Porter Ranch Just the Latest Environmental Disaster

How far could you go on 800,000,000 gallons of gasoline? That’s the equivalent of the nearly 90,000 tons of methane released to date from the gas leak near Porter Ranch, Calif. It works out to 7.4 million tons of carbon dioxide, adding to already-dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

The leak from the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, operated by Southern California Gas Co., was first detected on Oct. 23, 2015. It is an ongoing environmental disaster that has taken months to stop. The tragedy has dislocated at least 5,500 households and sickened a community of 30,000 people. Small businesses in the area are suffering as their customers relocate away from the carcinogenic fumes. Property values will almost certainly be impacted. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti called it “an unprecedented environmental disaster.”

Methane gas is clear, so there is no camera documenting the ongoing fumarole as there was with the BP oil spill in 2010. But the parallels are clear. A White House commission cited BP, Transocean and Halliburton for a series of cost-cutting decisions and an insufficient safety system, leading to the explosion 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club (of which I am a member), said in an email, “When, years ago, a safety valve began to fail in the well that is leaking today, the ‘solution’ adopted by SoCalGas was to remove it. Legally, they weren’t required to replace it. Incredibly, they didn’t.” That valve had stopped working in 1979.

Huffington Post cites “aging infrastructure, industry negligence and scant state regulations” as factors leading to the Porter Ranch catastrophe, and notes that these issues are common.

In 2013, 47 people were killed and the downtown area of Lac Megantic, Quebec was destroyed when a 74-car freight train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded. As a cost-cutting measure, the train was operated by just one crewmember.

The culture of cost-cutting combined with deadly fossil fuels results in recurring disasters with deadly consequences. The cost of our outdated dependence on a carbon economy is not just in long-term warming of the planet and disruptions to our climate; it is in frequent environmental disasters, destruction of wildlife, large-scale economic losses and a growing death toll.

By the way, if you were driving a Prius, you would be able to drive 40 billion — with a “b” — miles on those 800,000,000 gallons of gas.