by Hope Jahren
“It was earlier than October 23,” the lawyer said. “I just don’t know when. We want it to be as early as possible, so we can get much more money for everyone.”
The residents nodded in approval.
The lawyer explained that about 30 attorneys were assigned to the case. The firms would receive as their fee 30 percent of any payouts. “We’re predicting a settlement,” she said.
A Russian man who resembled Gérard Depardieu exclaimed, “I escaped Chernobyl for this!”
The man, Igor Volochkov, later told me that in 1986 he moved from Kiev, 60 miles south of Chernobyl, to Los Angeles when his wife was pregnant with their son. “We ran away to save our lives and the lives of our children.”
Volochkov said he knew something was wrong in October, when his parrot, Bon, dropped dead. He bought a new parrot and a parakeet, Gosha and Margosha, but they died within a month. The same thing happened in Kiev, when, he said, nuclear radiation from Chernobyl killed his parakeet Petruschka. Volochkov said his son had asked why they moved from one Chernobyl to another Chernobyl.
“Maybe,” Volochkov replied, “our destiny is to fight against Chernobyls.”
In mid-November, nearly a month into the leak, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ordered SoCalGas to pay for new housing for anyone affected by the gas odors. Nearly 6,000 households, about half of Porter Ranch’s population, accepted the offer, moving to hotels, apartments, and houses in surrounding neighborhoods. Those who did not relocate immediately struggled to find available short-term rental properties, but others took advantage of the gas company’s largess. Charles Chow said he knew a family paying $10,000 in monthly rent. “People are gouging the gas company,” he said. “I don’t believe in unfair practice. I was a businessman. I think fair is fair. All I might take is reimbursement for money I’ve had to pay the vet for Chaka Khan.”
Jerry McCormack, another neighbor of the Chows, has rarely detected an odor and has not been sick. “I think there’s a lot of foolishness going on,” he said. “This is not Fukushima. The rental market has gone crazy. Everyone is out to get the gas company. The hysteria is proportional to the number of lawyers coming to town.” He conceded that his wife, who is recovering from cancer, “can smell it quite well” and is concerned. Her oncologist advised her to leave.
Adam and Mindi Grant, a couple in their mid-40s, live a mile from the leak site. Their three children play basketball and swim outside. “We’ve legitimately smelled it one day,” Adam said. “We joke about it. Every time someone gets a bloody nose, we say, It’s the gas!”
Adam teaches world history at a local high school. Mindi is an insurance lawyer. “I have friends with real symptoms,” she said. “Some, maybe not. They’re setting up for a money grab. They think there’s big money, deep pockets. But they’re going to have trouble showing causation.”
“Had the smell been horrific,” Adam said, “we would have relocated. But because it’s not affecting us as a family, I’m a little lackadaisical about it.”
If the smell of gas makes one person dizzy while the neighbor next door can’t smell anything, is one of them lying? If a man does not actually inhale gas but develops headaches and nausea anyway, is his suffering any less? Disaster psychiatrists call this phenomenon somatization, a word that has replaced hysteria and psychosomatic, terms now considered offensive. “In manmade disasters, the psychological consequences can be very severe and ongoing,” David Eisenman, the director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters at UCLA, told me. “Unexposed individuals can have symptoms similar to people who have exposure.” Fear makes you sick. As it turns out, inhaling poisonous gas causes the same symptoms as the fear of inhaling poisonous gas: headaches, dizziness, and nausea.
Porter Ranch residents had reason to be afraid. Nobody could tell them what they were breathing. Methane was gushing from the leak, of this they could be certain, but methane was not what they smelled. Methane is odorless. What they smelled were mercaptans: sulfur compounds that in nature are released in animal feces. Mercaptans are added to natural-gas pipelines to provide an olfactory alarm in case a leak occurs, the way banks insert exploding dye packs into bags of cash. Inhalation of mercaptans can cause headaches, dizziness, and nausea, but like methane, they are not currently known to cause significant long-term health effects. The main health concern about the leak was that other, more toxic gases might also be escaping from the bowels of Aliso Canyon—including gases remaining from its previous life as an oil field.
