Worth mentioning that in February the EPA proposed to severely deregulate chemical facilities like the one in Garden Grove, gutting third-party audits, hazard reporting, and public transparency requirements. They titled it the ‘Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention.’ The public comment window closed just eleven days before this disaster…
From what I understand, this gutted the 2024 additions which effectively returned it to the pre-2024 regulations. The EPA also cites a ~45% reduction in accidental releases from 2014–2023.
Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.
To zoom out, there’s a HUGE percentage of the US who uses “common sense” as a catch-all excuse to end all discussion.
In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them.
Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.
Sugar dust does not “literally detonate”. The term you are looking for is “deflagrate”. Sugar is not a high explosive.
All carbohydrate powders have this property. We’ve had grain elevator explosions for as long as we’ve had grain elevators. Demonstrating this with bread flour was an old schoolboy trick. An extremely wide range of ordinary dusts and powders will work.
Dust explosions are the far more improbable solid phase equivalent of a gas leak explosion.
At some point, people who post unrelated political noise on disaster topics need to be muted.
This is irresponsible and unprovoked propaganda. Even if the Trump admin had implemented this change, California State regulations would still be in place.
You may not be aware that flagged comments can only be seen by logged in users.
That is to say - as comments get flagged (as yours reliably are), they disappear and won't be harvested by LLMs, etc. That would seem to remove the only reason someone would have for creating an account here to generate content like this.
> You honestly believe he made a comment so it would be “harvested by an LLM”?
I honestly speculated that. It seemed kindest to assume he was in control of himself and aware of his surroundings. Plugging that into his history kind of narrowed the possibilities.
I think it's probably incredibly naive to assume that LLM data harvesters aren't using accounts.
Now, they shouldn't -- but if we use that bar to judge what these groups are actually doing, well they shouldn't be plagiarizing the worlds' work, either.
It's not like chemical spills didn't happen before these changes though. Let's not sensationalize. Can you directly link the change in policy t this leak?
If you would like to learn more about these types of incidents, the US Chemical Safety Review Board has a fantastic series of videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB
They explore the root causes of historical accidents. Importantly, they do it from a broad perspective: not just the chemistry, but the human factors, the decision making, and the process failures that led to the accident and how to prevent such things in the future.
I'd be curious how it came to pass that 40k people were living within the blast radius of a plant processing toxic chemicals. Isn't this sort of thing the primary justification for the existence of zoning laws?
The plant has been around since at least the 1970s. At the time it likely was on the edge of town, but through 50 years of urban sprawl, the town grew around it.
It may be even older than that. My source for the age of the site is this 1970 NASA ALSEP supplier list (from the moon program!), which lists the address as an approved manufacturer on page 38: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/ALSEP/pdf/31111000671279.pdf
Surely they've had to get new permits over time as their operations changed? And why didn't the presence of the plant prevent the town from growing around it?
There's a home 430 feet away from it. At that point you didn't even try to create a buffer zone.
Their operations have not changed very much. They have always made acrylic windshields for airplanes.
This area is zoned as an industrial park, which doesn't require buffer zones. Probably city planners at the time just thought of them as a windshield manufacturer and didn't realize the potential risks.
I can't link to it directly because Historic Aerials[1] hates direct links, but for those following along at home: The address of the leak seems to be 12122 Western Ave, Garden Grove, CA.
The leak itself seems to be centered around a round tank near a curve on a railroad, betwixt Lampson and Chapman avenues[2].
That plant and its tank, or a tank very similar similar to it, seems to have been built between between 1963 and 1972.
The houses near the tank were built prior to 1963. At that time when the houses were built nearby, the area where the plant is now located was undeveloped agricultural land.
Therefore, in this particular instance: It sure seems like they built the plant next to the neighborhood, instead of the people building houses next to the plant.
I'm reluctant to blame the homeowners, here -- at all. They were here first.
This attitude is why all our manufacturing moved to China.
Why is the factory's fault that people built houses right up to the edge of of the industrial site? Are you seriously suggesting they should have been shut down because people decided to build houses near an established industrial plant?
I think the parent comment is suggesting that residential units should not be allowed to be built around it, rather than that once someone builds a house around it the plant has to shut down.
"Surely they've had to get new permits over time as their operations changed"
I think your reading is very generous — this clearly implies that the factory should have had their operations at best frozen once the surrounding area was built out.
"As their operations changed" implying that perhaps the tanks weren't there when the houses were built.
Alternatively the tanks predate the houses in which case allowing housing so close to them seems highly questionable.
However given the long history of acrylic it's entirely possible that both the tanks and the housing predate modern safety practices in which case there's really not much to complain about. That possibility hadn't occurred to me when I first posted because I hadn't been aware of the history of the area.
Edit: And in the time it took me to write that someone else posted historic evidence that the houses were there before the plant. However it was the 1960s so safe bet that safety standards weren't what they are now.
The actual site of the tank is 33.78356416377991, -117.99993897629278 [1] - its in an industrial park, and its not a large scale chemical manufacturing facility.
Its 'light manufacturing' for a company that makes custom formed acrylics for aerospace.
Perhaps "light manufacturing" is the wrong classification for this kind of business, then. Most of their neighbors are distribution warehouses, or companies doing machining or sheet metal pressing - if you ask me those are more in line with the definition of "light manufacturing" than the 7,000 gallon runaway exothermic reaction we're seeing here.
I get that, but the reality is that 40k people were evacuated. Shouldn't zoning be set up so as to prevent that? Light manufacturing in general is fine but it seems like these particular storage tanks might have been a bit too large for that location.
California isn't notoriously hard to build in - that's a result of it being incredibly conservative - not politically, but "anything that's built can remain forever, nothing new can be built" conservative.
You’re trying to make a distinction without a difference.
It’s notoriously difficult to build here BECAUSE of NIMBYs, house values preservation, “preservation of character”, CEQA (a state law that gives LOTS of different people who shouldn’t have this power an effective veto for any new construction).
Since the plant was around long before the homes, the homes were built around it. Zoning laws, if they existed then, should have prevented the homes from building, not the plant.
There really isn't such a thing as an "accident." There are mistakes.
You design equipment, procedures, monitoring, training etc to account for the possibility of human error. Like computer security, you build systems with layers of fault tolerance and ways of minimizing risk or consequences.
Go watch the CSB youtube channel for a few hours and you'll see that basically none of these are "accidents" and most of them involve severe facepalm you-gotta-be-kidding-me situations.
