L.A.’s Eternal Flame Symbolizes Life’s Calculated Risks

Explosive new findings across Southern California--print at 11!

Isn’t that a lot more enticing than “officials fear methane deposits around the Southland may jeopardize developments”?

So as long as you’ve started reading, glance down for a moment.

Below your feet, within a few yards or a few miles of where you are, is a shifting subterranean world, vast webs of earthquake faults great and small, pocked at intervals with sacs and pools of oil and natural gas and methane, substances that are often as inseparable as the Three Stooges.

Every once in a while, those substances burst forth into our world, sometimes in ways we want, like the Signal Hill oil field that, on a June night in 1920, announced its presence in a black spume 11 stories high . . . and sometimes in ways we don’t, like the explosion in the Fairfax district in March 1985, when methane and a little oxygen and a pinprick spark met up and, whoosh, a store was leveled and 21 people were hurt. Thereafter, the Red Line route along Wilshire Boulevard was reconfigured around a “methane danger zone” of about 400 blocks.

In Cleveland, it was the river that caught fire. Here, it’s the ground that did, and still can. In one spot in Newport Beach, locals stuck pipes in the earth to tap the methane gas, and lighted the other ends like tiki torches.

In Ventura County this week, $6 million changed hands in a lawsuit over an oil field accident that killed three workers and hurt two others after their drill struck a deep pocket and unleashed a geyser of methane and water.

In Ontario and Chino, there are big plans for raising up spiffy new subdivisions on nearly 10,000 acres that were once the exclusive terrain of dairy cows--plans that are now in question because cows make manure, and manure makes methane, and methane can make people sick, and can, once in a while, make things go boom. That was fine as long as the cows were there, because methane can percolate safely through earth and greenery, but if enough of it builds up under a solid seal like asphalt or concrete, as a Los Angeles city geologist reported in 1990, even a pilot light or a light switch could bring on a biggish bang.

There are methane deposits under the Belmont Learning Center, one of the reasons the place now stands as abandoned as a medieval crusader’s castle.

And there is methane under the thousand-plus waterfront acres of Playa Vista, the largest single development project in Los Angeles’ history. For that reason the city’s budget and finance committee is now pulling at the reins and crying “whoa” on the city’s pledge to issue $135 million in low-interest bonds to help Playa Vista developers put in the roads and storm drains that those future 30,000 Playa Vistans will certainly expect before they plunk down their money for houses and condos.

So seriously is the city taking a recent study of earthquake-methane-hydrogen sulfide risks at Playa Vista that next Tuesday evening, the chief legislative analyst’s office is holding public hearings to find out more before the city commits big dough to the project.

Every soul in City Hall is acutely aware of the Belmont fiasco, and they have all seen enough bad Hollywood sequels to know that not one of them wants to bear the blame for producing “Beach Blanket Belmont.”

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Methane--if you could see it or smell it, it’d be displayed on the city flag, L.A.’s eternal flame. Like smog or seismic shocks or sewage milkshakes in the surf, it epitomizes the calculated risks of living here.

But if every new building and road is a calculated risk, who is doing the calculating, and for whose benefit? With Belmont, we have a skittish school board voting to shut the place down, yet Supervisor Gloria Molina offers $1 million to finish up studies on finishing Belmont; the unpalatable calculated risk here is that students may encounter more hazards in the street walking to Belmont than they would find at Belmont.

In the boom years, when earthquakes were opaque mysteries, and people prayed to strike oil in their frontyards, whole cities rose up on seismic faults and oil sumps. Now we know more, but do we know any better?

It should. But if it doesn’t, we’ll have to rely on existing law, in this case Proposition 65, requiring the posting of notice of toxic substances. “Welcome to Los Angeles--enter at your own risk.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.