The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017 Page 20

  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; LAPD 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.”

  The first sign of trouble came on October 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 October 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 October 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 November 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 November 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.

  Conley is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis and the founder of Scientific Aviation. He flies a single-engine Mooney TLS that looks like something Cary Grant might have flown in Only Angels Have Wings. Public agencies, scientists, and nonprofit organizations that study the climate hire Conley to loop over oil and gas fields at low altitudes, measuring methane concentrations with a device called a Picarro analyzer. At 10:30 a.m. on November 5, Conley took off from Lincoln Regional Airport, just north of Sacramento. As a courtesy, O’Connor notified Jill Tracy, the director of environmental services at SoCalGas. He began to receive a flurry of text messages from executives at SoCalGas. They said the flight was unsafe and inappropriate. But SoCalGas was not concerned for the safety of the pilot, as O’Connor first assumed. The executives claimed to be concerned for the workers on the ground, who were operating cranes and drills in an effort to plug the leak. The workers, Tracy wrote, might become distracted by the sight of an airplane overhead, with catastrophic consequences.

  O’Connor found this reasoning odd, because Porter Ranch lies in the flight path of Van Nuys Airport. Nearly 600 flights take off or land there every day. He proposed that the airplane keep one mile away from the well site. SoCalGas executives said they still considered this unsafe. O’Connor asked whether there was a safe distance from the well at which the airplane could fly. The company said there was not. Conley was forced to turn back.

  Two days later, though, Conley was back in the air, this time on assignment for the California Energy Commission. Over the course of the next four months Conley flew 15 flights over the site. On his first flight Conley’s Picarro analyzer registered 50 parts per million. The normal concentration of methane in the atmosphere is two parts per million. Conley thought something was wrong with the instrument. But a backup analyzer gave the same reading. He recalled, “That’s when I said, Oh, my God, this is real.”

  What is real to a climate scientist is abstract to the rest of us. The study of the climate is a study of invisible gases. In order to translate findings to a public lacking a basic understanding of atmospheric chemistry, climatologists must resort to metaphor and allegory. They must become writers, publicists, politicians. This doesn’t always come easily. The leak at Aliso Canyon, Conley discovered, was the largest methane leak in the country’s history. But what did that mean?

  You could begin by comparing emissions from the gas leak at Aliso Canyon with other pollution sites. Conley had logged about 1,500 hours of flight time over oil and gas fields, moonscapes like the Barnett and Eagle Ford Shales in Texas, the Julesburg Basin in Colorado, and the Bakken Formation in North Dakota. The highest methane-emission rate he had ever recorded was three metric tons per hour. The methane was leaking from Aliso Canyon at a rate of 44 metric tons per hour. By Thanksgiving it had increased to 58 metric tons per hour. That is double the rate of methane emissions in the entire Los Angeles Basin. This fact takes some effort to absorb. It means that the steel straw seven inches in diameter plugged into Aliso Canyon was by itself producing twice the emissions of every power plant, oil and gas facility, airport, smokestack, and tailpipe in all of greater Los Angeles combined.

  In a paper published in the February issue of Science, Conl
ey and his coauthors estimate that 97,100 metric tons of methane escaped the Aliso Canyon well in total. Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted—25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon. If well SS-25 were a nation-state, it would have contributed to global climate change at a rate exceeding that of Senegal, Laos, Lithuania, Estonia, Zimbabwe, Albania, Brunei, Slovenia, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica, Latvia, Georgia, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Costa Rica, Honduras, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Iceland. SS-25 would fall just behind Mali.

  These facts, despite their world historical significance, still failed to make much of an impression locally and nationally, let alone internationally. What was one more airborne toxic event at a time when the global climate was itself an airborne toxic event? The World Health Organization has called climate change the greatest global health threat of the 21st century, an opinion shared by the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institutes for Health, among others. By 2030 increased rates of heat stress, infectious-disease transmission, and malnutrition caused by climate change are expected to cause an additional 250,000 deaths a year. Yet as gargantuan as the Aliso Canyon emissions might be, their influence on the climate would have no immediate or direct effect on the lives of the residents of Porter Ranch. Residents were as concerned about the leak’s contribution to atmospheric warming in the years and centuries to come as everyone else on the planet—which is to say, not especially. We are already immersed in leaking invisible gases with largely invisible effects too overwhelming to control. What difference was another Lebanon’s worth of emissions?

  The residents of Porter Ranch were very concerned, however, about what the inhalation of the gas might do to their brains and their lungs. Some residents found the smell of gas so overwhelming that they sealed their windows and doors and refused to go outside. Others could not smell the gas and experienced no symptoms. Sometimes those with severe symptoms and those without lived in the same household. In the absence of reliable information from SoCalGas or state agencies, the residents of Porter Ranch underwent their own transformation: they became amateur scientists, epidemiologists, sociologists, political theorists. They began to develop their own hypotheses.

  “Yellow spots,” Charles Chow said, “are coming out of the atmosphere.”

  I met Chow, a 76-year-old retiree with mirthful eyes and springy joints, in his driveway in late January. He was installing new shocks on his 1992 burgundy Cadillac Brougham Elegante. Beside the Cadillac was a 1986 Silver Spirit Rolls-Royce. In the street, which is called Thunderbird Avenue, there was a 2002 Black Thunderbird. Chow pointed out the spots. They were about the size and color of a yellow split pea. They had appeared on the windshields of his cars, on the Cadillac’s vinyl roof, on the canyon-facing windows of his home.

