Several homes on Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula were under evacuation orders Thursday, Oct. 23, due to a methane gas leak believed to have been caused by oil seeping from an orphaned oil well beneath a home.
“Seven total houses were red-tagged, including the affected property,” Newport Beach Fire Chief Jeff Boyles said.
Boyles said the city attorney declared a local emergency on Wednesday, Oct. 23, in an abundance of caution after a leak of methane and hydrogen sulfide, which appeared to be pressurized, was coming up from the foundation of a home in the 3600 block of Marcus Avenue.
“The house has been experiencing oil coming up from its foundation for the past couple of months,” Boyles said, adding that he was on scene Wednesday with the utilities director and the fire marshal using equipment that measures flammable gases to see what was happening.
“There’s an old oil well that is about 800 feet deep that was capped in the 1920s, and it appears to have released in some form, and it’s coming up through their foundation and into their house and outside of their house, and they’ve since evacuated their property,” Boyles said.
Boyles said the reading he got on Wednesday was “higher than we were comfortable with,” and he and the city decided to evacuate the adjacent houses.
“As long as that pressurized methane and hydrogen sulfide was still below the surface of the foundation, our main concern was any type of ignition,” he said. “We knocked on doors and made it a mandatory evacuation.”
Boyles said the neighbors were compliant and understood.
“They already understood what their neighbor was going through, so it wasn’t a big surprise,” he said. “We needed to buy time in case that pressure below the ground kept mounting. If the pressure kept increasing, something was going to have to give somewhere.”
Boyles said the city’s utilities department was drilling into the concrete to put in a pressure-relieving pipe to release the methane.
“We have the vent pipes installed and plan to return tomorrow to check the effectiveness,” Boyles said late Thursday. “If all goes well, we will have the residents return.”
“Until we get that pressure relieved, we don’t feel comfortable letting the residents back in,” he said. “It’s like a volcano basically. We’ve never experienced this before.”
Boyles said city officials worked with regulatory agencies all day on Wednesday.
“Not a lot of people had a lot of answers,” he said. “We’re just working through it with different consultants, utility experts and oil experts. The Police Department was there for evacuations, safety and security; our Fire Department was there for hazardous materials or explosions. It’s just a lot of people in the tent trying to make sure this neighborhood remains unharmed.”
Boyles said city records show that an oil well from the 1920s lies below the homes. Houses were built there 60 to 80 years ago.
“Oil and gases want to come up from the earth,” he added. “We just want to make sure it’s not in a violent way.”
That’s also on the minds of neighbors whose homes are not red-tagged, but live close by.
Hannah Dvorak, who lives directly across from the last house in the cluster of homes evacuated, said she and other neighbors were aware that the people in the affected house were having issues and were having “inches to a foot of oil” seeping through their foundation.
She first noticed something was going on Wednesday when the significant police presence showed up in her neighborhood for the evacuation.
She said she’s not overly concerned now because, “I feel if there were something more, they would expand the evacuation.”
She was also aware of the old oil well, learning about it when, one day, she called the city to find out why there is a big pole directly behind her house in the alleyway.
It irritated her, she said.
But when she found out it was there to vent the well, she embraced it, adding, “Maybe, I’ll paint it.”
Staff Photographer Jeff Gritchen and City News Service contributed to this report.
