Aliso Canyon Disaster Health Research Study
Aliso Canyon Disaster Health Research Study
The Aliso Canyon Health Study is led by a team of prominent and established researchers at UCLA with the expertise needed to answer questions about the disaster.
The UCLA team and partners represent experts in the fields of environmental and health sciences, geographic information science, remote sensing, toxicology, clinical medicine, disaster recovery, health care delivery systems, and data analytics.
Excerpt from The Los Angeles:
Dozens of researchers from UCLA and other universities are studying the health fallout of the Aliso Canyon leak, which between October 2015 and February 2016 spewed a then-record 109,000 tons of methane. The $25-million study is being funded by SoCalGas and its parent company, Sempra Energy, as part of a legal settlement.
Although the study is several years from completion, some early findings are alarming.
“The [Porter Ranch] community has a lot of legitimate concerns,” said Michael Jerrett, an environmental health sciences professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, who is leading the research.
Pregnant women living within seven miles of Aliso Canyon during the leak were 50% to 70% more likely to have low-birth-weight babies, Jerrett and his colleagues found. More recently, the research team determined that gas plumes likely stretched as far as 11 miles from Aliso — meaning more people could have been affected.
“The impact zone of the leak is considerably larger from what we thought it was,” Jerrett said.