Hi folks. Let's talk natural gas. You've heard of the Aliso Canyon storage facility, notorious for the methane leak in 2015/16 - the worst in United States history. That facility is located in Porter Ranch on top of a mountain just west of Mission Point. At ground level, it would be just a few miles from Northridge. If you are a curious person, like me, you remember that leak, and you ask, "Where did all that methane come from?" Then you Google and find out it is stored, with other natural gas products, in huge underground caverns (up to two miles below ground!) which were once filled with crude oil that was extracted by refineries in the early 20th century. When the oil was all pumped out, in came The Southern California Gas Co. They started filling the enormous (now empty) caverns with natural gas (piped in from other locations) in the 1940s.
It was at this point that So Cal homes were built and converted for natural gas (stoves and heating). Citizens took it for granted. Then in 1994, there were huge explosions during the Northridge quake, that reminded everyone of the gigantic gas caverns underground.
Let us now bring in our late friends Pat and Friedman for further exploration.
In October 2010, they took me on the infamous Pat/Friedman Tour, which included many stops at notorious criminal locations in northeastern Northridge and Granada Hills. One of the things P and F wanted to (and did) show me were three Gas Company "stations", hidden behind landscaped rises in the residential neighborhood bordered by Lassen Street to the north and Marilla to the south, and laterally along Shoshone Avenue. You can Google Street View them or visit in person. The stations are not visible from the street. They are hidden by tall hedges, and situated next to houses. You'd never know they were there, if not for the signs, which warn of "high pressure gas lines", i.e the kind that blew a hole in Balboa Boogalord on January 17, 1994 and sent flames billowing skyward.
An interesting fact about the southernmost of these three Gas Co "sector stations" is that it's just up Shoshone Street (no more than 100 yards north), of the former, long-time home of a family well-known to all of us, the scion of which is the best friend of one of my relatives.
Since we are being curious, we might ask, "What's behind the walls of these stations?" Likely Gas Company equipment, right? Perhaps meters, pressure regulators, heck...I don't know. But just stuff like that. We might also ask "does anyone monitor these stations? Are there Gas Co. employees on site?"
Folks, I walk by there a lot. I've never seen so much as a truck or an unlocked gate.
Maybe these stations are mostly automated, then. Okay fine.
But what about the storage caverns underground? Does the Gas Co have access to those?
You'd think so. Obviously, to reach the mountaintop (where the Aliso facility is located), and then to be piped into homes across Los Angeles, the gas has to pumped from two miles below the ground. How does it travel? Through pipes, of course. So, what if there's a leak or some other problem in the underground pipe system? They'd need to have a human being, a Gas Co employee (or employees), go down there and fix it. Right?
How would those employees get down to the storage caverns? For comparison, we can ask how geologists or miners get deep underground. "By elevator" would seem to be the answer.
What would you folks say if I told you that there's such an elevator behind the high hedges and walls of one of these residentially-blended Gas Co stations? You might say, "Wow, how do you know that, Ad?"
And I'd reply, "Because I've ridden on it. All the way down to the bottom, where the storage tanks are."
Pat Forducci, who died three years ago today, seemed to have "special connections". I don't know if they involved DoD or an Alphabet Soup agency, but there were times when he had access to inaccessable places. One day, in 1988, with the help of other people (including Lys, who also had high-level connections), Pat took me behind the wall of the station on Marilla Street. I believe there was an escalator there, inside an enclosure, that went one or two levels underground and connected to the deep-range elevator. Now, I don't know if it was a single elevator, or if we had to switch (like you do in some skyscrapers). But we got all the way down to the bottom, which looked like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," with jagged rock walls. The difference was that there were catwalks and railings, and a pit emitting flames. I remember Pat telling me to walk to the railing to check it out. Was it some sort of pilot light?
I have no idea.
There were also high, steel control panels down there, with lights. Everything was built into solid rock.
Why were we down there? I don't know the entire reason. Part of it may have been just to show me the cavern. On a side note, before we rode back up, Pat asked me: "Guess how far down we are?" I was thinking in "stories", like a building. I may have said, "I dunno...ten stories?" Pat said, "No, much deeper than that." I said, "20 stories?" He said, "Think in feet, not stories." I said, "Man...I don't know. 500 feet?"
He said, "You aren't close. Try ten thousand feet. Two miles."
When this memory first came back (last Summer), I had a hard time believing that figure. Until I did some Googling on the Aliso facility. And Pat was right. We were two miles below ground.
Someone else was down there. A bad guy we all know. We encountered him on one of the catwalks. He was holding a lady hostage. That's actually why we went down there, I think; to free this lady from the bad guy in question.
I recall getting in the elevator to go back up to the surface, with Pat and Lys (and maybe others, perhaps even Friedman).
When we got back to the top, to the Gas Co station on Marilla Street at Shoshone Avenue, we took the escalator back up to the hidden enclosure, where a law enforcement officer (Sheriff's Dept? State police?) was waiting for the bad guy.
This happened in the summer of 1988. On the Pat/Friedman Tour in October 2010, as we drove past these sites, Pat insinuated there had been, over the years, some sort of (literal?) power struggle between LADWP and Southern California Gas Co, and that's why some streets have brighter streetlights than others, in that neighborhood. Actually, there was much more to his explanation, and it involved the high pressure gas lines, but that's all I will say for tonight.
Thanks for reading.