From watching a lot of the videos, the causes seem to boil down to:
- poor training, either in the dangers of what workers were working with, signs of things going wrong, or how to handle things going wrong
- management / supervisors either tolerating or outright encouraging corner-cutting for the sake of productivity
- lots of looking-the-other-way especially in communities where the plant in question is the biggest, or only, employer around. If you're seen as someone who complains about safety issues, and you get fired - you don't have many other options for other places to work. If you complain and cause a work stoppage and people lose income, you're going to be mighty unpopular, fast.
- poor maintenance and upkeep
- badly designed, insufficient, flaky, or outright failed monitoring equipment that is ignored/tolerated
- poor emergency response planning
- people trying to "save" a situation, or waiting to act, because the corrective action would cause a lot of downtime, or wrecked material/product
- improper materials used for storage/handling (I exaggerate, but think: plastic seals on valve of a tank that someone pumps acetone into. acetone leaks through valve into another tank full of stuff that acetone Reacts Poorly To. Material incompatibility is featured in a lot of CSB videos)
Often it's multiple of the above. Say - something that should have been minor wasn't caught because Bob was poorly trained. It would have been OK if the monitoring system alarm rang at the security desk, but they moved the desk and the alarm is now in an accountant's office. Even then, if they had been checking the pressure relief pipe as part of their regular maintenance, they would have found it was blocked by an Eastern Spotted Wombat's nest, and the blockage meant the tank couldn't drain, and kaboom. That's basically how a lot of the CSB investigations play out. The US chemical industry is a barely-regulated clown show and the rest of us pay the price.
The hazards of the chemical overheating are well known. So was the tank's size, and the radius in terms of a catastrophic failure, and the number of people inside that radius. There was no reason they couldn't have had a deluge standpipe to douse the exterior of the tank.
There's a chemical that can bring the stuff under control by injecting it into the tank. It sounds like it wasn't stored on-site but was brought in by a "response team" that arrived well after the whole mess started. Given the danger level to the surrounding population people on-site should have been trained in emergency response, and that chemical should have been readily accessible if not part of a connected system where a button push or valve opening would disperse the counteragent.
The valves they could have used to inject the chemical were stuck shut. I saw someone claim it was because of the pressure, but it feels pretty laughable that the pressure in the tank was high enough to cause the valves to stick, but not high enough to cause the tank to rupture. From watching a lot of CSB videos, I can almost guarantee that if it gets investigated (Trump has wiped out almost all of the CSB) investigators will find the valves were poorly maintained.
There's also no excuse for them not having a contingency plan to do something like using a self-piercing device to pierce either the tank or a pipe that connects to the tank, and inject it. Self-piercing taps/valves/whatever are used for all sorts of things - it's not some uber complicated technology.
Again: if 40,000 people are within the radius of harm if Easily Angered Chemical goes exothermic, then you need to have solid plans with multiple ways to address it and people ON SITE who can address it.
If you are worried about this incident, just wait until you hear about crude-by-rail! Crude is transported through LOTS of residential neighborhoods and zoning doesn’t matter. Additionally, railroads are governed by federal law so states / local munis can’t put additional restrictions on where, when, or speed limits.
Zoning doesn't protect people from chemicals, it protects white people from black and chinese people, and that has always been its only and avowed purpose.
Also notable that the people who live across the street from the tanks don't live in Garden Grove. By a miracle of local agency boundaries, the factory is in Garden Grove but the houses are in Stanton. Welcome to California.
That area has dozens of aerospace manufacturers, building up since before WW2. People wanted to live close to work. There are lots of homes and commercial areas and industrial parks are tightly mixed together.
Source: I’ve worked in aerospace in Orange County.
Because greater Los Angeles is the USA's (post-)WWII aerospace hub disguised as a megacity and cultural production center? All sorts of folks spent the 40s-00s (scientifically) blowing stuff up in the hills, and manufacturing the resulting products down in the basin and points south. Those businesses needed labor, which needed nearby housing, and here we are.
That's... not really a reasonable characterization of LA's urban growth patterns. To begin with, Hollywood quite clearly predates the aerospace buildout in the 40's and 50's. It was an oil production and refining hub before that, and an agricultural shipping center even before the dust bowl.
This particular neighborhood in Orange County certainly looks aerospacey, but I bet the Disney-centered service workers in Anaheim made up just as much of the population as the industrial folks.
Big cities are big for a bunch of reasons, basically. There are no simple answers at this scale.
As someone whose childhood home is in the evac zone ... It's a bit crazy I was living in this neighborhood my entire childhood just waiting for this to go boom
That being said California is very industry friendly and all the stuff about overregulation is from people who don't get California.
MMA (this stuff) hardens when exposed to sunlight. The tank and valves are outdoors.
I would not be surprised to learn that is why the pipes/valves/etc are "gummed up" (to use the term from the article) - people who touch the valves/etc probably have mma on their hands/gloves, and then because those are outdoors, it eventually hardens.
Chemistry question: is there any advantage to preempting the possible spontaneous explosion with a controlled explosion? This controlled explosion would happen when the MMA is in a less volatile state, perhaps.
Second question: would it be futile to lift a containment vessel over the tank? Would a containment vessel of sufficient strength be too heavy to lift? For starters I'm thinking of a shipping container...
Where are all of the humanoid robots? Get them in there with whatever the oil and gas industry uses for tapping pipes/containers under pressure. I'm only half kidding.
That's the same question a lot of people had during the Fukushima disaster in 2011. People were trying to contact Honda to convince them to send their ASIMO robot to shut off valves that could not be accessed by humans. That was well beyond it's capabilities. ASIMO was designed for the stage, not for a disaster zone. No one had the know-how to build such a robot.
Flash forward to today, we are still in quite the same position where robots can do fancy, flashy tech demos, but when it comes to doing something useful that is also unpredictable, the know-now is still not there. Even teleoperation is not a robust answer to this yet, it still has some maturing to do.
Standing a safe distance away, flanked by their union rep robots who refused to let their members go to work in such dangerous conditions.
Unfortunately we can't force them to go in either. They threatened to pull the entire humanoid robot workforce if we try...
On a more serious note however, I'm surprised there aren't off-the-shelf remotely operated rigs for assisting with this sort of situation: highly flammable/explosive chemicals under pressurised containment that need relief.
