95,000 tons of methane

The leak is over, but the outrage remains
By Wendi Jonassen

The smell. My nose involuntarily scrunched up as I pulled up to a gated community in Porter Ranch, a neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles. I glanced over at Dariel Medina, my camera-guy (and brave fellow traveler), and saw his face contorted in the same disgusted way. We weren’t smelling the methane from the massive leak that brought us here. Methane is odorless. That rotten egg stench was from methyl mercaptan, a smelly chemical added to natural gas to warn if there’s a leak. Since October 23, 2015, Porter Ranch has been bathed in mercaptan-laced methane.

SoCal Gas just said they’ve stopped the leak — after 110 days. But nothing is confirmed yet and the community doesn’t trust it. Dariel and I were in Porter Ranch, talking to the community at around week 11, and we both noted the stench as soon as we landed. The other immediately obvious thing was the outrage. People in the community are sick. They feel they’ve been lied to by the gas company. They want SoCal Gas out, even if they’ve actually fixed the leak.
 
It could easily be the biggest environmental disaster since the British Petroleum oil spill of 2010, but no one paid as much attention. The main difference is that the mess in 2010 was very visual: 200 million gallons of black oil. In Porter Ranch, the culprit is invisible and odorless, but still dangerous and environmentally destructive. In the few weeks after the Aliso Canyon storage facility started leaking, natural gas spewed out at a rate of 125,000 pounds an hour. The methane leak boosted California’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent each day, according to air quality officials.

We met Gabriel Khanlian the day after his birthday. His beautiful, Mission-style family home was one of the closest to the source of the leak. The stench hit us when we stepped out of the car. Each breath was a reminder of rotten eggs and the leak. I promised Dariel we wouldn’t stay longer than we needed. He’d been struggling with headaches all weekend, which makes sense because large quantities of methane can displace oxygen. It was like Dariel was having a breath-holding competition with himself. A few days prior, Dariel had to pause an interview when he grew pale and his hands started shaking. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead and the camera dropped to his lap.
 
The day we drove to Gabriel’s house, he was waiting for us in the doorway with his three kids. His chubby-cheeked 2-year-old daughter had been getting mysterious rashes that covered large portions of her body, but they appeared only while the family was in Porter Ranch. Inside his kitchen, Gabriel listed a litany of his family’s recent health problems: bloody noses, dizziness, itchy eyes. Even the pets were sick. All of it echoed what we’d been hearing all weekend. Something was making residents sick.

“It was bad, to a point where when you step outside, you have an immediate headache,” Gabriel said.

The day after the leak sprung, Gabriel called the gas company’s help line. They denied any leak, calling it “normal venting.” Dariel and I had heard that before. Everyone we talked to said that from October 23–26, SoCal Gas told the community the stench was nothing out of the ordinary. Gabriel said the gas company finally told him on October 26 or 27: “We have a leak, but don’t worry about it, it will be fixed in a couple of days.”

This didn’t line up. Mike Mizrahi, a spokesperson for SoCal Gas, had a disjointed timeline of the company’s knowledge of the leak. “We noticed the leak right around October 23,” he told me, clear as day, in a recorded interview. When I called Mizrahi later, he acknowledged the three-day lapse in notification, but gave no solid reason for it. He mumbled something about internal miscommunication.

A month later, local officials ordered SoCal Gas to offer temporary relocation to Porter Ranch residents. More than 5,000 families have requested relocation since. Two schools have closed.

SoCal Gas just sealed the leak, more than four months after it started. They initially tried to stop the leak the traditional way — sending heavy liquids and mud down the well to clog it. They tried that seven times. Then they drilled a relief well next to the leaking well, hoping to reach the spot where the well meets the reservoir, to essentially block it from the base. But the reservoir is 8,500 feet down, so it took awhile to get down there.

Mizrahi tells me his story in perfect 15-second sound bites. We’re in front of the storage facility entrance — about two miles from Gabriel’s neighborhood. SoCal Gas took over depleted oil reserves in 1972, before anyone really lived in Porter Ranch. The well that busted, SS-25, is one of 115 aging wells used to pump gas in and out of the reservoir, which can hold up to 87 billion cubic feet of natural gas. In 1979, a safety valve on SS-25 broke. The safety valve is not required by law, so they never replaced it. If the safety valve were on the well, SoCal Gas could have stopped the constant stream of methane from leaking into the community, a lawyer working with the residents said. 
 
The damage to the environment won’t be quantifiable for some time, if ever, but no matter it is measured, tons of methane spilled into the air. Methane is a short-lived but very potent greenhouse gas. Pound for pound, it can do many times more global-heating damage than carbon dioxide. This leak is putting thousands of tons of methane into the air at a time when California is supposed to be lowering its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent.

SoCal Gas refuses to estimate how much gas leaked. Mizrahi told me it would be more accurate to take a measurement at the end than to guess during an active leak. He is right. But that hasn’t stopped people from guessing. The most interesting statistic I read was reported by the Los Angeles Times: The leak is equivalent to driving a car over 5 billion miles, or around the Earth 200,866 times. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates the leak spewed over 95,000 metric tons into the air.

We said goodbye to Gabriel and his kids. They had to get back to their temporary housing, a few towns over, before their little ones got sick again. As Dariel and I drove to the airport, I noticed my eyes getting itchy, almost like I’d come into contact with pepper spray. I looked down at my coffee, and a wave of nausea swept through my stomach. The toxic air had finally caught up with me. 
 
“At least we’re leaving,” I told Dariel in a reassuring voice.

“Too bad for the folks who can’t leave,” I mumbled under my breath, as I rubbed my itchy eye.

After a little rest, Dariel and I felt better, but residents of Porter Ranch haven’t settled down. They’re hosting rallies and attending outreach and political meetings organized by Save Porter Ranch, a local grassroots group that formed well before this leak.

Its cofounder, Matt Pakucko, runs a music studio out of his home, which sits less than a mile from SoCal Gas’s Aliso Canyon storage facility. Pakucko started the group in April 2014 to try to stop a plan to drill 12 new wells. After some investigation into the facility, he learned nosebleeds, headaches and breathing and skin problems had been reported by residents for years.

“[They’d also] been reporting smelling gas and oil in their neighborhoods for years. I smelled it here a bunch of times before I knew about the facility,” he said. “Then we discovered the gas facility. And we go, OK, maybe there is a bigger problem than these 12 oil wells. We started looking at the gas company and we figured we had to start doing air monitoring ourselves.”

The Air Quality Management Board demanded SoCal Gas do more than just fix the leak. They have to shut down the entire damaged well. But that’s not enough for angry Porter Ranch residents like Gabriel and Matt. They want all of SoCal Gas shut down, forever, everywhere. They’ve been dealing with toxic issues for far too long, they told us.

Air quality officials also ordered SoCal Gas to fund an independent study on the human health impacts of methane, and to develop a leak detection system. The city of Los Angeles filed a criminal suit against SoCal Gas, and the company faces at least a dozen other lawsuits. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein called for a federal investigation. Additional legislation is in the works to deal with the aging facility and address future monitoring.

Will any of this be enough? Dozens of aging wells remain at the Aliso Canyon storage facility site. More than 400 other natural gas storage sites exist across the country, and, like Porter Ranch, much of the equipment is decades-old and deteriorating.

It all feels like an inevitable disaster, unless companies take responsibility to fix these aging wells and install safety valves before the next leak springs. Or better yet, move away from natural gas and start investing in renewable energy sources.