Crews worked overnight into Monday morning to keep the chemical tank in Garden Grove (a suburb of Southern California’s Orange County) from exploding in the hopes of preventing a chemical disaster.
The “crisis situation,” which forced California Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a “state of emergency,” has now forced 50,000 people from their homes as the authorities work to “stop a pressurized tank filled with a toxic chemical at the GKN Aerospace facility from exploding in Garden Grove,” per ABC News.
In a Sunday afternoon update, Orange County Fire Authority Interim Chief TJ McGovern said firefighters did “a recon mission on the tank” late Saturday night, during which they discovered a crack, which could be relieving some of the pressure.
In a later update, OCFA said an all-night mission will be conducted to confirm if the pressure in the tank has been released and that the threat of a catastrophic explosion has been eliminated.
“The BLEVE threat is the worst-case catastrophic event that we have been talking about. We are not there yet. We need to run this operation tonight,” McGovern said.
According to the Huron Daily Tribune, the tank cracked over the weekend after it overheated on Thursday and “began venting vapors, leaving local and state officials scrambling to evade a worst possible scenario at the aerospace company site.”
Atmospheric modeling showed an active leak in the tank on Sunday night. No injuries have been reported as of this writing.
“Firefighters have repeatedly sprayed the tank with water in an attempt to cool the chemical inside, methyl methacrylate, which is used to make plastic parts,” noted the outlet. “The tank’s interior reached 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius) Sunday, an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius) since Saturday, according to Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg.”
“The tank at GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems, which makes parts for commercial and military aircraft, holds 6,000 to 7,000 gallons (22,700 to 26,500 liters) of methyl methacrylate used to make plastic parts,” it added.
An O.C. scanner declared on Sunday night it “received information that 2 out of the 3 tanks in the GKN complex have effectively been ‘neutralized’ meaning they no longer pose a threat of explosion to the community.”
