Thursday: Rally for Playa Del Rey Gas Storage Shutdown
“Be Our Valentine!" - Local Officials, Community Leaders to Call on Garcetti to Close Dangerous Facility
Playa Del Rey — One year from Mayor Eric Garcetti’s declaration of “the beginning of the end” of natural gas in LA, environmental organizations from across LA’s Westside will come together to demand action from the Mayor in shutting down SoCalGas’s gas storage facility - located in the heart of Playa Del Rey and within the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. The call comes after recent actions taken by the City Council and County Boards of Supervisors around investigating the site and charting a path towards its closure.
WHAT: Residents will gather at an intersection in Playa Del Rey, down the road from the SoCalGas facility, to rally and hand out Valentine’s Day flowers to motorists, along with information urging them to call Garcetti.
WHEN: Thursday, February 13, 2020 at 4:30pm
WHERE: Lincoln Blvd. and Jefferson Blvd., Playa Del Rey, CA, 90094
WHO: Residents from Playa Del Rey and across Los Angeles. Protect Playa Now, Climate Reality, Food & Water Action, Ballona Institute, Indivisible 43, Sierra Club, SoCal350 and more.
VISUALS/AUDIO: Protestors, dressed in red, will hold large pink and red “valentine hearts” and “broken-hearts” signs, while cheering and chanting. Protesters will pass out flowers and flyers to cars stopped at the intersection. Protesters will speak to the crowd with Megaphones.
BACKGROUND:
Following the 2015 blowout of the Aliso Canyon Gas Storage Facility in the north San Fernando Valley, demand has been building for the closure of a similar facility, located in the heart of Playa Del Rey. The 90 year old SoCalGas facility threatens the health and safety of the PDR neighborhood and surrounding area, having already been the site of a number of accidents, including a vent stack explosion in 2013 which set flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air.
The storage facility sits within and underneath the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. Environmentalist groups have pointed to a proposed “restoration” project currently being considered for the reserve as an means for SoCalGas to embed new fossil-fuel infrastructure underneath the wetlands, and as being destructive to the reserve’s fragile animal and plant habitat.
With a grassroots campaign by the community to shut down the facility growing, local officials have begun to call for action. In October 2019, the LA City Council passed Councilmember Mike Bonin’s motion to investigate the facility’s operations, and in January 2020, the LA County Board of Supervisors, led by Supervisor Janice Hahn, called on the Governor to initiate a feasibility study on shutting down the site.
But despite the launch of his “Green New Deal” and declaration of the “beginning of the end of natural gas” in Los Angeles one year ago, Mayor Garcetti has yet to take action on the Playa Del Rey site. Community members are calling for the Mayor to revoke the city’s 1955 Conditional Use Permit for the facility, and for the Mayor to call publically on Governor Gavin Newsom to shut the facility down and withdraw the state's application for the restoration project.
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Food & Water Action is the political advocacy arm of the research and education organization Food & Water Watch. We mobilize people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water and climate problems of our time