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.
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+...
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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...
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?
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...
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.
That being said California is very industry friendly and all the stuff about overregulation is from people who don't get California.
Stuff like this happens in Texas on a fairly regular basis, but it rarely ever makes national news.
Divide and conquer
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.
Didn't an EPA whistleblower credibly accuse the fully regulated EPA of a coverup including backdated policies in that incident?
Sounds like a better system, coverups, corruption and incompetence.
Also the USCSB is one of my favorite federal institutions:
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.
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 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.
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?
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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/us/garden-grove-chemical-...
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.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/robot-delivered-lethal-...
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.
There are other "Orange County"s in the U.S.
Because there are other Londons.
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.
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 poked around on Google and found a brief write-up and some photos of those cannons: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=89707
(Also fantastic in an old-web way: It includes a page hit counter. It currently shows 801 for all time, and 29 for the year.)
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 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.
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...
