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

131–140 of 177 posts

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

#131

Post by jandrewrogers »

themafia wrote: post #112
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

Sugar dust does not “literally detonate”. The term you are looking for is “deflagrate”. Sugar is not a high explosive.

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.

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

#132

Post by foota »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #54
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…

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.

Heat exchange is proportional to the difference in temperature though (in reference to your "or heat exchange"). Colder water would cool faster. The tank isn't at boiling either, so it's not like you'll be able to phase change away a bunch of energy. I guess you'll still get some evaporative cooling, but there's a limit to how much you'll get just from the ambient temperature (the exterior of the tank is relatively cool, presumably because the "gummed up" interior is inhibiting heat transfer)

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

#133

Post by foota »

gwbas1c wrote: post #52
foota wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not. I said ice cold. I read this article and several other articles about this.

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?

Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-)

I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).

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

#134

Post by defrost »

foota wrote: post #133
gwbas1c wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-) I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).

> "refrigerated liquid transport"

Well, "Ice Cold" water is ice and ice trucks are a thing - not to mention for fast substantive cooling 0 Celsius ice blocks on top of the tank would soak up far more heat energy than the same weight of 0 Celsius water.

As for the transportation of cold liquids, there are many LNG / Propane trucks about - pressurised containers for Liquefied Natural Gas.

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

#135

Post by ssl-3 »

thephyber wrote: post #61
fc417fc802 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are worried about this incident, just wait until you hear about crude-by-rail! Crude is transported through LOTS of residential neighborhoods and zoning doesn’t matter. Additionally, railroads are governed by federal law so states / local munis can’t put additional restrictions on where, when, or speed limits.

Is crude-by-rail worse for people than crude-by-pipeline?

Either way, our current methods of doing modern human things require crude oil to get from A to B eventually...somehow.

And the pathway this takes isn't necessarily one that is devoid of humans.

(I live in a small city that sees all kinds of rail fright, with many dozens of trains on any normal day. I'm very interested in your opinion.)

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

#136

Post by thenickdude »

Aloha wrote: post #8
fc417fc802 wrote: post #3

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 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. https://www.google.com/maps/place/33°47'00.8%22N+117°59'59.8...

https://xkcd.com/2170/

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

#139

Post by itishappy »

foota wrote: post #133
gwbas1c wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah that's fair. It does make me wonder what there is that would allow this. Maybe importing some snow machines from Tahoe? :-) I'm actually a little surprised that a quick search for "refrigerated liquid transport" didn't turn up anything. I would have sort of thought this was something that would exist (just because there are so many random things that are necessary for _some purpose_).

Snow machines are just big spray nozzles. They don't chill the water the way you might be thinking. There's some adiabatic cooling from the expansion of compressed air, but that's about it.

Refrigerated liquid transport absolutely exists. Milk trucks is an example off the top of my head. Liquified natural gas is another.

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

#140

Post by itishappy »

btilly wrote: post #39
gazook89 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they are having issues with the valves, from what I’ve read. But I’m just some guy.

They are having valve problems. One of the possible reasons is that it may be turning into a solid plastic. If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.

Turning into plastic is an exothermic reaction. That's what's heating the tank.
Post reply on HN