I was surprised to see so many pumping jacks or nodding donkeys as they are called. We are "proud" of ours. Even so far as to decorate them. Now you don't see a lot of derricks, there are a butt load of flare stacks!
I hope that one day, all my years of walking into random buildings to see what's inside will pay off and I'll find one of these bad boys.
Non Californians may not know this, but LA is just one giant oil rig with a cover on it
I'm in Toronto & my wife & I lived across the street from a Uranium Processing Plant for a *year* & we only learned that it existed from a newspaper article about 3 years after we moved away from that address.
what neighbourhood?
@@davidthomson802 The plant is on the North West corner of Lansdowne & DuPont.
@@AdrianParsons ah. Thanks. If I think hard I might remember that corner. I might put it into a novel. thanks again
that sounds like someone should pay you a health compensation
@@AdrianParsons The streetname should have been a give away.
I built a few cell phone towers that look like trees, some were flagpoles. then others built on building facades, water towers, and billboards
All my life living in LA we all see the oil drills in random spots, but *I NEVER KNEW THEY WERE HIDDEN AROUND* 🤣
Now hide some oil rigs as giant mountain islands and you got yourself a dark as hell working environment.
There is a video on Defunctland about a small LA amusement park that used a working pump as their advertising by making it look like a grasshopper.
Isn’t life grand. So nice to be able to post information to the masses that is full of falsehoods. No need to speak the truth. Gotta love it.
Imagine breaking into a house and literally striking oil
My grandpa put up a lot of oil derricks along the 57 just north of Yorba Linda back in the 60’s. They’re not covered up and most are still in operation today.
2:56 wow an oil derrick really gives me hope for the future, especially when global warming and pollution will just disappear when you can’t see it directly
This is actually extremely smart strategically too. Imagine an enemy wanting to destroy oil rigs, they either need to find them to target them, or bomb the whole city of civilians...
Except the location of all of them is publicly available😂 it's more to visually hide them
nah information like this video makes it pretty easy to take these out without taking out civilians
Why destroy a rig, couple of 2000lb surprises at the destination makes every pump useless. Don't attack the source, demolish the destination.
That's using civilians as human shield. "extremely smart".
Of all the videos on youtube, I least expected the Nuremberg U-Bahn to be mentioned in a video about drilling oil in LA.
Alter same haha, der Brunnen kam aus dem nichts
@@RobinMueller1 Wobei ich ja fast alles über die U-Bahn weiß, aber das mit dem Brunnen war tatsächlich etwas neues für mich, ich wusste zwar, dass da die U-Bahn fährt, aber dass der Brunnen was mit der U-Bahn zu tun hat war mir nicht klar.
sorry you couldn’t make it to that airshow man. that’s like the best day of the year
You missed the army bases in Switzerland disguised as normal houses but house massive gun batteries to defend against invasion!!!
and the "mountains". That's what they want you to think they are.
@@davidthomson802 Yeah. And the grains of sand are secretly a bunch of super small nuclear bombs.
as a proud Texan I can confirm crude oil is a vegetable
That's a decent effort, but I have to admit that oil platforms look way too cool to cover up. Land derrecks, not so much though. And living in Shipyard Town, Oil Sate, I get to see them in't harbour quite often. Though the drilling is done out of view in the middle of the ocean, I only see them when they're not operating.
It depends. In a residential area, they are an eyesore
And Wednesday the LA city council is going to vote on banning new oil drilling sites and phasing out these old ones. Really well timed HAI crew!
I walked past the fountain in Nuremberg today, as so many times before, and never knew that it‘s purpose was ventilation for the subway. Again what learned, as Lothar would say.
trials and error
I knew a dude who discovered what he thought was a oil spill in his yard was actually an oil well. He sold it and retired and the company who developed it put the equipment in a mock up of his house and they pay the neighbors to put up with the noise.