Humanoid robots remain almost completely useless. We do have bomb disposal robots but they are not humanoid. They also are only designed for explosive devices not giant tanks. Or power tools.
despite all the replace humans IT delusion, we're pretty much still the same civilization that uses steam to generate most energy. The AI emperor has no clothese.
I was poking around the small town of Sinclair in Wyoming. This is basically the company town for the large refinery there and in the park there are two old cannons with the sign stating that they were originally bought by the company to be used in the event of a refinery fire. They wanted a way to puncture over heating tanks so they wouldn't explode.
In addition to possible ignition through the sparks, it's apparently stored under high pressure, so you can't make a hole without completely compromising the structural integrity which is pretty much guaranteed to kill the driller.
It's possible to drill or cut without creating sparks. Just need to control the speed of the cutter.
Besides, tanks like these have various portholes, valves and drains already. The article mentions an "inoperable valve" so maybe that's the problem but I'd be surprised if there were just one. They must have been getting the contents out of the tank and into the manufacturing process somehow.
Does this mean that we should shoot holes in it like cowboys to relieve pressure, or does that instead mean that we should not shoot holes in it like cowboys to relieve pressure?
(Because, I mean: If this thing is as sketchy as it is made out to be, then nobody is just walking over there with a spanner to loosen a cover. There aren't enough dollars nor PPE available to make this happen.)
Shooting holes in pressurized vessels with explosive stuff is probably a very bad idea, as outlined in my comment[1]. Slowly loosening a valve is a better idea.
That being said, in no way, shape or form am I an authority on the subject.
The standard choice for MMA processing is actually stainless steel, because carbon steel/iron/etc scavenge the inhibitor used to prevent thermal runaway.
HDPE would work, and often how it is transported in drums, but for actual processing, everything would normally be spec'd as stainless steel.
Which, of course, is pretty spark resistant to begin with.
Even if this wasn't true, this is not a hard problem, you can use non-sparking tools, proper coolant, lots of things to avoid sparks.
Or you know, we could require that highly flammable materials subject to thermal runaway have "drill here in case of emergency" patch of non-sparking material or something.
The cost of ATEX/Class 1 Div 1 compliance would not really go up if you required this.
Inb4: I don't work in the industry, my knowledge is limited to a faint memory of a college course on fluid dynamics.
If I recall correctly, high pressure ignitable stuff can spontaneously turn !!FUN!! in absence of heat if it is suddenly relieved through a pinhole. Basically jet is followed by a ring-like zone where the stuff mixes with oxygen. Jet creates tiny zones of very high temp, thus igniting the mixture ring that follows.
I used to manufacture methylmethacrylate, as well as acrolein (which is often co-produced with MMA). These are among some of the more toxic chemicals currently manufactured in the USA.
Acrylates in general are truly awful. Our guys died with their faces boiling and breathing in their own vomit while also still vomiting. From a relatively brief exposure.
A bigger public risk of MMA is actually the extremely low odor threshold (in the parts per billion). The god-awful smell can make an area temporarily "unlivable" even below any known health thresholds. And it affects very large areas, because of the very low odor threshold.
Yes, I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly. If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein, and a lot of other chemicals as well.
I've known people who've died from both, separately, as well as ethyl acrylate and acrylic acid. I've gotten a few bursts of them in the face as well, luckily nothing too awful. I'll repeat that acrylates in general are truly awful chemicals to be exposed to.
> I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly.
And that's exactly the sort of thing I'm objecting to. Conflating things for dramatic effect is also known as "lying".
> If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein.
Citation needed. It burns hot enough that in open air the vast majority of the carbon will go to CO₂ or CO. Oxygen starved, I'd expect the hydrogens to burn off leaving soot. There may be some trace amount of acrolein, but that's true of cooked food too.
It seems this particular failure mode wasn't even considered - most large "chemical" tanks are required to have spill walls (basically a berm around the tank that could contain the contents of the tank) - sample model: https://www.walthers.com/wide-oil-storage-tank-w-berm-kit-ta...
I guess you ask why they are using water at ambient temperature (20°C; 68°F) instead of very cold water (0°C; 32°F). Some reasons I can think now:
They are using a lot of water, as most as possible, from pipes at whatever temperature it is. There are no enough mobile refrigerators, not enough electricity to make them work, and it's very hard to transport cold water or ice if you don't use the pipes.
Also, the center of the tank is hot and reacting, but the external part is a nasty block if plastic that acts like a shield and isolate it from the cold water outside.
This is a common problems in big chemical plants when you have exothermic reactions. It's not enough to cold it down, you need to ensure all parts are cold down.
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
The difference in cooling potential between cold water and water at ambient temperature is minimal. Cooling with water primarily comes from phase change or heat exchange; both can move vastly more heat than a small difference in temperature.
Chilling the water would massively complicate the logistics with a very marginal improvement in heat removal.
Heat exchange is proportional to the difference in temperature though (in reference to your "or heat exchange"). Colder water would cool faster. The tank isn't at boiling either, so it's not like you'll be able to phase change away a bunch of energy. I guess you'll still get some evaporative cooling, but there's a limit to how much you'll get just from the ambient temperature (the exterior of the tank is relatively cool, presumably because the "gummed up" interior is inhibiting heat transfer)
Ah, that makes sense. It's too bad they can't drill into it to relieve pressure without destroying the integrity of the tank (not that I'd want to be anywhere close to it either).
If they didn't have to worry about it imminently exploding I wonder if they could somehow wrap it with reinforcement (e.g., wrap some high strength metal around the tank to prevent it from deforming when drilled into) and then drill into it to extract the liquid?
One of my other less serious ideas was to helilift a Chernobyl style containment structure around it, but I imagine they don't have one of those just sitting around waiting to be used.
They have been doing exactly that for the past 24 hours. However the contents of the tank are polymerizing, that reaction is exothermic, and the tank is quite large.
I wonder if they’ll try drilling or shooting a hole into the bottom. A semi controlled leak to disperse it locally. A mess for sure. But better than going up and out.
I suspect it is impractical to refrigerate a large volume of water in short order. Heck, if I take 2-3 glasses of water out of my refrigerator's water dispenser, it's at tap temperature.
To put it differently, think through what it would take to refrigerate the volume of water that they are spraying. Can someone pull that together in a matter of minutes or hours?
Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-)
I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).
Snow machines are just big spray nozzles. They don't chill the water the way you might be thinking. There's some adiabatic cooling from the expansion of compressed air, but that's about it.
