Explosive Gas Still Imperils Fairfax Area, Experts Say : Methane: Underground pockets of the ‘potential dynamite’ persist, igniting controversy over where it seeps from and how the problem should be remedied.

Almost five years after a cloud of methane gas ignited in the basement of a Fairfax District clothing store and injured 23 people, underground concentrations of methane still pose a significant explosion threat in the area, some geologists and petroleum experts say.

“I believe what happened there will happen soon again--and again and again,” said George V. Chilingar, a petroleum engineering professor at USC, in a deposition taken to support an upcoming lawsuit. “Based on all the information I have here, it’s potential dynamite.”

Joseph W. Cobarrubias, a geologist for the city of Los Angeles, agrees that the methane problem persists despite city efforts to deal with it in the last five years. He said he believes another explosion is “kind of a remote possibility,” but a task force he heads has nonetheless recommended that the city install an improved system of venting pipes in the threatened area to prevent methane from accumulating in explosive concentrations.

“Nobody here can say it can’t happen again,” said Cobarrubias, whose task force was set up after another methane scare closed off a one-mile stretch of 3rd Street for two days last February.

In a report that is about to go to the City Council, the group recommends that a set of venting pipes be sunk into the ground to provide a harmless way out for pockets of gas that build up beneath parking lots, streets and buildings, especially at the corner of 3rd Street and Ogden Drive, where both methane incidents took place.

After the 1985 fire, the city marked off a 400-block area as a potential risk zone and a smaller area of about a square mile closer to the blast site as a “high potential risk” zone. The high-risk zone includes such landmarks as the Farmers Market, the county art and archeological museums, La Brea Tar Pits and the huge Park Labrea apartment complex.

The City Council adopted an assortment of safety requirements aimed at preventing a recurrence, including the installation of gas detectors in all dwellings with basements in the high-risk zone.

Now, the task force recommends that stores and public buildings near the explosion site be required to install methane detection and venting systems that would disperse dangerous concentrations of gas whenever they occur.

Still unresolved is the question of where the gas is coming from, a question that is shaping up as a central issue in the lawsuit filed by the 23 people burned or otherwise injured in the March 24, 1985, blast and fire at the Ross Dress-For-Less shop.

Affixing Liability

The principal defendants in the suit, which is scheduled for trial in April, are McFarland Energy Inc., which operates some oil wells in the area, and Park Labrea Associates, owner of the shopping center where the explosion occurred. The city of Los Angeles, also named in the original suit, has settled out of court with the victims.

Cobarrubias said the task force was less concerned with the source of the methane than with how to prevent another explosion in the area, which sits atop the Salt Lake oil field. The field was a major source of petroleum in the early decades of the century, but now supports only a few producing wells.

Cobarrubias said that an 80-foot-deep cast-iron ventilation pipe installed after the 1985 blast turned out to be useless during the latest incident, when an underground concentration of rainwater apparently forced a pocket of methane to the surface through cracks in the asphalt of a parking lot.

“That one (pipe) filled up with water,” the city’s staff geologist said. The new venting system recommended by the city task force calls for three 52-foot-deep pipes. Once they are in place, Cobarrubias said, “I’m hoping the water will blow the gas out. And if not, then I did my best.

“Whether it’s deep or shallow gas, it’ll vent the same, and to control it is the important thing,” he said.

In the multimillion-dollar lawsuit, scheduled for trial in April, Chilingar and other experts for the plaintiffs are expected to argue that McFarland Energy oil well operations caused the rise of methane gas from deposits of petroleum in sedimentary rock 4,000 feet beneath the surface. McFarland operates 42 slant-drilled wells from a yard known as the Gilmore drilling island near the Farmers Market.

The oil company has lined up geologists, chemists and petroleum engineers of its own, who will attempt to show that the methane is most likely a waste product of goo-gobbling bacteria that feed on odd pockets of oil left behind by earlier drilling in the Salt Lake field.

“The activity of McFarland has absolutely nothing to do with what happened under the property where the explosion occurred,” said Fritz Seitz, an attorney representing the company, which takes about 400 barrels a day from the oil field.

“Drilling has been reduced to an absolute trickle at this point in time,” he said. “The evidence eventually will show that the gas came either from an oil sump located underneath the store or from some organic matter at a fairly shallow depth compared to where the wells are.”

Attorneys for Park Labrea Associates, meanwhile, are expected to present testimony that the 1985 explosion could not have been anticipated because no one was aware of the danger until the blast occurred.

Geologists concluded after the explosion that methane had gathered under a layer of clay about 40 feet beneath the surface, then spilled up through layers of sand and gravel to a basement room in the Ross store, where it gathered until a spark set it off.

“Nobody really knew about those hazards before those hazards occurred,” said Daniel Hoffman, attorney for Park Labrea Associates, which was owned at the time by the May Co. stores. Hoffman also represents the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., which sold its share in Park Labrea two months before the blast.

