It makes a person wonder and marvel at the thought of what it must have been like to be here 80 years ago. People who owned wells made money. Lots of it. People who worked the wells made money. Good money. There were basicly no environmental or safety standards back then. More money. Lots of it.

I've read that because of the shoddy methods used to extract the oil during this time, ..over 50% of the oil was wasted during the extraction of the other half.

But nobody knew about these things back then. They set up wells and struck oil and built ponds, and waited for oil trucks to come get it.

Floods caused a major problem. When it rains, the oil in filled-to-capacity storage ponds simply floated up and over the barriers and into the creeks and rivers. It was a disaster. Mom tells me that even 30 and 40 years later, they didn't swim anywhere.

She swam at a local city pool, until desegregation laws went into place. City officials were faced with the prospect of black people in the public pool, and thus decided to fill the pool with cement. White people are evil.