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Meanwhile, Southern California Gas Co. — the utility in charge of the leaking natural gas well — acknowledged Thursday that it found higher than normal readings of the cancer-causing chemical benzene at least 14 times since the leak first began, the Associated Press reported.

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In response to previous inquiries, the company had said they’d only spotted abnormally high readings twice, the AP said.

SoCalGas spokesperson Kristine Lloyd told the AP that the discrepancy between the newest report of high benzene levels and past ones is “an oversight” that was being corrected. The utility says that the gas leak doesn’t pose a long term health risk to residents, and local health officials have largely agreed.

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An evaluation on the California governor’s Office of Emergency Services website says that the highest benzene level detected at Porter Ranch was half the level that is considered a potential short-term risk. The office concludes that there’s no acute toxicity hazard from the leak, though that doesn’t invalidate the health concerns — nosebleeds, headaches, vomiting — that residents have been reporting.

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The natural gas that has been leaking since October contains at least 80 percent methane, according to the California Environmental Protection Agency. It is also contains smaller amounts of other compounds, including benzene — which the World Health Organization says can cause anemia, leukemia and other cancers.

“Benzene is carcinogenic to humans, and no safe level of exposure can be recommended,” the organization’s guidelines read.

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Last year, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment published recommendations on how much benzene people can be exposed to before risking their health: eight parts per billion for a one-off exposure, and no more than one part per billion for repeated exposure over the course of eight hours, as well as longer exposures.

On Thursday, SoCalGas said that nearly 1,200 tests over the past few months turned up 14 instances in which levels of benzene exceeded one part per billion, including once in December.

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Dr. Cyrus Rangan, a medical toxicologist from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said it doesn’t seem like state safety levels were exceeded, since the spot tests didn’t turn up a broad, consistent pattern of high levels of benzene.

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“You can’t take a 10-minute sample that’s 5.6 parts per billion and make any long-term risk assessment,” Rangan told the AP. “If that was sustained over several months in a row, I’d be concerned about that, but we know that’s not happening.”

But the chairman of the environmental health department at the University of California, Los Angeles, Michael Jerrett, told the AP he believes there is a “high probability” the eight-hour standard was violated.

Seth Shonkoff, the executive director of an independent energy science and policy institute and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, added that he has not seen “anything convincing that it’s been proven to be safe.

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“I’m not going on record as saying this is absolutely an unsafe situation,” he said. “I’m saying there are a number of red flags.”

Residents of Porter Ranch have been complaining for months of nosebleeds, dizziness, breathing problems, headaches, vomiting and a host of other health concerns. But health officials told the Los Angeles Times that those problems are actually a reaction to a noxious additive injected into the gas in order to alert people that methane (which is otherwise colorless and odorless) is in the air. In this case, the additive may be doing its job too well.

Dee Ann Abernathy, whose family has been relocated, said that her 6-year-old daughter broke out in hives and suffered several episodes of severe vomiting.

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“My child is not a guinea pig and no one can guarantee that this is not harming her health,” Abernathy told the LA Times. “I have to wonder whether people who insist there are no long-term effects from this leaking well would continue to do so if it was their daughter vomiting day and night.”

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The leak at SoCalGas’s underground Aliso Canyon storage facility — the second largest facility of its kind in the U.S. — was first detected on Oct. 23. A SoCalGas executive told LA Weekly that there hadn’t been a safety valve on the damaged well since 1979, when the old one was removed (since the well in question was at least 300 feet from a home and at least 100 feet from a road or park, it wasn’t required to have a safety valve).

The magazine reported that the utility company made six “kill” attempts, in which liquid is poured down the well to staunch the flow of natural gas, but none succeeded — the pressure of the gas pouring out was too intense. Now a relief well is being drilled to ease the pressure and help plug the leak.

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SoCalGas has spent roughly $50 million trying to contain the leak and relocating more than 4,500 families who live in the gas-engulfed area, according to the AP.

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Residents are also suing the company, which they say endangered people living near Aliso Canyon by failing to install a safety valve.

“Had we had [the safety valve], this whole problem would have been prevented,” Brian Panish, an attorney for the residents involved in the lawsuit, told the Los Angeles Times last week. “There would have been a small runoff of some gas and it would have been over. All these people wouldn’t have had to leave and they wouldn’t be sick. It’s critical to the whole case.”

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SoCal Gas spokeswoman Melissa Bailey noted to the Times that such a valve was not required by law, but did not comment further on the lawsuit.

Though the health effects of the leak are still disputed, the outflow of gas has been described as an unmitigated environmental disaster.

Scientists and environmental experts say the leak instantly became the biggest single source of methane emissions in the state when it began in October, The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick reported last month. The impact of the greenhouse gases released in the initial two months since it was first detected, when measured over a 20-year time frame, is the equivalent of emissions from six coal-fired power plants or 7 million automobiles.

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Methane, which makes up the bulk of the leaking natural gas, is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.