The area, much of which was a dairy farm before it was an oil field, has been known for centuries as a source of oil and gas. Even today, occasional bubbles release tiny amounts of methane as they pop in the muck of the La Brea Tar Pits.

Oil drilling began in 1902, and the Salt Lake oil field was once the site of 528 wells. The field was abandoned in the 1920s, and the Fairfax District became a thickly populated residential and commercial district. McFarland’s wells were drilled by a predecessor company in the 1960s, when new technology had made additional extraction feasible.

Within a few blocks of the blast site, the Park Labrea apartment complex now is home to about 10,000 people. The CBS Television City complex is not far away.

Hundreds of Mediterranean-style, single-family houses line nearby streets. Their lawns allow occasional puffs of methane to escape harmlessly into the atmosphere, but the acres of asphalt and concrete in the immediate vicinity of the Farmers Market act as a lid where once there was nothing but dirt.

Although planners of the Metro Rail abandoned the area as a route for the subway because of the methane hazard, major shopping, hotel and office projects have been proposed at the Farmers Market property and on four nearby parcels owned by Forest City Properties Corp., the company that now operates Park Labrea Associates together with the May Co.

Cobarrubias said that, from his point of view, any new development would be a good thing because the owners would be required to install venting systems that would reduce the chance of methane buildups.

The city’s staff geologist said he considered both the bacteria theory and oil wells in drawing up his soon-to-be-released report, but eventually came down on the side of the tiny organisms.

“The origin, surprisingly, is a very complicated subject because of all the things that can happen,” he said.

Search for the Source

The gas can dissipate very quickly, which makes it hard to determine where it came from, or it can lose telltale chemical elements as it filters through porous rock or underground pools of water. And when the microbes make methane out of pockets of oil near the surface, its characteristics are much like those of gases that migrate up from deposits thousands of feet deep.

The task force based its conclusions on a study by the state’s Division of Oil and Gas, which used data gathered when Metro Rail officials were planning its original route along Wilshire Boulevard and up Fairfax Avenue.

“There is no indication it is coming up from any oil wells,” said R. K. Baker, district deputy at the state agency’s Long Beach office.

But Matthew B. F. Biren, attorney for the plaintiffs, said his experts will use gas chromatography and other scientific tools to show that the explosive concentration came from sedimentary rock nearly a mile underground. Chromatography allows experts to determine the age and origin of gas specimens by analyzing their chemical composition.

He said he will argue that the methane’s move to the surface was hastened by the removal of oil, natural gas and water from the field, and by the injection of gas, waste water and acid solutions back into the oil-bearing layers.

Gas and water are often byproducts of oil production. Oil drillers often inject them back into the ground, either to simply dispose of them or in an effort to maintain pressure on underground petroleum deposits to keep the oil flowing.

Biren said the evidence will show that because oil extraction “has continued unabated . . . methane gas continues to exist in explosive levels (and) it is sheer happenstance that methane gas has not accumulated in a controlled area where it could be ignited.”

According to production records, as many as 560,000 barrels of water were returned to the earth through one well in the five years before the March 24, 1985, blast, and the injection of water was doubled in the year before the explosion.

Pretrial testimony also showed that as many as 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas were returned to the ground over several years before 1971. This, together with the water, could have had an unsettling effect on the underground deposits and sent quantities of methane floating to the surface, the plaintiffs’ geologists contend.

But Fleet Rust, a chemist who is scheduled to testify for the defense, said that bacteria can easily use shallow-lying oil as a food source, eventually breaking it down to carbon dioxide, which other bacteria can transform into methane.

Complicating the situation is the area’s occasional seismic activity and the presence of two active faults, one running under 6th Street and the other under 3rd Street. The 3rd Street fault rises to the surface near the site of the Ross store at 3rd and Ogden.

“One of the worst things an oil company can do is to inject gas in a highly fractured area underground without making sure that the injected gas would remain where it is injected,” said M. R. Tek, an expert on gas migration who will testify for the victims.

But Seitz, attorney for McFarland, said the fault lines in fact prevented the migration of gas from the area of the company’s oil wells to the site of the Ross store.

McFarland Energy is a small but growing company that reported revenues of $11.5 million and profits of $1.2 million in the first nine months of 1989.

Other defendants, including the city of Los Angeles, have already settled for a total of about $440,000, Biren said.

The city attorney’s office estimated last summer, when the Los Angeles City Council decided to settle its share of the case for $75,000, that damages resulting from a jury verdict in favor of the plaintiffs would probably exceed $3 million.

UNDERGROUND DANGER

Underground concentrations of methane gas still pose a serious threat in the Fairfax District, nearly five years after a methane explosion in the basement of the Ross Dress-for-Less store on 3rd Street injured 23 people, according to city and private geologists. According to a city task force, the greatest threat exists in an area of approximately a square mile that includes the Park Labrea apartment complex, the county museums and Farmers Market.