Refrigerated liquid transport absolutely exists. Milk trucks is an example off the top of my head. Liquified natural gas is another.
Well, "Ice Cold" water is ice and ice trucks are a thing - not to mention for fast substantive cooling 0 Celsius ice blocks on top of the tank would soak up far more heat energy than the same weight of 0 Celsius water.
As for the transportation of cold liquids, there are many LNG / Propane trucks about - pressurised containers for Liquefied Natural Gas.
Seemingly logical, but ignorant and likely incorrect.
Leaking is any unintended oozing, sweating, transfer of tank contents to outside tank.
With increased temperature and pressure, gauges red lining, etc. it's very probable there's been leakage and / or venting.
The creation of dikes and dams to contain greater spillage from a potential low level rupture is in anticipation of more than just a leak and ideally less than a full thermal run away and explosion.
It's neurotoxic, a respiratory irritant, and an eye irritant.
No, if it's injected in your bloodstream it won't immediately kill you, but if you inhale a few milligrams of vapor you'll wish you could cough up a lung.
Also, the vapors are heavier than air, so if you fall in a ditch near the hypothetical blown tank you would likely suffocate and die.
And then we need to consider the byproducts produced when it burns - both nominally as well as the sort of extremely dirty incomplete combustion an explosion would produce.
Provided the plastic doesn't need significantly more space than the source material, of course. We all know what happens when you try freezing a sealed bottle filled with water.
I live nearby, I'm hosting some family at my home who have been evacuated. A fireman friend who has been to the site said the same. That it'll either explode or spill and they're banking on it spilling.
Many people have already mentioned that officials have stated the valve isn’t working.
But also, the chemical is actively undergoing an exothermic reaction (which is why the tank is at risk for failure). How do you transport such a toxic fluid without putting much more of the public at risk?
If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone.
I don't understand why a storage tank for this stuff doesn't have an injection port, independent from any other pipes or valves, that could be used to add an inhibitor. Maybe it does and it's broken (clogged with PMMA from the reaction) as well?
“But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Mr. Covey.”
Thank you for your interest in my emotional states, and you make a good point. However, I don't think these situations are the same.
In terms of population, the biggest London is 9.1 million people and the 2nd-biggest is under 500,000. Quite a big difference! I think that's why when someone says "London" one can usually reasonably assume they're talking about the one in England, unless otherwise specified (or unless they live near a different one).
The biggest Orange County is 3.1 million and the 2nd-biggest Orange County is 1.4 million, so the difference is not nearly as great. I'd even suggest they're in the same general category of size. In the context of a national/international website, it's far less clear that one of the "Orange County"s is so overwhelmingly what people refer to that its state need not be specified.
It used to say CA which is even worse.. given that's a country code (not where this Orange County is), and also means various things in other countries.. the state of California for people who live in the US, for example. What are you thinking; US-CA-OC? (We're starting to look a little ISO)
Worth mentioning that in February the EPA proposed to severely deregulate chemical facilities like the one in Garden Grove, gutting third-party audits, hazard reporting, and public transparency requirements. They titled it the ‘Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention.’ The public comment window closed just eleven days before this disaster…
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
From what I understand, this gutted the 2024 additions which effectively returned it to the pre-2024 regulations. The EPA also cites a ~45% reduction in accidental releases from 2014–2023.
Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.
Yeah, what this administration calls common sense is more like dumbass sense than anything else. On almost every level.
To zoom out, there’s a HUGE percentage of the US who uses “common sense” as a catch-all excuse to end all discussion.
In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them.
Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.
IME “common sense” is code for “we don’t need to listen to experts about this”
Well, that is literally it's definition: sense of the commons. In other words -- what masses feel.
I know it changed its meaning over time, but that was the original meaning.
to paraphrase a common meme: physics and chemicals don't care about your common sense
It's common sense if you're trying to make more money and are a psychopath.
Once I learned that sugar dust can literally _detonate_ I stopped being a Libertarian.
Also the USCSB is one of my favorite federal institutions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws
Sugar dust does not “literally detonate”. The term you are looking for is “deflagrate”. Sugar is not a high explosive.
All carbohydrate powders have this property. We’ve had grain elevator explosions for as long as we’ve had grain elevators. Demonstrating this with bread flour was an old schoolboy trick. An extremely wide range of ordinary dusts and powders will work.
Dust explosions are the far more improbable solid phase equivalent of a gas leak explosion.
Also wheat flour. And grains like wheat can catch fire, so they sprayed with tons of water while loading on a ship.
At some point, people who post unrelated political noise on disaster topics need to be muted.
This is irresponsible and unprovoked propaganda. Even if the Trump admin had implemented this change, California State regulations would still be in place.
Please take your political trash back to Reddit.
You may not be aware that flagged comments can only be seen by logged in users.
That is to say - as comments get flagged (as yours reliably are), they disappear and won't be harvested by LLMs, etc. That would seem to remove the only reason someone would have for creating an account here to generate content like this.
The politically deranged ascribe the oddest motivations to people just saying what they think.
And they think the “power” to downvote or flag comments is some kind of infinity stone.
You honestly believe he made a comment so it would be “harvested by an LLM”? That’s such an odd thing for you to have said.
> You honestly believe he made a comment so it would be “harvested by an LLM”?
I honestly speculated that. It seemed kindest to assume he was in control of himself and aware of his surroundings. Plugging that into his history kind of narrowed the possibilities.
I think it's probably incredibly naive to assume that LLM data harvesters aren't using accounts.
Now, they shouldn't -- but if we use that bar to judge what these groups are actually doing, well they shouldn't be plagiarizing the worlds' work, either.
It's not like chemical spills didn't happen before these changes though. Let's not sensationalize. Can you directly link the change in policy t this leak?
If you would like to learn more about these types of incidents, the US Chemical Safety Review Board has a fantastic series of videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB
They explore the root causes of historical accidents. Importantly, they do it from a broad perspective: not just the chemistry, but the human factors, the decision making, and the process failures that led to the accident and how to prevent such things in the future.
I'd be curious how it came to pass that 40k people were living within the blast radius of a plant processing toxic chemicals. Isn't this sort of thing the primary justification for the existence of zoning laws?
The plant has been around since at least the 1970s. At the time it likely was on the edge of town, but through 50 years of urban sprawl, the town grew around it.