Chief among these was benzene, a known carcinogen. Los Angeles air, among the most polluted in the nation, tends to have a background concentration of benzene between 0.1 and 0.5 parts per billion. The World Health Organization has declared that “no safe level of exposure can be recommended.” In November readings taken by SoCalGas near its facility found benzene concentrations fluctuating wildly between 0.3 ppb and a nightmarish 30.6; readings taken by the company in Porter Ranch shot as high as 5.5 ppb. Other toxic gases—toluene, xylene, hexane, and hydrogen sulfides—were also detected at higher-than-normal concentrations. The South Coast Air Quality Management District also tested the air quality in the first two months of the leak, but the monitoring was sporadic and conducted at only a handful of locations in the community. By mid-January, after efforts to depressurize the well had managed to reduce the leakage rate considerably, a more rigorous study by Michael Jerrett of UCLA found that the air in Porter Ranch was in fact unusually clean—most likely because of the absence of so many residents and their cars.
California health officials believe that there will be no long-term health effects from the leak. “Increased cancer risk is very small,” said Dr. Melanie Marty, the acting deputy director for scientific affairs for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. “Much smaller than routine risks we experience every day.” But Jerrett suspects that during the first six weeks of the leak, when the gas escaped at a much higher rate, conditions might have been dangerous, particularly for children and older residents. On March 10, following complaints from relocated residents who suffered nosebleeds and skin rashes after moving back home, Jerrett took dust samples at seven houses in Porter Ranch. Two contained benzene and hexane, a finding that Jerrett found “concerning.”
The actual composition of the gas was only the beginning of what the residents of Porter Ranch did not know about the invisible fumes seeping from Aliso Canyon. They did not know how far the gas was drifting or in what quantities. It seemed that the smell was stronger the higher you went up the mountain and stronger at dusk and dawn, but there was little data to support this. There was also the mystery of the complex local wind patterns, which resemble those of no other part of the Los Angeles Basin and change direction capriciously.
No one even knew what had caused the leak in the first place, though a broken safety valve, removed by SoCalGas in 1979 and never replaced, received some blame. In 2012, President Obama signed a pipeline-safety bill that should have prevented a leak of this kind. But in Aliso Canyon the new regulations were not enforced. “We have the law, but no one is complying,” said Mel Rei-ter, the editor of The Valley Voice, a monthly newspaper that may be the only local business to profit from the leak: more plaintiffs’ law firms sought full-page ads than it has pages. “There are 115 active wells, and more than two-thirds were built before 1980,” Reiter said. “If one is leaking, what are the odds that 30 more are, or will soon?”
Regulations are in place, but nobody knows who can enforce them. When Matt Pakucko, a lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, first smelled the leak on October 24, he called SoCalGas. He was told that the company was merely “releasing gas into the air,” which was “something that they do periodically,” and that there wasn’t a leak. He knew that the South Coast Air Quality Management District was responsible for investigating air-quality complaints. But SoCalGas, a private utility, did not fall under the regulatory oversight of any single agency. Besides the Air Quality Management Distr
ict, agencies responsible for responding to the leak included the State Energy Commission, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the Air Resources Board, the Public Utilities Commission, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health, the Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the County Fire Department, and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. In January the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called for the creation of yet another regulatory “structure” to oversee gas-storage facilities.
For most Porter Ranch residents, all this confusion added up to a single fact: an invisible gas was threatening their lives. “We don’t know what methane is,” said Sam Kustanovich, a Belarussian pawnbroker who had the misfortune of buying his house two months before the leak was detected. “Nobody knows. It could mean explosions. Me, I’m afraid of explosions.”
The global climate, even in drought-stricken Southern California, is not an especially consequential campaign issue. A menacing disaster that causes mass vomiting and mass nosebleeds in a wealthy, vote-rich community, however, is a candidate’s dream. In this election season the procession of scientists and lawyers heading to Porter Ranch has been trailed by a caravan of Californian politicians. None have come out in favor of mass nosebleeds. Though the 25th Congressional District reaches only its pinkie toe into Porter Ranch, Bryan Caforio, a Democrat, has made the leak a central issue of the election, which promises to be one of few closely contested races in the House. The Republican incumbent, Steve Knight, who has received campaign donations from Sempra Energy, said in December that he was confident that SoCalGas was “working on this as diligently as they can” but more recently called for a congressional hearing on the matter and introduced safety regulations for natural-gas storage. Even the Los Angeles County supervisor, Michael Antonovich, a Republican who has voted consistently against regulation efforts, has loudly proclaimed his determination to hold SoCalGas responsible.
“We’re all kind of feeding on it in a weird way,” said Henry Stern, a Democrat who is running for state senate in the local district. He previously served as an adviser on energy and climate policy for the district’s current senator, Fran Pavley, a Democrat who cannot run again because of term limits. “How often are there climate disasters in suburbia?”
Stern has been struck at community meetings by the comments of local residents, many of them self-identifying conservatives, who have begun to question the wisdom of relying on fossil fuels. “Climate change is not a real thing for most of these people,” Stern said. “But you change your mind quick when your kids are puking.”
The only politician who has failed to use the gas leak for political gain is Governor Jerry Brown. His Office of Emergency Services, following protocol, began monitoring the leak in October and began coordinating the state’s response in mid-November, overseeing the various state agencies responsible for responding to it. On December 18, Brown sent a stern letter to the chief executive of SoCalGas, urging cooperation and demanding accountability. “Everything that could be done under the authority of the governor was being done,” Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, told me. But Brown made no public statement until January, when he toured the SoCalGas facility and met privately with four members of the local Neighborhood Council; this was 10 weeks into the leak and a month after he attended the United Nations climate talks in Paris, where he boasted of California’s emissions-reduction plan, the most ambitious in North America. Brown declared a state of emergency in Aliso Canyon on January 6, but for many in Porter Ranch, that wasn’t nearly soon enough.
“We’re suffering because Jerry Brown is so not involved in this,” Matt Pakucko said. “There he was in Paris, saying look how green California is, while 10 years of green stuff is going into the air right now.”
Ghilarducci disputes this. “This concept that nothing happened and the governor was not engaged until he issued a state of emergency on January 6 is just absolutely not correct,” he said. “Let’s face it: we deal with so many emergencies out here. This is not Vermont, this is not Oklahoma, where you have a state the size of Sacramento County. This is a nation-state.” He continued, “The governor is very confident that he doesn’t need to be on the scene, holding a press conference, to show that he’s doing something.”
The governor’s reputation in Porter Ranch was not helped by the revelation that his younger sister, Kathleen Brown, is a paid board member of SoCalGas’s parent company, Sempra Energy. “I’m sure there’s a conflict of interest,” Rick Goode said. “My feeling is it’s an ‘I scratch your back, and you scratch mine.’ It concerns me.” In 2013 and 2014, Kathleen Brown received $456,245 in compensation, including stock awards. A partner at the firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, she also has, according to the Public Accountability Initiative, a $949,653 stake in the Forestar Group, a real estate and natural-resources company, where she is a director and major shareholder. Forestar is developing Hidden Creeks Estates, a gated community of 188 luxury homes, right next to Porter Ranch, on property abutting Sempra’s.
Kathleen Brown’s office at Manatt referred me to Doug Kline, the director of corporate communications for Sempra Energy, who would not give a specific comment on Brown’s role. But he said, “Our entire board of directors has been actively engaged and regularly briefed on the Aliso Canyon incident.” Deborah Hoffman, Jerry Brown’s deputy press secretary, wrote in a statement that any implication that the state did not exercise “its full regulatory and oversight authority” was “scurrilous and irresponsible.”
