Another looked to a shallower source: the decay of organic matter in the underlying soil.
The Ross Dress for Less sat atop the old Salt Lake oil field, and one theory suggested that gas had escaped from the depths by way of an improperly capped well. In the aftermath, it was clear that the paved and mostly impermeable surfaces of the modern city had trapped the explosive methane, allowing it to pool in dangerous quantities, but in the months and then years that followed, investigators could not agree on the gas's origins. No one died, but in all 23 people were hospitalized. Horrified and bloodied shoppers ran outside, only to find themselves surrounded by an even more hellish landscape: the ground itself was on fire, as flames licked up from cracks in the concrete. It twisted the discount clothing racks into pieces of flying shrapnel. The ensuing explosion launched the store's roof into the sky. Methane from a mysterious underground source had silently been seeping into the basement of the Ross Dress for Less in L.A.'s Fairfax District when, on the afternoon of March 24, 1985, an employee punched his timesheet in an adjoining room, emitting a spark and igniting the pool of odorless gas. Thirty-one years ago, however, the Southland's hydrocarbons made themselves visible in a surreal way. Thousands of residents have been displaced, but the leak lacks the visual markers of a disaster. Not even a disaster on the scale of the Porter Ranch leak, which pumped 80,000 metric tons of natural gas into the atmosphere until it was finally tamed yesterday, effectively demonstrates the power of those forces.
Photo by Dean Musgrove, courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.Īncient forces lurk beneath the paved surfaces of Los Angeles - powerful natural processes that, when touched by humanity and its creations, threaten public safety. A 1985 methane explosion in L.A.'s Fairfax district turned a Ross Dress for Less into a disaster scene.
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