It may be even older than that. My source for the age of the site is this 1970 NASA ALSEP supplier list (from the moon program!), which lists the address as an approved manufacturer on page 38: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/ALSEP/pdf/31111000671279.pdf
Surely they've had to get new permits over time as their operations changed? And why didn't the presence of the plant prevent the town from growing around it?
There's a home 430 feet away from it. At that point you didn't even try to create a buffer zone.
Their operations have not changed very much. They have always made acrylic windshields for airplanes.
This area is zoned as an industrial park, which doesn't require buffer zones. Probably city planners at the time just thought of them as a windshield manufacturer and didn't realize the potential risks.
I can't link to it directly because Historic Aerials[1] hates direct links, but for those following along at home: The address of the leak seems to be 12122 Western Ave, Garden Grove, CA.
The leak itself seems to be centered around a round tank near a curve on a railroad, betwixt Lampson and Chapman avenues[2].
That plant and its tank, or a tank very similar similar to it, seems to have been built between between 1963 and 1972.
The houses near the tank were built prior to 1963. At that time when the houses were built nearby, the area where the plant is now located was undeveloped agricultural land.
Therefore, in this particular instance: It sure seems like they built the plant next to the neighborhood, instead of the people building houses next to the plant.
I'm reluctant to blame the homeowners, here -- at all. They were here first.
[1]: https://www.historicaerials.com/ -- awesome site, just not very compatible with WWW norms and never really has been
[2]: Google Maps direct link with current-ish aerials -- useful, at least, for orientation on Historic Aerials: https://www.google.com/maps/place/12122+Western+Ave,+Garden+...
---
BIG FAT EDIT: I figured out how to get something close to useful, direct links to Historic Aerials.
Here's 1963. Note the presence of houses, and the absence of a manufacturing plant: https://www.historicaerials.com/location/33.7836372593042/-1...
Here's the same spot in 1972. Note that the houses are still there, and a manufacturing plant (with a tank!) has popped up to the West: https://www.historicaerials.com/location/33.7836372593042/-1...
This attitude is why all our manufacturing moved to China.
Why is the factory's fault that people built houses right up to the edge of of the industrial site? Are you seriously suggesting they should have been shut down because people decided to build houses near an established industrial plant?
I think the parent comment is suggesting that residential units should not be allowed to be built around it, rather than that once someone builds a house around it the plant has to shut down.
I think that's what they're suggesting, as well.
However: In this instance, the residential units were present before the plant was. I covered the apparent timeline some here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
"Surely they've had to get new permits over time as their operations changed"
I think your reading is very generous — this clearly implies that the factory should have had their operations at best frozen once the surrounding area was built out.
"As their operations changed" implying that perhaps the tanks weren't there when the houses were built.
Alternatively the tanks predate the houses in which case allowing housing so close to them seems highly questionable.
However given the long history of acrylic it's entirely possible that both the tanks and the housing predate modern safety practices in which case there's really not much to complain about. That possibility hadn't occurred to me when I first posted because I hadn't been aware of the history of the area.
Edit: And in the time it took me to write that someone else posted historic evidence that the houses were there before the plant. However it was the 1960s so safe bet that safety standards weren't what they are now.
The houses were there before the tank-in-question showed up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
It is your comment that my edit was referring to after all.
I replied to you before I saw your edit.
Time is funny that way sometimes.
Cheers. :)
The actual site of the tank is 33.78356416377991, -117.99993897629278 [1] - its in an industrial park, and its not a large scale chemical manufacturing facility.
Its 'light manufacturing' for a company that makes custom formed acrylics for aerospace.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°47'00.8%22N+117°59'59.8...
Perhaps "light manufacturing" is the wrong classification for this kind of business, then. Most of their neighbors are distribution warehouses, or companies doing machining or sheet metal pressing - if you ask me those are more in line with the definition of "light manufacturing" than the 7,000 gallon runaway exothermic reaction we're seeing here.
I get that, but the reality is that 40k people were evacuated. Shouldn't zoning be set up so as to prevent that? Light manufacturing in general is fine but it seems like these particular storage tanks might have been a bit too large for that location.
> I get that, but the reality is that 40k people were evacuated. Shouldn't zoning be set up so as to prevent that?
It's funny that you would suggest this about California, where it is notoriously hard to build things.
Accidents happen, it's not obvious that this was a forseeable outcome (happy for corrections from folks who have expertise in this area).
California isn't notoriously hard to build in - that's a result of it being incredibly conservative - not politically, but "anything that's built can remain forever, nothing new can be built" conservative.
You’re trying to make a distinction without a difference.
It’s notoriously difficult to build here BECAUSE of NIMBYs, house values preservation, “preservation of character”, CEQA (a state law that gives LOTS of different people who shouldn’t have this power an effective veto for any new construction).
Since the plant was around long before the homes, the homes were built around it. Zoning laws, if they existed then, should have prevented the homes from building, not the plant.
Grew up there, the plant wasn't there first, probably around the same age.
I have seen this claim (the plant was there first), but I can’t find a source.
The nearest houses were built in 1958 according to Zillow.
The earliest photo in Google Earth is 1984 and at that time the site is already totally surrounded by houses for miles.
There really isn't such a thing as an "accident." There are mistakes.
You design equipment, procedures, monitoring, training etc to account for the possibility of human error. Like computer security, you build systems with layers of fault tolerance and ways of minimizing risk or consequences.
Go watch the CSB youtube channel for a few hours and you'll see that basically none of these are "accidents" and most of them involve severe facepalm you-gotta-be-kidding-me situations.
From watching a lot of the videos, the causes seem to boil down to:
- poor training, either in the dangers of what workers were working with, signs of things going wrong, or how to handle things going wrong
- management / supervisors either tolerating or outright encouraging corner-cutting for the sake of productivity
- lots of looking-the-other-way especially in communities where the plant in question is the biggest, or only, employer around. If you're seen as someone who complains about safety issues, and you get fired - you don't have many other options for other places to work. If you complain and cause a work stoppage and people lose income, you're going to be mighty unpopular, fast.
