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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
Read the article in the context of the comment clearly means "I have read the article - here's my conclusion of its context relating to your post". Did you even read the thread?
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)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
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.
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
There's a home 430 feet away from it. At that point you didn't even try to create a buffer zone.
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.
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...
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).
Source: I’ve worked in aerospace in Orange County.
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.
Stuff like this happens in Texas on a fairly regular basis, but it rarely ever makes national news.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238025#48240301
https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC127140100&...
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.
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.
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.
I wonder why they can't drain the tank into another facility. Maybe they just lack an appropriate container.
But I’m just some guy.
If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.
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.
Chilling the water would massively complicate the logistics with a very marginal improvement in heat removal.
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.
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?
There are other "Orange County"s in the U.S.