Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#111

Post by ssl-3 »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #91
bpodgursky wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#112

Post by themafia »

yungbeto wrote: post #6

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...

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

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#113

Post by VTimofeenko »

DannyBee wrote: post #105
VTimofeenko wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drill = spark = boom = nasty stuff all over surrounding area

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…

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.

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#114

Post by VTimofeenko »

SoftTalker wrote: post #93
VTimofeenko wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drill = spark = boom = nasty stuff all over surrounding area

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

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#115

Post by VTimofeenko »

keepamovin wrote: post #88
VTimofeenko wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#116

Post by tolciho »

foota wrote: post #44
gus_massa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#117

Post by tootie »

mkw5053 wrote: post #27

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.

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.

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#118

Post by bombcar »

zorex wrote: post #76
mkw5053 wrote: post #27

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…

A robot useful for these kinds of things would look much more like Simone Giertz's contraptions than a futuristic humanoid thing.

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#119

Post by bombcar »

tootie wrote: post #117
mkw5053 wrote: post #27

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.

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-...

Re: Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County

#120

Post by bombcar »

rdtsc wrote: post #51
toponijo wrote: post #49

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...
Post reply on HN