The Nome nugget., 1938-03-26

NHCiid Sdiicy.
 Today huge industry has grown up and the groves there resemble those about Baghdad or Basra, In Iraq.
 Much of the desert basin above the Salton sea, with its duck clubs and speedboat races, is still emp ty; here and there are date and other gardens of astounding fertili- ty. Men must have felt the heat the day they gave such local place names as Mecca" Arabia" Thermal" and "Biskra."
 Planes from Los Angeles for Phoenix. Tucson and Fl Paso fly down this long, hot valley, entering from the north through San Cor gonio pass. Grotesque tumbleweed. rolling over deserts in hard winds, looks like brown bears at full gallop.
 Not far from San Gorgonio pass. you may visit the site of one of many construction camps on the Colorado river aqueduct project with its miles of tunnels. A worker there once found a petrified egg about the size of coconut
 Across the valley men dig the great hole that will carry water un- der the San Jacinto mountains. Like the Indians before them, local whites say that sometimes this mountain "growls" Geologists say it is young" mountain; that if there are growls, they may be earth tones from subterranean movements along earthquake faults.
 Earthquakes Now and Then.
 Earthquakes occur here when one block of earth crust slips past an other along an earth fracture. Sev- eral such faults extend from the Mojave desert to offshore islands
 One such slip caused the Long Beach earthquake of March 10, l933. Mud and hot water squirted from cracks that opened in the ground. Many people say they saw a Wav- ing motion pass across the fields which set trees, houses, and water tanks to swaying, while up from the rocking earth came a deep- toned. roaring sound.
 If giant could seize the edge of this region, as you might grab the lid of a steamer trunk, and thus lift the top off southern California, you would see below it one of Natures busiest workshops. Down here, in the dark, things go on which affect all that live up above in the sun- shine.
 Far into the earth, miles and miles deep and many leagues long. run the faults or fractures that fig ure in the quakes; but more inn portant to man on top of the ground are the vast underground basins that hold water for his wells and other great natural tanks, from which for decades he has pumped that oil which, more than anything else, has put this region on solid economic basis.
 Since exciting early days, when pioneers bored and found oil in com mercial quantities within the city limits of Los Angeles, it's flow has increased, and southern California has become a financial and geo. graphic center of a Titan industry.
 Oil Attracted Many Thousands.
 As with the land booms, so in the days of oil excitement there came hordes of oil executives. techni- clans, drillers, rotary helpers, der rick men, tool-dresSerS, teamsters and truckmen, roustabouts. pipe ln- CTS, tank builders, refinery workers. and stock salesmen, adding their thousands to an already heterogen- eous population in and around Los Angeles, the fields of Kern county, and the Kettlemen hills. One we'll in Kettlemen hills was bored in 1853 to depth of l0,944 feet, new rec ord.
 Odd, indeed, to visitors is the sight of oil derricks set out in the ocean, down the coast from Santa Barbara. which pump oil from be- low the sea. At the Rincon field a we'll has been bored which is more than half mile from the mainland. The discovery that holes already very deep could be drilled even deeper and actually deflected to reach new sections of oil pools has given Huntington Beach a new boom.
 From an airplane you look down on tank farms" where oil Is stored; clusters of white metal tanks appear like giant frosted cakes; roofs of still larger reser- voirs, built like ponds. are protected by lightning rods. These. the roar ing refineries, the long pipe lines, trains of oil cars, and tank steamers loading at the ports, are the out ward and visible signs of this trade now operating under the oil conser- vation law.