California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to a looming chemical disaster in Orange County. The proclamation directs the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and other state agencies to provide additional support to local responders and makes state-owned properties available to shelter the 40,000 people ordered to evacuate the area.
Evacuation and Response Efforts
“The safety of Orange County residents is the top priority,” Newsom said in a statement. “We are mobilizing every state resource available to support local responders and make sure the community has what they need to stay safe.”
On Thursday, a storage tank holding methyl methacrylate began off-gassing and threatened to fail at a facility in Garden Grove owned by GKN Aerospace, according to local authorities. The highly flammable chemical is used to fabricate resins and plastics. The tank, holding between 6,000 and 7,000 gallons, could either explode or leak its contents into the parking lot.
Firefighting and Containment
Firefighters have attempted to cool the tank by dousing it with water, but those efforts appear to be failing. An emergency response team entered the facility on Saturday night to add a neutralizing agent to a separate nearby tank to reduce its explosive potential, said Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey. When the team checked the temperature, the tank had reached 90°F—about 13 degrees higher than the previous reading—and was rising by approximately 1 degree per hour.
Emergency responders are preparing to dike and dam the contents in case of a spill and mitigate health risks from a potential explosion. At the same time, they are exploring “out of the box” strategies to avert disaster entirely. “We’re bringing people in from all over the country, talking to people all over the place, trying to come up with additional options,” Covey said. “Letting this thing just fail and blow up is unacceptable to us.”