- poor maintenance and upkeep
- badly designed, insufficient, flaky, or outright failed monitoring equipment that is ignored/tolerated
- poor emergency response planning
- people trying to "save" a situation, or waiting to act, because the corrective action would cause a lot of downtime, or wrecked material/product
- improper materials used for storage/handling (I exaggerate, but think: plastic seals on valve of a tank that someone pumps acetone into. acetone leaks through valve into another tank full of stuff that acetone Reacts Poorly To. Material incompatibility is featured in a lot of CSB videos)
Often it's multiple of the above. Say - something that should have been minor wasn't caught because Bob was poorly trained. It would have been OK if the monitoring system alarm rang at the security desk, but they moved the desk and the alarm is now in an accountant's office. Even then, if they had been checking the pressure relief pipe as part of their regular maintenance, they would have found it was blocked by an Eastern Spotted Wombat's nest, and the blockage meant the tank couldn't drain, and kaboom. That's basically how a lot of the CSB investigations play out. The US chemical industry is a barely-regulated clown show and the rest of us pay the price.
The hazards of the chemical overheating are well known. So was the tank's size, and the radius in terms of a catastrophic failure, and the number of people inside that radius. There was no reason they couldn't have had a deluge standpipe to douse the exterior of the tank.
There's a chemical that can bring the stuff under control by injecting it into the tank. It sounds like it wasn't stored on-site but was brought in by a "response team" that arrived well after the whole mess started. Given the danger level to the surrounding population people on-site should have been trained in emergency response, and that chemical should have been readily accessible if not part of a connected system where a button push or valve opening would disperse the counteragent.
The valves they could have used to inject the chemical were stuck shut. I saw someone claim it was because of the pressure, but it feels pretty laughable that the pressure in the tank was high enough to cause the valves to stick, but not high enough to cause the tank to rupture. From watching a lot of CSB videos, I can almost guarantee that if it gets investigated (Trump has wiped out almost all of the CSB) investigators will find the valves were poorly maintained.
There's also no excuse for them not having a contingency plan to do something like using a self-piercing device to pierce either the tank or a pipe that connects to the tank, and inject it. Self-piercing taps/valves/whatever are used for all sorts of things - it's not some uber complicated technology.
Again: if 40,000 people are within the radius of harm if Easily Angered Chemical goes exothermic, then you need to have solid plans with multiple ways to address it and people ON SITE who can address it.
If you are worried about this incident, just wait until you hear about crude-by-rail! Crude is transported through LOTS of residential neighborhoods and zoning doesn’t matter. Additionally, railroads are governed by federal law so states / local munis can’t put additional restrictions on where, when, or speed limits.
Is crude-by-rail worse for people than crude-by-pipeline?
Either way, our current methods of doing modern human things require crude oil to get from A to B eventually...somehow.
And the pathway this takes isn't necessarily one that is devoid of humans.
(I live in a small city that sees all kinds of rail fright, with many dozens of trains on any normal day. I'm very interested in your opinion.)
Zoning doesn't protect people from chemicals, it protects white people from black and chinese people, and that has always been its only and avowed purpose.
Also notable that the people who live across the street from the tanks don't live in Garden Grove. By a miracle of local agency boundaries, the factory is in Garden Grove but the houses are in Stanton. Welcome to California.
That being said: https://www.ocregister.com/2026/05/22/disneyland-and-knotts-...
https://xkcd.com/2170/
That area has dozens of aerospace manufacturers, building up since before WW2. People wanted to live close to work. There are lots of homes and commercial areas and industrial parks are tightly mixed together.
Source: I’ve worked in aerospace in Orange County.
Because greater Los Angeles is the USA's (post-)WWII aerospace hub disguised as a megacity and cultural production center? All sorts of folks spent the 40s-00s (scientifically) blowing stuff up in the hills, and manufacturing the resulting products down in the basin and points south. Those businesses needed labor, which needed nearby housing, and here we are.
That's... not really a reasonable characterization of LA's urban growth patterns. To begin with, Hollywood quite clearly predates the aerospace buildout in the 40's and 50's. It was an oil production and refining hub before that, and an agricultural shipping center even before the dust bowl.
This particular neighborhood in Orange County certainly looks aerospacey, but I bet the Disney-centered service workers in Anaheim made up just as much of the population as the industrial folks.
Big cities are big for a bunch of reasons, basically. There are no simple answers at this scale.
This part of the OC is very defense heavy.
It should have been in the disclosures for all the home purchases at least, but renters don’t get those (maybe they should?)
Imagine how often this situation lie this would be happening without institutions like OSHA or the EPA.
Stuff like this happens in Texas on a fairly regular basis, but it rarely ever makes national news.
From what I hear[1], we should be relying on the fact that environmental disasters are bad for business in a true Scotsman "free market".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238025#48240301
As someone whose childhood home is in the evac zone ... It's a bit crazy I was living in this neighborhood my entire childhood just waiting for this to go boom
That being said California is very industry friendly and all the stuff about overregulation is from people who don't get California.
Doesn't that mean they can bike to work there?
MMA (this stuff) hardens when exposed to sunlight. The tank and valves are outdoors.
I would not be surprised to learn that is why the pipes/valves/etc are "gummed up" (to use the term from the article) - people who touch the valves/etc probably have mma on their hands/gloves, and then because those are outdoors, it eventually hardens.
Or something similar.
Chemistry question: is there any advantage to preempting the possible spontaneous explosion with a controlled explosion? This controlled explosion would happen when the MMA is in a less volatile state, perhaps.
Second question: would it be futile to lift a containment vessel over the tank? Would a containment vessel of sufficient strength be too heavy to lift? For starters I'm thinking of a shipping container...
Where are all of the humanoid robots? Get them in there with whatever the oil and gas industry uses for tapping pipes/containers under pressure. I'm only half kidding.
That's the same question a lot of people had during the Fukushima disaster in 2011. People were trying to contact Honda to convince them to send their ASIMO robot to shut off valves that could not be accessed by humans. That was well beyond it's capabilities. ASIMO was designed for the stage, not for a disaster zone. No one had the know-how to build such a robot.
Flash forward to today, we are still in quite the same position where robots can do fancy, flashy tech demos, but when it comes to doing something useful that is also unpredictable, the know-now is still not there. Even teleoperation is not a robust answer to this yet, it still has some maturing to do.
A robot useful for these kinds of things would look much more like Simone Giertz's contraptions than a futuristic humanoid thing.
Standing a safe distance away, flanked by their union rep robots who refused to let their members go to work in such dangerous conditions.
Unfortunately we can't force them to go in either. They threatened to pull the entire humanoid robot workforce if we try...
