The Environmental Disaster Happening Right Now That You Might Know Nothing About

My parents have lived in the same house for the past 30 years but tonight they are sleeping in a hotel. The reason is an environmental disaster you might know nothing about.

This is the Porter Ranch Gas Leak and it’s located in a suburb 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. At its peak a few months ago, the leaking underground reservoir was spewing 58,000 kilograms of natural gas per hour into the atmosphere. Per hour. Every hour. Most of it emanating from a single crack in a pipe that extends deep into the mountains behind my parents’ home. Natural gas is clear and lighter than air, so this disaster does not come armed with Facebook-ready photos of seabirds drenched in sticky black oil. Instead you have to look through an infrared camera to see the staggering flow of gas coming out of the mountain.

SoCalGas, the privately owned utility that runs the reservoir, is having a hell of a time plugging the leak. The cracked pipe is more than 8,500-feet long, buried in rock. The gas company is now digging a relief well to intercept the pipe and plug the leak, but this is a complicated geological dance that is taking months to accomplish. The leak was first reported in October, and the latest estimate calls for it to be plugged about a month from now. If that timeframe is accurate, this gas leak will last a full four months. The BP Gulf oil spill, by comparison, lasted three. To date, it’s estimated that more than $14 million worth of natural gas has escaped into the air.

Natural gas is composed primarily of methane. It burns cleaner than gasoline but is 25 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. That means it is dangerous for the entire planet. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the initial weeks of the leaking well was akin to putting 7 million new cars on the road. Even in Los Angeles, you’d notice 7 million more cars.

In its pure form methane has no smell, but the gas company adds an odorant called mercaptan as a safety measure so people can detect a gas leak in their homes. Yet what is potentially lifesaving indoors is horrible when applied to an entire neighborhood. Some days, the air outside reeks like rotten eggs, and is making people sick with headaches and nosebleeds. During a recent visit home for the holidays, I didn’t smell anything untoward most of the time. But the few times I did, I not only smelled the mercaptan; I felt it as a texture, the sensation of a sticky melted plastic layer coating my lungs. I gasped for clean air and imagined what it would be like to suffocate outdoors in a cloud of gas. It was terrifying and my self-preservation instinct screamed at me to get out of there. But I was home for the holidays, so I ignored that instinct. It didn’t smell as much inside the house, but my head hurt for most of the visit.

Nobody seems to know for sure what the effects are of long-term exposure to methane and mercaptan. SoCalGas claims that the noxious smell doesn’t pose a danger. Naturally, many Porter Ranch residents are not inclined to believe the gas company. Benzene, a known carcinogen, is also found in natural gas. According to the gas company, the levels of benzene in the air around Porter Ranch are not high enough to cause cancer. Again, many people do not believe this. They point to Flint, Michigan, where residents were initially told by officials that it was safe to drink the brown tap water.

The leak rate from the ruptured natural gas reservoir has slowed somewhat but my parents’ anxiety has only gotten worse. The smell of gas in the air and fear of breathing too deeply along with weeks of calls to the gas company for relocation assistance followed by displacement from their home of 30 years all add up to a rising sense of panic. This panic seems even more dangerous than the tons of methane in the air. Stress is real and can make people physically ill.

My father says he has smelled gas around the neighborhood on and off for years, but never made the connection to the awesomely large gas field just a mile from the house. His failure to make that link is a reasonable one, considering he had no idea natural gas was stored in the scenic hills behind the lemon tree in our backyard.

We were the first family to claim our particular lot and our particular house in the subdivided paradise named Porter Ranch. The real estate developer never mentioned that 86 billion cubic feet of natural gas was a feature of the neighborhood. Apparently whatever disclosure guidelines existed in the mid-1980s did not include informing homebuyers of the explosive gas stored nearby at pressures approaching 3,000 pounds per square inch. Pressures so high that when SoCalGas workers first tried to plug the leak by shooting a thick slurry of mud and concrete down the pipe, it exploded right back at them and blew an ugly black crater out of the rock.

Erin Brockovich is on the case now. As is Robert Kennedy Jr. and a host of other lawyers scrambling to represent the residents of Porter Ranch in what are sure to be many lawsuits brought against SoCalGas for alleged mismanagement and endangering the public. Nearly 4,500 households have been relocated to apartments and hotels by the gas company. My former elementary school was closed down after weeks of protests from parents who said their kids were getting sick. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency at Porter Ranch. There are loud and angry calls to permanently shut down the entire Aliso Canyon storage facility.

However, it’s not like the gas company just came in a few years ago and set up shop in Porter Ranch. If anything, the suburbanites are the interlopers. The first oil well at Aliso Canyon was dug in 1918. By the late 30’s oil companies were drilling with gusto and by the 70’s it was mostly all pumped out. (Perhaps James Dean filled his Porsche 550 Spyder with Aliso Canyon oil when he gassed up for the last time in nearby Sherman Oaks.) In 1971 SoCalGas leased some of the empty oil wells to use as natural gas storage reservoirs. This was also when residential construction began in earnest around what was once Benjamin Porter’s ranch. Fast forward to now and Aliso Canyon is one of the largest gas storage fields in the United States, used to supply 22 million people.

I was in high school when the Northridge earthquake rocked Porter Ranch. Unlike many of the houses in my neighborhood, The Aliso Canyon gas storage facility came through the quake seemingly unscathed. And we remained happily unaware that we were living with dangers beyond just shifting tectonic plates. It would have been a different story had we been living in that house in 1968 or 1975, when massive well fires at Aliso Canyon are said to have lit up the San Fernando Valley at night. The ’75 fire was on for 10 days and nights, and let loose a tower of flame 125 feet into the sky. But Porter Ranch was just in the early stages of joining the LA sprawl at that time and my parents were still living in Brooklyn and I wasn’t living at all.

Impossible to say whether knowledge of the gas storage fields would have prevented my parents or anyone else from buying in Porter Ranch. Like most residents of the region, my family enjoys hot showers and cooking eggs and all the other things we depend on natural gas to provide. It’s a parable, but not a terribly complicated one. The things we rely upon for our comfort will be the very things that end up destroying our way of life.

There are more than 100 wells leading down to the natural gas storage reservoirs at Aliso Canyon. About half of the wells are more than 50 years old. The well causing the current problem was drilled in 1953 and is known as SS-25.

In an interesting coincidence of history, SS-25 also happens to be the military designation of a Soviet-era ICBM capable of detonating a nuclear warhead 7,000 miles away from the launch site. The SS-25 is completely mobile and built into a forest green truck to make the missile easy to hide from spy satellites.

SS-25 is a fitting name for the leaking gas well. The threat of something terrible is there, but you can’t see the danger. In fact, you don’t even know it’s there until it detonates over your head. The natural gas leak next door to mom and dad is not quite so dramatic as a nuke, but it does make a person wonder about what other dangers could be lurking nearby, just out of sight. And how one simple thing, like a cracked gas pipe, can destroy the idea of the place we call home.