101–110 of 177 posts
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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)
Use the nearest airport code with passenger service? SNA
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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 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.
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.
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.
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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 lik…
IME “common sense” is code for “we don’t need to listen to experts about this”
Why can’t they drill it and pipe it off into some drainage pipe for cooling or collecting in trucks? Divide and conquer
Drill = spark = boom = nasty stuff all over surrounding area
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.
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.
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.
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)
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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.
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...
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[flagged]
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.
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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.
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.