Huh, so that episode of saved by the bell where they find oil at Bayside wasnt as unrealistic as I always thought it was…….. well the finding oil part, the fact they didn’t end up drilling is still unbelievable
I Dont really think a school district would approve an active oil drill on a school today
Half as interesting can be so good at stalling sometimes that it doesn't even make me mad
Alternative title: How Fake Buildings Hide LA'S Slicky Icky
I live in the country side of CT. We have a "dairy farm" that is actually a chemical plant/warehouse. Its hard to get info on it actually. Other than there not being cows out front, you would never know though. They restrict their trucks to night as well.
It will be cool of new open-world games would use these as collectibles. Instead of looking for some obscure random graffiti in the middle of a dark alley, you would observe every structure you could see and figure out if any of them feels "off". It's a great way to encourage exploration without making it seem like a chore.
Why wouldn't it seem like a chore? Still sounds like basically the same thing to me.
@@qactustick Well for one, they're basically huge, but just hidden in plain sight. You don't really need to go to every nook and cranny like most standard collectibles do. You can simply look for them by just looking at the skyline whenever you're driving off to somewhere else.
*screams in The Witness*
Sounds like the most boring game ever.
Cool video. My dad worked for Beverly Hills Oil for most of my childhood. I think I still have one of his trucker caps from the 80s.
I do appreciate the toronto shout out. Yeah we have tons of these fake houses and other fake buildings downtown for this exact use.
someone should make a map. I mean make a map available.
There is a steam pump facility in downtown Denver that looks like a windowless office building, near the convention center. Non discript buildings hiding what's inside are EVERYWHERE
Explains why you can't enter most buildings in GTA 5.
There is disappointing amount of gta5 references in this comment section
🤣 That always bothered me, but at least now I know why!
Living in Nuremberg, Germany for a decade now, passing by the sculpture probably 1000 times, I had to watch a TH-cam Video to find out that this is a ventilation shaft…
haha same. never could have thought that.
I live a couple blocks away from one of the many oil derricks in LA, but it's not cleverly hidden at all, and it's actually a huge issue for the community from a health perspective.
Why is it a health risk? A derrick pumps oil up a pipe into a container.
@@sandersson2813 A study in Colorado found that people living within 500 feet of an oil and gas facility have a lifetime excess cancer risk eight times higher than the upper limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Denver Post article from 2018
@@Am-Not-Jarvis Theres similar studies for everything, for example peolle who live near to pylons, granite deposits, coal deposits, rubbish dumps etc.
Who cares and who the fuck live just 500ft from an oil facility? 😂 😂 😂 😂
You might as well say studies show higher rates of ill health among those who live at Chernobyl
@@sandersson2813 You are very dishonest, you asked "why is it a health risk" and he answered. Who lives 500ft from an oil facility? Well apparently a lot of people.
@@nemou4985 How many?
Lots of things are a health risk. We take risks every single day. No one makes you live near a well. Move.
Time to fill my brain with more facts that I can annoy my friends and family with.
Same. Muhahahahha
Big mood. (Though my father also listens to this channel and thus we often team up to just go on about a thing we learned about that's super cool and possibly annoying everyone else in the process who is not also like us.)
@@pandoraeve9751 You're lucky to have such a supportive dad! I hope to be like him someday!
Good job, nice pace and no fluff!
3:13 I thought that was a joke you made, and then I looked back to my screen and saw the article 😳
I know!!! It a citing a school newspaper, so it was a bunch of high-schoolers making that joke. It was their friends who were getting cancer, so I guess they're entitled to their humor.
Imagine breaking into 1 of these houses, you'd certainly be bamboozled.
As a born-and-raises Texan, I love me some roasted crude with my morning longhorn steak.
0:51 You are absolutely right. And i have no idea why lol
The old oil fields look so creepy and otherworldly... I would bet that's where Tolkien got some inspiration for the orc structures
This video just reminded me of one of my favorite episodes of the TV show Emergency! Season 4, Episode 2 "I'll Fix It". In that episode, they rescue someone trapped in a house that is flooding with oil because it was built on an "inactive" oil well that started erupting.