Stopped!! Methane Blow-Out. Radioactive Fall-out. And … The Predictable Result.
By Brett Redmayne-Titley
This past Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016 brought a welcome breath of fresh air to more than 4400 displaced Porter Ranch, CA residents. It was their first in more than four months. A mile or so due north and a thousand feet farther up the foothills of the Santa Susana mountains in Aliso Canyon, the nation’s worst environmental and health disaster since BP, has stopped. Natural gas well, SS-25 is dead.
After depositing more than 90 million metric tons of a very toxic gaseous cocktail from two miles deep under the mountains up into the atmosphere above 18.5 million mostly unsuspecting Angelenos, the corporate players who have caused this disaster are now assuring this same public that they are, suddenly, protecting their interests. As highlighted in the previous article, the negligent corporate criminals at the Southern California Gas Company hold the keys to the jail and the purported guards over at the California agencies; PUC, DOGGR and the Dept. of Conservation are sound asleep in their chairs. Now, with pending legal and legislative action heading downwind towards So Cal Gas, continued close public scrutiny is warranted. Considering that these same public agencies were all negligently complicit in causing the Aliso Canyon disaster, can they now be trusted to change their spots and enforce meaningful changes upon So Cal Gas?
Like the natural gas flowing downhill from Aliso Canyon the growing plethora of damaging information against So Cal Gas funnels together down a central path. Two points generally sum-up the accusations leveled squarely at multiple defendants, many of whom will almost certainly be bearing witness very soon. In court. First; owner of SS-25, the Southern California Gas Company, caused the disaster by willful negligence. Second; that this negligence was subordinated by multiple California State public officials. As the previous article shows, starting with the Calif. state agencies, P.U.C.[Public Utilities Commission]; DOGGR [Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources], and the California Department of Conservation – and likely leading to “environmental” governor, Jerry Brown’s telephone – So Cal Gas has been given unregulated carte blanche to put their corporate profits before concerns for public and environmental health and safety. Multiple lawsuits may soon ferret-out the details of these inescapable conclusions.
At issue; the removal, rather than replacement, of a “Sub-Surface Safety Valve” on SS-25 of which So Cal Gas, in 1979, reported to state regulators that it had indeed replaced the safety valve. Then, in 2014, So Cal Gas filed a fraudulent inspection report with the Conservation Dept. certifying that the valves were in place and had also passed inspection. With the Aliso Canyon Underground Storage Facility holding over 160 billion cubic feet of highly pressurized, very toxic gas, and the potential risks showcased for the past one-hundred-twenty-plus days in epic evidence, the necessity of safety valves is obvious. So … how many of the other 114 aging wells are also missing safety valves? In defending this apparent negligence Rodger Schwecke, of So Cal Gas, said in a public meeting last month that the company decided not to replace it [the safety valve] because it was not a “critical well.” Reportedly, according to state law, Critical Wells are defined as those being 300-feet-or-less from homes or schools. What? After hiking up the steep hills to witness the full horrifying magnitude of SS-25 up-close, the sheer lunacy of such a regulation is pause for retching disgust.
http://www.activistpost.com/2016/02/stopped-methane-blow-out-radioactive-fall-out-and-the-predictable-result.html
