In an upscale Southern California suburb, a mother of five thought she smelled the neighbor’s barbecue grill. The smell went on for several days, always being strongest in the morning, then dissipating by the afternoon. The mother didn’t think much more about it, until her kids came inside with bloody noses.
Residents of Porter Ranch are on edge after what happened to Christine Katz’s five kids, with one of the youngest, 2-year-old Ava, having suffered the brunt of the ordeal. To make matters worse, the state refuses to take responsibility for any of it, claiming that they don’t see what the problem is, despite the fatal ramifications of ignoring it.
Katz told NPR that starting back in October, she began smelling the neighbor’s gas grill. “It would start off early in the morning, and then it would kind of dissipate,” she said. “Then it continued on each day.” She thought the neighbor had mistakenly left their grill on, as not a day would go by without smelling the gas for weeks on end, and she couldn’t think of anything else that it could be.
After two weeks of noticing this stench, Katz couldn’t ignore it any longer, when her kids starting showing alarming health symptoms. Little Ava was having difficulties breathing, something she hadn’t ever experienced before. Then, the other four children began having repeat spontaneous nosebleeds after playing outside.
Since all five were affected, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. The mother’s instinct told her that something far more sinister was going on, and she was right. She took her youngest to the doctor, where the girl was given an inhaler to help with her respiratory issues. After days of use, it didn’t seem to work, and her symptoms were getting worse. A couple of days later, Ava’s health took a terrifying turn, when she was rushed to intensive care in the midst of an apparent seizure.
Doctors couldn’t seem to figure out what was causing the family’s health issues. Then, the mother realized something else that started at the same time all of her children started getting sick. Katz, along with thousands of others in their neighborhood, live right near a natural gas storage unit that had been leaking, filling the air with the toxic fumes.
Ava’s doctors refused to make the connection that the health complications were associated with being poisoned by the natural gas leak, while not providing any other answers. But Katz knew the truth of the matter and wasn’t willing to risk her family’s health any longer. She recently moved them out of their Porter Ranch home, which ultimately caused a mass exodus of 5,000 of her neighbors who sided with the mom, believing that the leak was there and unhealthy to all.
California officials don’t see it that way and are not taking responsibility for the environmental danger. They claim that the findings of their testing do not “indicate that an acute health hazard exists.” But Katz doesn’t care, she’s happy she followed her gut, now that all of her children are back to normal health, especially Ava, after moving away from the mess.
“Even though you can’t see the gas, it’s there,” she told NPR. “And that’s the saddest part — people don’t understand it. Because it’s not a mudslide, it’s not an earthquake. You just don’t see the devastation, but it’s there.”
It’s easy to say something is not a problem when it doesn’t affect you or your family. Perhaps all the officials, who want to stick to their seemingly false findings, should move into these now 5,000 vacated homes and test it out for real with their own health. That’ll surely bring about a quicker remedy, when it’s their children who suffer seizures from it.