On a more serious note however, I'm surprised there aren't off-the-shelf remotely operated rigs for assisting with this sort of situation: highly flammable/explosive chemicals under pressurised containment that need relief.
It’s not simply that the tank might explode. That is one hazard, but spilling the chemical is another serious hazard.
Humanoid robots remain almost completely useless. We do have bomb disposal robots but they are not humanoid. They also are only designed for explosive devices not giant tanks. Or power tools.
To be fair we discovered you can strap a bomb to a bomb-disposal robot and make a remote controlled bomb.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/robot-delivered-lethal-...
despite all the replace humans IT delusion, we're pretty much still the same civilization that uses steam to generate most energy. The AI emperor has no clothese.
I was poking around the small town of Sinclair in Wyoming. This is basically the company town for the large refinery there and in the park there are two old cannons with the sign stating that they were originally bought by the company to be used in the event of a refinery fire. They wanted a way to puncture over heating tanks so they wouldn't explode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Grove_chemical_leak
Why can’t they drill it and pipe it off into some drainage pipe for cooling or collecting in trucks?
Divide and conquer
In addition to possible ignition through the sparks, it's apparently stored under high pressure, so you can't make a hole without completely compromising the structural integrity which is pretty much guaranteed to kill the driller.
That's a very good point.
Drill = spark = boom = nasty stuff all over surrounding area
Righti didn’t realize It was explosive like that but it really is
Flash point 2 °C (36 °F; 275 K) Autoignition temperature 435 °C (815 °F; 708 K) Explosive limits 1.7%-8.2%
Drilling is too risky then. What about dumping liquid nitrogen on the thing until it’s doused?
Quick googling sez that liquid nitrogen might solidify the MMA inside, turning it into even more of a pressure cooker
It's possible to drill or cut without creating sparks. Just need to control the speed of the cutter.
Besides, tanks like these have various portholes, valves and drains already. The article mentions an "inoperable valve" so maybe that's the problem but I'd be surprised if there were just one. They must have been getting the contents out of the tank and into the manufacturing process somehow.
IIUC, the stuff inside is polymerizing, turning into goop that gummed everything up. It was probably not goop when used for the original purpose
Does this mean that we should shoot holes in it like cowboys to relieve pressure, or does that instead mean that we should not shoot holes in it like cowboys to relieve pressure?
(Because, I mean: If this thing is as sketchy as it is made out to be, then nobody is just walking over there with a spanner to loosen a cover. There aren't enough dollars nor PPE available to make this happen.)
Shooting holes in pressurized vessels with explosive stuff is probably a very bad idea, as outlined in my comment[1]. Slowly loosening a valve is a better idea.
That being said, in no way, shape or form am I an authority on the subject.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254381
What about airlifting a containment vessel on top of it? To lessen the impact of an explosion?
I refer you to this excellent literature review of the topic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M9AXXLAonh8
The standard choice for MMA processing is actually stainless steel, because carbon steel/iron/etc scavenge the inhibitor used to prevent thermal runaway. HDPE would work, and often how it is transported in drums, but for actual processing, everything would normally be spec'd as stainless steel.
Which, of course, is pretty spark resistant to begin with.
Even if this wasn't true, this is not a hard problem, you can use non-sparking tools, proper coolant, lots of things to avoid sparks.
Or you know, we could require that highly flammable materials subject to thermal runaway have "drill here in case of emergency" patch of non-sparking material or something.
The cost of ATEX/Class 1 Div 1 compliance would not really go up if you required this.
Inb4: I don't work in the industry, my knowledge is limited to a faint memory of a college course on fluid dynamics.
If I recall correctly, high pressure ignitable stuff can spontaneously turn !!FUN!! in absence of heat if it is suddenly relieved through a pinhole. Basically jet is followed by a ring-like zone where the stuff mixes with oxygen. Jet creates tiny zones of very high temp, thus igniting the mixture ring that follows.
Inert gas?
More fire / explosion risk than the "toxic cloud engulfs city" rhetoric people have been spreading.
https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC127140100&...
I used to manufacture methylmethacrylate, as well as acrolein (which is often co-produced with MMA). These are among some of the more toxic chemicals currently manufactured in the USA.
Acrylates in general are truly awful. Our guys died with their faces boiling and breathing in their own vomit while also still vomiting. From a relatively brief exposure.
A bigger public risk of MMA is actually the extremely low odor threshold (in the parts per billion). The god-awful smell can make an area temporarily "unlivable" even below any known health thresholds. And it affects very large areas, because of the very low odor threshold.
Acrolein is about 300x more toxic than methyl methacrylate in rats. Was this unfortunate victim exposed to acrolein?
Yes, I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly. If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein, and a lot of other chemicals as well.
I've known people who've died from both, separately, as well as ethyl acrylate and acrylic acid. I've gotten a few bursts of them in the face as well, luckily nothing too awful. I'll repeat that acrylates in general are truly awful chemicals to be exposed to.
> I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly.
And that's exactly the sort of thing I'm objecting to. Conflating things for dramatic effect is also known as "lying".
> If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein.
Citation needed. It burns hot enough that in open air the vast majority of the carbon will go to CO₂ or CO. Oxygen starved, I'd expect the hydrogens to burn off leaving soot. There may be some trace amount of acrolein, but that's true of cooked food too.
They talk about the possibility of a spill going into the environment, but if they know it might spill, can't they make it spill and capture it?
They are building a dam around it I read in one of the news releases maybe the one linked above
It seems this particular failure mode wasn't even considered - most large "chemical" tanks are required to have spill walls (basically a berm around the tank that could contain the contents of the tank) - sample model: https://www.walthers.com/wide-oil-storage-tank-w-berm-kit-ta...
Is it not possible for them to just... spray it with ice cold water?
I guess you ask why they are using water at ambient temperature (20°C; 68°F) instead of very cold water (0°C; 32°F). Some reasons I can think now:
They are using a lot of water, as most as possible, from pipes at whatever temperature it is. There are no enough mobile refrigerators, not enough electricity to make them work, and it's very hard to transport cold water or ice if you don't use the pipes.
Also, the center of the tank is hot and reacting, but the external part is a nasty block if plastic that acts like a shield and isolate it from the cold water outside.
This is a common problems in big chemical plants when you have exothermic reactions. It's not enough to cold it down, you need to ensure all parts are cold down.
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
The difference in cooling potential between cold water and water at ambient temperature is minimal. Cooling with water primarily comes from phase change or heat exchange; both can move vastly more heat than a small difference in temperature.
