The Only Thing Holding It Back

▶️ Prefer to watch? Every story’s a short video → https://www.youtube.com/@GetSafetyIntel · 📣 Got a near-miss? Share it anonymously (QR + link at the bottom).

Eleven years ago today, a man driving past a well pad north of Los Angeles rolled his window down and smelled gas. By the time crews got it stopped, nearly four months had gone by, more than 8,000 families had been moved out of their homes, and more methane had poured into the sky than from any single source in U.S. history. Here’s the part that should keep you up at night: there was only ever one thing standing between that gas and that neighborhood — and it was rusting from the outside in.

At about 3:15 in the afternoon on October 23, 2015, an employee from a neighboring operator drove past the SS-25 well at Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon storage field — in the Santa Susana Mountains, about 24 miles northwest of LA, just above the Porter Ranch neighborhood — and smelled gas. SoCalGas crews swept the pad with a handheld detector and got nothing. But gas was already escaping from somewhere down the hole, and within days the leak grew into a full-blown, uncontrolled blowout.

Here’s what most people never understood about that well. SS-25 was drilled in 1953 as an oil well and converted to gas storage in 1973. Like a lot of the old wells out there, it was run by pushing and pulling gas through BOTH the inner tubing and the outer casing at the same time. Translate that to the floor: the 7-inch steel casing wasn’t a backup — it was the ONLY wall between 8,500 feet of high-pressure gas and the open air. One barrier. No second line.

And that one barrier was rotting. The independent root-cause team — Blade Energy Partners, hired by the CPUC and the state’s oil-and-gas division — pulled the pipe, put it under an electron microscope, and found the 7-inch casing had split open along its length from external microbial corrosion: bacteria and groundwater eating the steel from the outside. Within hours of the split, the casing separated completely. Here’s the gut-punch: the field had logged more than 60 casing leaks before this one, and there was no real well-integrity risk program tying those warnings together.

Crews fought it for nearly four months — well over a hundred days. Seven separate top-kill attempts between October 24 and December 22, pumping heavy fluid down the wellhead, and every one failed; a couple made the wellhead worse. It didn’t stop until they drilled a relief well to intersect SS-25 near the bottom and killed it from underneath. Controlled February 12, 2016. No one was killed — but don’t mistake “no fatalities” for “no casualties.”

The Full EHS Picture. Most incidents are E, H, and S at the same time, and this is the clearest example you’ll ever find. Environmental: state regulators (the California Air Resources Board) estimated roughly 109,000 metric tons of methane escaped — what researchers called the largest known release of natural gas from a single source in U.S. history, a climate hit on the scale of hundreds of thousands of cars running for a year. Health: SoCalGas relocated more than 8,000 households and temporarily moved two schools; families reported headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds from the odorants added to the gas (t-butyl mercaptan and tetrahydrothiophene). State health scientists (OEHHA) couldn’t even set a safe-exposure number for those odorants because the long-term data didn’t exist, and air-quality regulators ordered SoCalGas to fund an independent health study. Safety: for nearly four months a kill crew worked a live, uncontrolled gas well with ignition a constant threat. One corroded pipe with nothing behind it drove a whole town out of its homes, vented a record slug of methane into the sky, and put a well crew in harm’s way for months. Same root cause. Three bills come due at once.

The rule it shaped — 49 CFR 192.12, underground natural gas storage. Aliso Canyon is the reason there’s a FEDERAL safety standard for underground gas storage at all. After the blowout, Congress passed the PIPES Act of 2016 and ordered PHMSA to write minimum safety rules; the result lives at 49 CFR 192.12, pulling in the industry integrity practices API RP 1170 and 1171. California’s regulators went further — their new storage rules now require what SS-25 never had: injection and withdrawal through the inner tubing ONLY (so the casing is finally a true second barrier, not the only one), real-time pressure monitoring on both the tubing and the annulus, downhole safety-device testing every six months, mechanical integrity testing, and a written risk-management plan for every well. Written, like most of them, after the fact.

Ground control isn’t paperwork — it’s the wall that holds. On October 15, Cal/OSHA proposed $212,500 against two employers after a tunnel collapse near Knights Ferry, California, killed a 35-year-old geologist, Twyla Capurro, and seriously hurt another worker on a 12,000-foot irrigation tunnel. Investigators found both the contractor (Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring) and the firm that designed the tunnel (Provost & Pritchard) let work continue through ground that had already been identified as dangerous — without removing it or shoring it — including a “willful-serious” tunnel-support citation. So what: the hazard was already known and on paper. This wasn’t a surprise failure; it was a documented one nobody stopped work over. If “identified dangerous ground” sits in a report and the crew is still under it, your stop-work authority is decoration.

Twenty years old, twelve feet down, no protection. Federal OSHA cited a Pennsylvania excavation contractor, J.D. Wagoner Excavating, for one willful violation plus two repeats and three serious after a 20-year-old worker was buried in an unprotected storm-sewer trench about 12 feet deep — proposed penalty $254,884. The repeats were for having no competent person doing daily inspections and for not pulling workers out of a trench already known to be bad. So what: 1926 Subpart P hasn’t moved an inch — anything 5 feet or deeper needs a protective system, and a competent person has to inspect it daily. A trench that deep with no box and no slope is just a grave nobody’s fallen into yet.

A maintenance tech locked out a pump, pulled the breaker, hung his own tag — did everything right on paper. What he didn’t know: the line still held pressure upstream of a check valve nobody had told him about, because the P&ID taped to the wall was two revisions out of date. He cracked the fitting and took a face full of hot condensate. He’s okay. But look at where the failure actually lived — not in his hands, in the drawing. He followed the procedure exactly; the procedure was pointing at a plant that no longer existed. Blaming the tech teaches nobody anything. Fixing the drawing — and building the habit of verifying zero energy at the point of work instead of trusting the paper — saves the next guy. That’s the whole game: the person closest to the work found the gap, with his face. Let’s find the next one with a question instead.

Got a fail or a near-miss? Hit reply, or scan the QR below — we’ll feature it anonymously — no names, no company, no blame. Just the lesson, so the next crew doesn’t learn it the hard way.

Walk out today and pick one critical isolation on your site — a line, a well, a vessel — and ask the person who runs it a single question: “If this one barrier failed right now, what’s behind it?” If the honest answer is “nothing,” you’ve found your SS-25. One barrier is not a barrier. Fix that before anything else today.

🎬 Rather watch than read? Every Safety Intel story is a short video on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@GetSafetyIntel — subscribe so you never miss one. 📸 Share YOUR near-miss (100% anonymous): https://scantoconfess.com — or just scan the QR above. 📤 Forward this to a crew member who needs it today.

Please stay Safe & Hydrated!!!