On Jan. 7, 2016, the governor of California declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County due to a methane leak.
The leak started three months ago at the Southern California Gas Company. The source of the leak is from an apparent broken injection pipe. Due to the nature of the leak, everything that officials have done has not worked, and they fear that applying more pressure to the pipe will further damage it and worsen the leak. Over 2,000 families have been relocated since October, after reports that the leak caused feelings of sickness.
This methane leak accounts for a quarter of the state's emissions of methane. According to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), over eighty thousand metric tons of methane have been released since Oct. 23, when the leak began. The fund's website also has a real-time count on the leaked methane, and it's increasing every second. To show you the rate in which it is rising, the count increased three entire points while I was writing this article.
And I doubt that most, if any, of you readers have even heard of this leak. The Environmental Defense Fund has stated that about 62 million standard cubic feet of methane per day is being released, and it is "the same short-term greenhouse gas impact as the emissions from 7 million cars," and very few people know about what is happening. The leak has even been called the biggest leak since the BP Oil Spill in 2010, and nobody knows about it.
Nevertheless, this leak is a major problem. According to EDF's Director of Oil and Gas Timothy O'Connor, "the plume is about 1,000-feet high and several miles long," and the leak is "one of the biggest ever recorded." The EDF recently released a bird’s-eye, infrared version of new footage recently taken, showing the leak. The video can be seen here.
The leak has serious implications, as methane is a greenhouse gas, and EDF Chief Scientist Steven Hamburg says that "emitting just a little bit of methane greatly accelerates the rate of climactic change." That means that this leak is a huge contributor. The California Air Resources Board has likewise stated that methane is much shorter lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but the impact of methane "can be tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times greater than that."
Roughly translated, this methane leak is a huge issue, and will continue to affect people and the environment. The consequences of this occurrence will be felt for a long time to come, and it hasn't even stopped yet.
