A judge has ordered the Southern California Gas Co. to release documents related to the 2015 Aliso Canyon Gas gas leak.
Under the ruling issued Thursday by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, the utility must release more than 165 documents and communications with AECOM, an independent engineering consultant, within 10 days.
Attorney R. Rex Parris, who represents more than 8,000 plaintiffs who sued the company over the gas leak, said the documents would show that during the massive gas leak utility officials “knew the gas was toxic; they knew it was going to the neighborhoods and still sent a letter to everybody, saying it was absolutely safe.”
“For four years, the gas company has tried to conceal from the public what actually happened during and after the blowout,” Parris said. “This is the beginning of the end for them. The truth is going to come out.”
The judge also slapped $6,500 in sanctions on SoCalGas and its defense attorneys — payable to the plaintiffs — within 20 days, for delaying the process.
Christine Detz, a spokeswoman for SoCalGas, wrote in an email that the utility has produced over a million pages of documents to plaintiffs in this litigation.
“In this situation, we asked the judge to protect a small number of documents that we believed were privileged,” Detz wrote. “With respect to most (but not all) of those documents, the Court disagreed. We will comply with the court’s order.”
The ruling comes a few weeks after San Fernando Valley residents and community activists testified at a state oversight hearing focusing on health symptoms many residents experienced following the gas leak.
At the hearing, Sen. Henry Stern, D-Canoga Park and Assemblywoman Christy Smith, D-Santa Clarita, will examine state regulators’ response to the massive gas leak that began Oct. 23, 2015, and released more than 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas into the air.
An independent investigation into the blowout released in May showed the Aliso Canyon site experienced dozens of gas leaks before the 2015 blowout. There were no investigations conducted, though, by SoCalGas, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy, which owns the site, according to a report by Blade Energy Partners ordered by state regulators. The utility failed to use the best available procedures to stop the leaking gas, which took 111 days, the report said.
Company officials continue to say that the facility is now safe, and new measures are in place to prevent a similar blowout from happening to an Aliso Canyon well.