SoCalGas announced on February 18 that the well had been sealed. Chris Gilbride, a spokesman for SoCalGas, wrote in an email, “Throughout the incident, air samples for benzene and other compounds were found to be at or near levels seen in the rest of the county and below levels of concern.” He continued, “The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has consistently reported that no long-term health effects are expected due to the leaking well.” In late February many residents, including Rick Goode and Igor Volochkov, said they still smelled gas or still suffered symptoms. “Maybe SS-25 is capped,” said Kyoko Hibino, Matt Pakucko’s girlfriend. “But I think there is still something seeping up from underground. I think other wells are continuing to leak. The smell is still pretty strong. It is out there still.”
It is uncertain whether the residents of Porter Ranch will experience health effects in the long term. It is certain that the atmosphere will experience long-term effects. But the effects will be as indecipherable as a plume of colorless gas leaked into a windswept canyon. How do we make sense of the addition to the atmosphere of thousands of tons of invisible gases that will have semi-invisible effects on us and only slightly more visible effects on generations we won’t live to see?
“If you compare the Aliso Canyon leak to other leaks,” said Stephen Conley, the aviator-scientist, “it’s top dog. It’s a monster. It throws off LA’s emissions for the year. It’s a significant percentage of California’s annual carbon budget. But it’s about 0.002 percent of the global methane budget. It’s not like next year will be warmer because of Aliso Canyon.”
This is true. It’s not like next year will be warmer because of the car trips that Porter Ranch residents make to their temporary rental homes, or the gas they use to cook dinner, or the energy required to heat their swimming pools. Next year won’t be warmer because of the 200,000 airplanes passing through Van Nuys Airport. Next year won’t even be warmer, necessarily, because of the roughly 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas that oil companies flare into the atmosphere. But next year will be warmer.
CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON
The Devil Is in the Details
FROM Outside
The American West is our handsome conundrum—too beautiful to use, too useful to be left alone, as a Colorado journalist once put it. In the past the landscape seemed so enormous that conflicti
ng dreams could find room in its whistling emptiness. Now there’s not much left that we haven’t touched, and we argue about how to manage what remains—a quarrel over whose dreams should come first.
Nowhere is the argument louder than in the creased country of eastern Utah, a place you know even if you’ve never been there: stone arch and sunburned canyon, perfect desert sky. The area is home to marquee national parks like Arches and Canyonlands, but much more of it exists as sprawls of federal land that taken together are larger than many eastern states. Some people look at the region’s deep slots, peaks, and antelope flats and are inspired to protect them from development. Others hunger for what lies beneath: natural gas, oil, and potash.
If conservation is a tricky project in today’s rural West, with a resurgent Sagebrush Rebellion leading to events like the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, it’s particularly confounding in Utah, where for the better part of a century a war over wilderness has been fought. Recently, during travels through small eastern Utah towns like Moab and Vernal and Blanding, I met more than one Utahan whose pioneer ancestors had arrived by wagon train and who still couldn’t bring themselves to utter the word wilderness, famously defined in the 1964 Wilderness Act as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Instead they called it “the W-word,” and they spat it out when they said it. In Utah more than other states, environmentalists and their foes wield just enough power to stymie each other. The toll has been great: enemies have grown gray squatting in the same trenches their fathers dug, and still the land remains unconquered by either side.
In early 2013 a conservative Utah congressman named Rob Bishop sent a letter to more than 20 groups in both camps of the wilderness wars. He said to them, simply, Tell me what you want. He proposed using their responses to frame an ambitious “grand bargain” designed to end the state’s wilderness disputes. In Bishop’s hoped-for compromise—officially known as the Public Lands Initiative—everybody would get some of what they desired, as long as they were willing to negotiate. Conservationists could potentially protect the largest amount of wilderness acreage in a generation—a Vermont-size array of wildlands that would be free from development forever—including places whose names are talismanic to desert rats: Desolation Canyon, Indian Creek, Labyrinth Canyon. And the conservative counties of eastern Utah would get some assurances that more motorized recreation and future development would be allowed to happen on other public lands, along with the economic benefits those projects promise to deliver.