Engineer Hailed in Gas Leak Battle

Specks of mud caked his black, double-knit slacks and covered his tassled leather shoes. His silver Member’s Only jacket was zipped tight against a persistent westerly wind, which was doing a good job of mussing his graying hair.

But engineer Ronald J. Lofy emerged as the key figure Tuesday in the city’s battle against a natural methane gas leak that ignited Sunday and blew the roof off a Fairfax business district clothing store, resulting in more than 20 injuries and costing area businesses an estimated $500,000 a day in losses.

Lofy, the head of a local engineering firm, Lockman and Associates, was called in as a primary consultant by the Los Angeles City Fire Department shortly after Sunday’s explosion. His task is to help design a well to release the gas pressure through a controlled burn.

No Guarantee for Future

George Eckert, a spokesman for McFarland Energy Inc., which provided the drilling equipment, said the burning should relieve the underground pressure enough to prevent another immediate explosion but provides no guarantee for the future.

“This may take care of the immediate problem,” Eckert said, “but the area is tremendously active from natural geologic forces. The gas could be coming from a large area” and, because buried methane gas lies close to the surface in the Fairfax area, “there’s no guarantee this can’t happen again.”

It was Lofy’s advice that helped authorities get the upper hand on the situation Tuesday. By early afternoon, flames had stopped leaping out of the ground around the blast site.

Lofy was not alone in the operation. A meeting conducted Monday morning by the Fire Department drew experts from 31 private and public agencies.

But throughout the day Tuesday, Lofy was in the middle of every important meeting as officials groped for the best way to relieve pressure from the underground methane gas buildup.

‘Thorough, Complete Job’

“He drew a lot of respect,” Capt. Tony DiDomenico, a Fire Department spokesman, said. “His answers to questions were always straight and honest and within the realm of possibility. They weren’t scientific pie-in-the-sky theories that nobody could understand. He did a very thorough and complete job for us.”

Lofy, 45, has been involved in similar operations in the area.

His advice helped Farmer’s Insurance gain control over a methane gas buildup under its executive office building on Wilshire Boulevard in 1981. He also was the primary consultant in controlling methane fumes that had seeped into the basement of a condominium complex on Spaulding Avenue near Wilshire Boulevard the same year.

But none of the previous operations compared with the severity of the Fairfax business district explosion.

“This is the worst situation I’ve seen in terms of pressure so close to the surface,” Lofy said Tuesday. “But again, life is full of continual surprises.”

Richard Manuel, an operations engineer with the state Division of Oil and Gas, said the methane gas was building up in a strata of sand that extended from 45 feet to 100 feet below the ground.

“Below the sand is a shale zone, and the gas could be coming from there,” Manuel said. “But it could also be coming from a source a mile away from here. And it’s not necessarily related to oil wells. If it were related to an oil well, and we knew which one, we could take remedial action. But it’s been extremely difficult to find out what the cause is.”

Amid the consultations over how best to relieve the pressure from the gas--which was measured at 27 pounds per square inch at one point Monday--the Fire Department, on Lofy’s advice, decided to reduce it by drilling a single well near the site of Sunday’s explosion.

In the predawn hours Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Public Works Department began digging, constantly pouring mud into the well--which eventually measured 78 feet deep and 12 inches in diameter--to keep the gas from rising to the surface.

Early in the drilling operation, a surge of gas blew the mud back up the hole, splattering dirt and water into the eyes of an engineer, who was treated at a hospital and released.

“I don’t know if they got a pressure surge (from the gas) or what,” Manuel said.

The partial blowout of the well seemed to mark a turning point of sorts in the operation. Authorities noted that the gas pressure began to subside after the incident involving the engineer.

Workmen later sealed the pipe firmly in the well with a cement mixture, then poured a liquid additive down the pipe to loosen the sand containing the methane. That allowed the gas to follow the path of least resistance through the perforations and to the surface.

Authorities had to wait for the cement to dry before they could install the 12-foot flare stacks on the well, which they were to ignite Tuesday night in order to burn off the gas pressure.

“We have good expectations that it will work well,” Lofy said. “We expect to see a drop in the pressure--and the hazard--within 6 to 24 hours. But there may be a recharge to this cavity. There’s quite a big area flooding into here. But the situation at the top will stabilize, and we’ll know within 24 hours what we’re dealing with.”

Times staff writers Sandy Banks and Larry B. Stammer contributed to this article.