  Chow first became concerned about the Aliso Canyon leak in October, when Chaka Khan, his Chihuahua/miniature pinscher, began having severe respiratory problems. His wife, Liz, began suffering chronic headaches, eye irritation, and a sore throat. Her doctor said there was nothing he could prescribe her. The only thing she could do, he said, was to leave Porter Ranch. Most of their neighbors fled before Thanksgiving. On their block alone, Chow estimates that 15 households, mostly retirees, relocated. Since then the Chows have driven four times a month to a vacation rental they share on the Baja Peninsula, 60 miles south of the border, “just to get out of the atmosphere,” Chow said. In the Mexican air, Liz’s symptoms vanished.

  Chow was soon joined in his driveway by Rick Goode, a neighbor of 25 years with a slender build and a birdlike gait. Goode wanted Chow’s advice about legal representation: about two dozen plaintiffs’ firms had descended on Porter Ranch since October, competing to sign as many clients as possible. What did Chow think of Robert Kennedy’s firm? Or Weitz & Luxenberg, which had sent Erin Brockovich to solicit clients? The previous week Brockovich told reporters that she “started feeling kind of dizzy” within 10 minutes of arriving in Porter Ranch. Chow ruled her out.

  “You don’t get sick that fast,” he said.

  “I’ve been having terrible headaches,” Goode said. “Have you?”

  “My wife has headaches every day, sore throats,” Chow said. “I don’t. We both live in the same house. Everybody is different.”

  Liz returned from a doctor’s appointment. She removed her sunglasses to reveal a new cyst on her eyelid. She searched for a word to describe her general condition since October. “A malaise,” she said finally.

  Barbara Weiler, 64, who was walking her dog very slowly several blocks away, first experienced the malaise in gym class. “You felt like you were lazy,” she said. “It was obvious when we were using the resistance bands. We felt like we didn’t want to work as much as we normally would.”

  Paula Vasquez found the smell of gas so strong in late October that she was certain there was a leak inside her house. She hasn’t opened a window since. She and her family—she lives with her husband, their 33-year-old daughter, and their 13-year-old grandson—have experienced bloody noses, blurred vision, and nasal congestion. But Vasquez has also noticed other signs. She pointed to fruit trees in her neighbors’ backyard. “I see them picking lemons,” she said. “I don’t say anything, but I’m concerned for them. Is there gas in the fruit?”

  She showed me photographs she made her grandson take on her cell phone while she was driving home on the Ronald Reagan Freeway. In the sky above Porter Ranch, a heavy funnel of clouds was lit neon orange.

  “It looks like a big atomic cloud,” she said. Vasquez had a warm, cheerful manner; horror did not come naturally to her. “Creepy, huh? But I don’t know anything about science.”

  We are a show-me species, wired to look for visible evidence of invisible harm. That impulse can lead a person to blame global warming for a hot day in February or, conversely, make a climate-change denialist find vindication in a snowstorm. But the world’s largest natural-gas leak has no known effects on clouds or lemons. (It may, however, create yellow dots. Michael Jerrett, the director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at UCLA, explained that the dots are most likely a residue of the petroleum-laced slurry used to plug the leak.) The most dangerous threats to our species are precisely those that are most difficult to visualize: long-term, slow to emerge, amorphous. These threats include not only warming temperatures but also mutating viruses and political corruption and tend to be invisible, dimensionless, and pervasive, like death. Like natural gas.

  While the yellow dots were coming out of the atmosphere and staining the vinyl roof of Charles Chow’s Brougham Elegante, the planet was enduring the warmest January on record. It was the fourth consecutive month in which global temperatures beat historical averages by more than one degree Celsius, another novelty. This news, when publicized at all, tended to be accompanied by NASA’s map of the world, overlaid muddily with orange and red splotches denoting temperature increases; otherwise there appeared stock photographs of sunbathers on beaches or icicles melting. Then came February, the warmest month in recorded history. The threat to human civilization is advancing faster than ever before—the climate is warming faster than at any time in the last 65 million years—but all we can see are sunbathers and melting icicles.

  All that the residents in Porter Ranch could see during those months of yawning uncertainty were empty streets and mysterious white vans. They were desperate for answers: Was the gas making them sick? How could they protect themselves? Who would be held responsible? The personal-injury lawyers were well prepared. They offered clarity, assurance, optimism. They could predict, with confidence, the future—a profitable future for the residents of Porter Ranch. Since November
the firms had been holding weekly informational meetings at local churches and hotels. At each session lawyers answered questions from the community, often for several hours at a time, and circulated client forms.

  Rick Goode and the Chows attended one such meeting in late January, two days after their driveway conversation on Thunderbird Avenue. It was hosted by R. Rex Parris at the Hilton in Woodland Hills, about 10 miles south of Porter Ranch. R. Rex Parris belongs to a consortium of law firms that on December 10 filed the first class-action complaint against SoCalGas and its parent company, Sempra Energy, the nation’s largest natural-gas utility, on behalf of hundreds of homeowners. The group’s news release anticipated that the leak would end up costing Sempra shareholders “well over $1 billion.” On this morning, about 20 Porter Ranch residents sat at conference tables, grazing on the free coffee, doughnuts, and bagels. A young lawyer, who seemed to have consumed a large quantity of the coffee, stood at the front of the room, delivering her sales pitch.

  “Anything SoCal tells you,” she said, “don’t listen to it. Everything they say means nothing.”

  She advised the residents to keep daily journals. They were to note each occurrence of a physical symptom or a gas smell and list all expenses incurred by relocation or illness. Someone asked whether he could qualify as a plaintiff even if he lived 10 miles from Aliso Canyon.

  “Nothing’s been established yet,” the lawyer said. “I’ve heard between five and 10 miles. But we don’t have the data yet.”

  “They claim it started on October 23,” one older woman said. “But in April my dog, a boxer, died within two weeks. I know it was the gas.”