Aliso Canyon, 10 years later

After a natural gas blowout, progress is made and promises are broken

- HAYLEY SMITH

THE facility’s relief well on Dec. 17, 2015. For 112 days, the facility spewed an estimated 120,000 tons of methane and toxic chemicals.

On an evening 10 years ago, Porter Ranch resident Matt Pakucko stepped out of his music studio and was walloped by the smell of gas — like sticking your head in an oven, he recalled.

Pakucko called the fire department. It turned out crews had already been up to the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility in the Santa Susana Mountains behind the neighborhood, responding to a report of a leak. Many of his neighbors were beginning to feel ill, reporting issues such as heart palpitations, vomiting, burning eyes and bloody noses.

"I swear I thought I was standing behind a 747 with its engines blowing — it was not just gas, it was oil smell, it was chemical smell that permeated," recalled Pakucko, who went on to co-found the advocacy group Save Porter Ranch. "I couldn't stay out there for 30 seconds. It tasted like f-gasoline."

Soon it was clear that this wasn't just a leak — it was a blowout. Over the course of 112 days, the Aliso Canyon facility would spew an estimated 120,000 tons of methane and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. It was the worst natural-gas well blowout in U.S. history, and an environmental disaster whose effects will be unpacked for generations.

The event was widely seen as a wake-up call to the dangers of methane and underground natural gas storage. Methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, is about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide and is responsible for about a quarter of all the human-caused climate change we are experiencing. A study published by UCLA researchers last month found that women in their final trimester of pregnancy who were living within 6.2 miles downwind of the blowout in 2015 had a nearly 50% higherthan-expected chance of having a low birth-weight baby.