The mainstream media FINALLY picked up on the CA gas leak.
‘It just seems like a beautiful day in Southern California,” Bryan Caforio said.
It was late January in Porter Ranch, an affluent neighborhood on the northern fringe of Los Angeles. Caforio and I sat at a Starbucks overlooking an oceanic parking lot crowded with shoppers. The air was still, dry, 70 degrees. Caforio, a young trial lawyer running for Congress in the state’s 25th District, gestured at the pink and orange striations of sky above Aliso Canyon, its foothills bronze in the falling daylight. “It seems like a beautiful sunset in a wonderful community,” Caforio said, “and we’re sitting outside, enjoying a wonderful coffee.”
But there were scattered clues that suggested that everything was not so wonderful. Near a trio of news vans parked in front of the Starbucks, antenna masts projecting from their roofs, a cameraman stared quizzically up at the canyon. Next to the SuperCuts, security guards stood outside two nondescript storefronts; stenciled on the windows were the words “Community Resource Center” and, in smaller letters, “SoCalGas.” The guards asked for identification and dismissed anyone who tried to take a photograph. At the entrance to Bath & Body Works, a device that resembled an electronic parking meter was balanced on a tripod; the digital display read “BENZENE,” followed by a series of indecipherable ideograms. The parking lot held a preponderance of silver Honda Civics bearing the decal of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Inside the cars, men sat in silence, waiting.
Beyond the Ralphs grocery store and the Walmart rose a neighborhood of jumbo beige homes with orange clay-tiled roofs and three-car garages. The lawns were tidily landscaped with hedges of lavender, succulents, cactuses and kumquat trees. The neighborhood was a model of early-1980s California suburban design; until October, it was best known for being the location where Steven Spielberg shot “E.T.” But now the meandering streets were desolate, apart from the occasional unmarked white van. As you ascended the canyon, reaching gated communities with names like Renaissance, Promenade and Highlands, the police presence increased. On Sesnon Boulevard, the neighborhood’s northern boundary, an electric billboard propped in the middle lane blinked messages: “REPORT CRIME ACTIVITY; L.A.P.D. IN THE AREA; CALL 911.” Holleigh Bernson Memorial Park was empty aside from three cop cars, patrol lights flashing.
But the most significant clues were the spindly metal structures spaced along the ridge of the canyon. They resembled antennas or construction sites or alien glyphs. Until recently, most residents of Porter Ranch did not pay them much attention.
“You look at the hills, you see a few towers,” Caforio said. “But do you really know what they are?” He shook his head. “You try to say, ‘Hey, we’re having an environmental disaster right now!’ But it just looks like a beautiful sunset.”
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The first sign of trouble came on Oct. 25, when the Southern California Gas Company filed a terse report with the California Public Utilities Commission noting that a leak had been detected on Oct. 23 at a well in its Aliso Canyon storage facility. Under “Summary,” the report read: “No ignition, no injury. No media.”
The local news media began to take notice, however, when Porter Ranch residents complained of suffocating gas fumes. In response, SoCalGas released a statement on Oct. 28 pointing out that the well was “outdoors at an isolated area of our mountain facility over a mile away from and more than 1,200 feet higher than homes or public areas.” It assured the public that the leak did not present a threat.
Timothy O’Connor, the director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s California Oil and Gas Program, had read about the complaints. But he did not think much of them until Nov. 3, when, at a climate-policy event in downtown Los Angeles, he learned from an acquaintance who worked at SoCalGas that the company was flying in experts from around the country to help plug the leak. At home that night, O’Connor read everything he could about the Aliso Canyon gas field. How much gas was stored inside the canyon? How much could leak out?
The foothills on which Porter Ranch was built, O’Connor learned, once belonged to J.Paul Getty. His Tide Water Associated Oil Company hit crude in 1938 and did not sell the land until the early 1970s, after it had extracted the last drop. The drained oil field was bought by Pacific Lighting, which used it to store natural gas. With a capacity of 84 billion standard cubic feet, the cavity, which lies between 7,100 and 9,400 feet below the surface, is one of the country’s largest reservoirs of natural gas (which is composed mainly of methane). The facility functions as a kind of gas treasury. When prices are low, the company hoards the gas inside the canyon; when they are high, it releases the gas into pipelines that snake through Los Angeles, heating homes, fueling stoves and providing power to solar-and wind-energy facilities.
The 115 wells in Aliso Canyon can be imagined as long straws dipping into a vast subterranean sea of methane. The leaking well, SS-25, is a steel tube seven inches in diameter that descends 8,748 feet from the canyon’s ridge. The well is plainly visible from many of the streets in Porter Ranch. From the ground, it resembles a derrick, set beside a series of low white buildings. If you look at it through a pair of binoculars, you can make out, flying from its highest girder, an American flag.
After conducting some basic calculations, O’Connor arrived at a shocking conclusion. Given the pressure and quantity of gas stored within, the canyon was like an overinflated balloon; a puncture could release in a single day as much gas as 1,785 houses would consume in a year. As it turned out, O’Connor was mistaken — the figure ended up being much higher than that — but he included it in an urgent letter he sent the next day, on Nov. 4, to the governor’s senior energy adviser and members of the California Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, Energy Commission and Department of Conservation. He demanded that the agencies conduct “an accurate and public accounting of the gas lost at Aliso Canyon.”
That evening, O’Connor attended a hearing at the Community School in Porter Ranch with about 100 panicked residents. They complained that the gas fumes were causing headaches, respiratory problems, nosebleeds and vomiting. The next morning, having yet to receive a response to his letter, O’Connor realized that he didn’t have to wait for the state to take action. He could call Stephen Conley.
Read more (long and more atmosphere than substance):
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/the-invisible-catastrophe.html