Chilling the water would massively complicate the logistics with a very marginal improvement in heat removal.
Heat exchange is proportional to the difference in temperature though (in reference to your "or heat exchange"). Colder water would cool faster. The tank isn't at boiling either, so it's not like you'll be able to phase change away a bunch of energy. I guess you'll still get some evaporative cooling, but there's a limit to how much you'll get just from the ambient temperature (the exterior of the tank is relatively cool, presumably because the "gummed up" interior is inhibiting heat transfer)
Ah, that makes sense. It's too bad they can't drill into it to relieve pressure without destroying the integrity of the tank (not that I'd want to be anywhere close to it either).
If they didn't have to worry about it imminently exploding I wonder if they could somehow wrap it with reinforcement (e.g., wrap some high strength metal around the tank to prevent it from deforming when drilled into) and then drill into it to extract the liquid?
One of my other less serious ideas was to helilift a Chernobyl style containment structure around it, but I imagine they don't have one of those just sitting around waiting to be used.
Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.
They have been doing exactly that for the past 24 hours. However the contents of the tank are polymerizing, that reaction is exothermic, and the tank is quite large.
I wonder if they’ll try drilling or shooting a hole into the bottom. A semi controlled leak to disperse it locally. A mess for sure. But better than going up and out.
Both of those seem likely to risk causing sparks.
Read the article. They have been doing that, but that is just slowing things down and buying them time.
They are not. I said ice cold. I read this article and several other articles about this.
I suspect it is impractical to refrigerate a large volume of water in short order. Heck, if I take 2-3 glasses of water out of my refrigerator's water dispenser, it's at tap temperature.
To put it differently, think through what it would take to refrigerate the volume of water that they are spraying. Can someone pull that together in a matter of minutes or hours?
Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-)
I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).
Snow machines are just big spray nozzles. They don't chill the water the way you might be thinking. There's some adiabatic cooling from the expansion of compressed air, but that's about it.
Refrigerated liquid transport absolutely exists. Milk trucks is an example off the top of my head. Liquified natural gas is another.
> "refrigerated liquid transport"
Well, "Ice Cold" water is ice and ice trucks are a thing - not to mention for fast substantive cooling 0 Celsius ice blocks on top of the tank would soak up far more heat energy than the same weight of 0 Celsius water.
As for the transportation of cold liquids, there are many LNG / Propane trucks about - pressurised containers for Liquefied Natural Gas.
> Toxic chemical leak
vs.
> They were also creating dikes and dams to contain any chemicals if the tank spilled
So, no leak.
Seemingly logical, but ignorant and likely incorrect.
Leaking is any unintended oozing, sweating, transfer of tank contents to outside tank.
With increased temperature and pressure, gauges red lining, etc. it's very probable there's been leakage and / or venting.
The creation of dikes and dams to contain greater spillage from a potential low level rupture is in anticipation of more than just a leak and ideally less than a full thermal run away and explosion.
Just because I placed a couple of buckets under the leaks on my roof doesn't mean my roof is not leaking.
It was leaking a few days ago. That leak was stopped. The reaction was not. It looks likely to leak again.
The LD50 of methyl methacrylate in rates is 7-10 g/kg. In comparison, the LD50 of table salt in rats is 3 g/kg. So it's not a highly toxic chemical.
It's neurotoxic, a respiratory irritant, and an eye irritant.
No, if it's injected in your bloodstream it won't immediately kill you, but if you inhale a few milligrams of vapor you'll wish you could cough up a lung.
Also, the vapors are heavier than air, so if you fall in a ditch near the hypothetical blown tank you would likely suffocate and die.
It is however highly flammable and potentially explosive when sealed in a tank, which is the main concern.
And then we need to consider the byproducts produced when it burns - both nominally as well as the sort of extremely dirty incomplete combustion an explosion would produce.
They say it will fail for sure, either leak or explode.
I wonder why they can't drain the tank into another facility. Maybe they just lack an appropriate container.
I believe they are having issues with the valves, from what I’ve read.
But I’m just some guy.
They are having valve problems. One of the possible reasons is that it may be turning into a solid plastic.
If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.
Turning into plastic is an exothermic reaction. That's what's heating the tank.
Yes, as of recent the third possibility mentioned by officials is that it will Turn into plastic and not explode.
Provided the plastic doesn't need significantly more space than the source material, of course. We all know what happens when you try freezing a sealed bottle filled with water.
I live nearby, I'm hosting some family at my home who have been evacuated. A fireman friend who has been to the site said the same. That it'll either explode or spill and they're banking on it spilling.
Many people have already mentioned that officials have stated the valve isn’t working.
But also, the chemical is actively undergoing an exothermic reaction (which is why the tank is at risk for failure). How do you transport such a toxic fluid without putting much more of the public at risk?
If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone.
I don't understand why a storage tank for this stuff doesn't have an injection port, independent from any other pipes or valves, that could be used to add an inhibitor. Maybe it does and it's broken (clogged with PMMA from the reaction) as well?
They tried to neutralize but couldn’t apparently.
“But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Mr. Covey.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/garden-grove-chemical-...
The valve's jammed, so they can't really pump things in or out.
I love how the current title of this post just assumes that everyone lives in California.
There are other "Orange County"s in the U.S.
Do you get angry when someone mentions London that they didn't specify that it is London, England?
Because there are other Londons.
Thank you for your interest in my emotional states, and you make a good point. However, I don't think these situations are the same.
In terms of population, the biggest London is 9.1 million people and the 2nd-biggest is under 500,000. Quite a big difference! I think that's why when someone says "London" one can usually reasonably assume they're talking about the one in England, unless otherwise specified (or unless they live near a different one).
The biggest Orange County is 3.1 million and the 2nd-biggest Orange County is 1.4 million, so the difference is not nearly as great. I'd even suggest they're in the same general category of size. In the context of a national/international website, it's far less clear that one of the "Orange County"s is so overwhelmingly what people refer to that its state need not be specified.
It used to say CA which is even worse.. given that's a country code (not where this Orange County is), and also means various things in other countries.. the state of California for people who live in the US, for example. What are you thinking; US-CA-OC? (We're starting to look a little ISO)
Ontario, CA is a thing. Two things, actually, I guess.
https://www.ontarioca.gov
Use the nearest airport code with passenger service? SNA
LGB is closer - but that has its own aliasing issues.