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

91–100 of 177 posts

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

#91

Post by collinmcnulty »

bpodgursky wrote: post #89
crote wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#92

Post by gdulli »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #78
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...

[flagged]

The point is that the long-ongoing effort to weaken regulation leads to events like this as predicted, and further steps in that direction are powerfully incompetent.

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

#93

Post by SoftTalker »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #73
keepamovin wrote: post #66

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

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.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

lokar wrote: post #90
gnabgib wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by MarkusQ »

nerdsniper wrote: post #17
pfdietz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acrolein is about 300x more toxic than methyl methacrylate in rats. Was this unfortunate victim exposed to acrolein?

Yes, I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly. If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein, and a lot of other chemicals as well. 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.

> I'm conflating them for dramatic effect, perhaps unfairly.

And that's exactly the sort of thing I'm objecting to. Conflating things for dramatic effect is also known as "lying".

> If MMA is on fire, it will produce acrolein.

Citation needed. It burns hot enough that in open air the vast majority of the carbon will go to CO₂ or CO. Oxygen starved, I'd expect the hydrogens to burn off leaving soot. There may be some trace amount of acrolein, but that's true of cooked food too.

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

#96

Post by harshreality »

thephyber wrote: post #77
mmooss wrote: post #12

They say it will fail for sure, either leak or explode. I wonder why they can't drain the tank into another facility. Maybe they just lack an appropriate container.

Many people have already mentioned that officials have stated the valve isn’t working. 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?

If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone.

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?

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

#97

Post by acomjean »

harshreality wrote: post #96
thephyber wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have already mentioned that officials have stated the valve isn’t working. 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?

If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone. 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?

They tried to neutralize but couldn’t apparently.

“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-...

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

#98

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

SadErn wrote: post #82
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...

[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.

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

#99

Post by aliasxneo »

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...

From what I understand, this gutted the 2024 additions which effectively returned it to the pre-2024 regulations. The EPA also cites a ~45% reduction in accidental releases from 2014–2023.

Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.

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

#100

Post by khana »

thephyber wrote: post #58
drivingmenuts wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what this administration calls common sense is more like dumbass sense than anything else. On almost every level.

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…

[dead]
Post reply on HN