In this world, there’s no love more fierce than the love a mother has for her child. It is a love that is all-consuming and indescribable. It creates a connection that a mother shares with her children, and Mother’s Day is the perfect day to celebrate that love.
But along with that love comes worry — it is a universal truth. We hold our breath when they climb just a little higher in the backyard tree. We do whatever we can to keep them safe. We cultivate a love for fruits and vegetables (because they’re healthy), and carry bandages in our bags for unexpected boo-boos.
However, for more than three months, mothers in the Los Angeles suburb of Porter Ranch have lived with a worry that bandages can’t fix. After a massive gas leak in the community last October, these mothers — while themselves suffering from headaches, nosebleeds, and nausea — have lived in constant fear of how the dangerous gas leak has affected their children’s health.
And those mothers have reason for concern. From last October to this February, when the leak was finally stopped, the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility released nearly 97,000 tons of methane into the air that the community breathes. The gas leak was the largest recorded methane leak in U.S history, and caused the Los Angeles Unified School District to evacuate 1,860 children from Porter Ranch schools and send them to outlying campuses. The methane leak might finally be contained, but its long-term effects cause persistent worry for mothers in this community.
Research has shown that the closer people live to active oil and gas production, the greater the health risks. A risk assessment in Colorado showed that those living in closer proximity to oil and gas wells experience increased incidence of respiratory, neurological, and reproductive ills, as well as elevated cancer risks. The pollution caused by methane can make smog and soot worse, trigger asthma attacks in children, and lead to cardiovascular disease and even premature death.
During infancy and childhood, vital organs are being formed, the blueprints for delicate biological systems are being laid down. Exposure to methane during this critical period is cause for deep concern. Because a child’s ability to metabolize toxic chemicals is different from an adult’s, children take in disproportionately larger doses of chemical toxicants. Since the leak began, the children of Aliso Canyon have experienced nosebleeds, headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, and loss of coordination.
Pregnancy is usually a time of joy and anticipation. For pregnant mothers in Aliso Canyon, that anticipation is likely felt in equal measure with dread. For babies born to mothers living near oil and gas fields, a mother's exposure to high levels of methane can increase the risk of health problems including congenital heart defects and neural tube defects. Because more research needs to be done, the magnitude of the health effects of fetal and childhood exposures to methane may not be evident for years to come.
While we strive to protect our children in the world as it is today, we mothers also work to preserve the world they will inherit. Methane leaks like the one in Porter Ranch not only threaten our children’s health right now, but also have disastrous implications for our climate and the world we’ll leave behind. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane is 86 times more potent than carbon pollution in trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. To put that in perspective, the Porter Ranch methane leak had the same affect on our climate as adding half a million cars to our roads in a year.
No mother, child, or family should have to experience what the families of Aliso Canyon are going through. No mother should have to bear that burden. To protect the mothers, families, and children of Aliso Canyon, and the rest of the California, the legislature has begun to address methane exposure.
SB 380, a bill to extend a moratorium at the Aliso Canyon methane reserve until there is certainty that existing wells are safe, just passed the legislature and sits on the governor's desk. Other bills that address a range of other ways to cut methane exposure are working their way through the legislature.
Even this action amounts to little more than a bandage on a boo-boo. To truly safeguard our families’ health, our climate, and our communities is to keep dirty fuels — like oil and gas — in the ground and transition to clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar.