https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.
Also the USCSB is one of my favorite federal institutions:
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.
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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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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 like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.
They explore the root causes of historical accidents. Importantly, they do it from a broad perspective: not just the chemistry, but the human factors, the decision making, and the process failures that led to the accident and how to prevent such things in the future.
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
I poked around on Google and found a brief write-up and some photos of those cannons: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=89707
(Also fantastic in an old-web way: It includes a page hit counter. It currently shows 801 for all time, and 29 for the year.)
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.
Flash forward to today, we are still in quite the same position where robots can do fancy, flashy tech demos, but when it comes to doing something useful that is also unpredictable, the know-now is still not there. Even teleoperation is not a robust answer to this yet, it still has some maturing to do.
Divide and conquer
https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC127140100&...
Acrylates in general are truly awful. Our guys died with their faces boiling and breathing in their own vomit while also still vomiting. From a relatively brief exposure.
A bigger public risk of MMA is actually the extremely low odor threshold (in the parts per billion). The god-awful smell can make an area temporarily "unlivable" even below any known health thresholds. And it affects very large areas, because of the very low odor threshold.
Second question: would it be futile to lift a containment vessel over the tank? Would a containment vessel of sufficient strength be too heavy to lift? For starters I'm thinking of a shipping container...
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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 of the tank is hot and reacting, but the external part is a nasty block if plastic that acts like a shield and isolate it from the cold water outside.
This is a common problems in big chemical plants when you have exothermic reactions. It's not enough to cold it down, you need to ensure all parts are cold down.
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
vs.
> They were also creating dikes and dams to contain any chemicals if the tank spilled
So, no leak.
I wonder why they can't drain the tank into another facility. Maybe they just lack an appropriate container.
But I’m just some guy.
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No, if it's injected in your bloodstream it won't immediately kill you, but if you inhale a few milligrams of vapor you'll wish you could cough up a lung.
Also, the vapors are heavier than air, so if you fall in a ditch near the hypothetical blown tank you would likely suffocate and die.
There are other "Orange County"s in the U.S.
Because there are other Londons.
And they think the “power” to downvote or flag comments is some kind of infinity stone.
You honestly believe he made a comment so it would be “harvested by an LLM”? That’s such an odd thing for you to have said.
I honestly speculated that. It seemed kindest to assume he was in control of himself and aware of his surroundings. Plugging that into his history kind of narrowed the possibilities.
Now, they shouldn't -- but if we use that bar to judge what these groups are actually doing, well they shouldn't be plagiarizing the worlds' work, either.
You make a good point. Based on all the folks re-serving HN content, I assume HN has an API.
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I know it changed its meaning over time, but that was the original meaning.
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There's a home 430 feet away from it. At that point you didn't even try to create a buffer zone.
This area is zoned as an industrial park, which doesn't require buffer zones. Probably city planners at the time just thought of them as a windshield manufacturer and didn't realize the potential risks.
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...
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?
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...
It's funny that you would suggest this about California, where it is notoriously hard to build things.
Accidents happen, it's not obvious that this was a forseeable outcome (happy for corrections from folks who have expertise in this area).
Source: I’ve worked in aerospace in Orange County.
This particular neighborhood in Orange County certainly looks aerospacey, but I bet the Disney-centered service workers in Anaheim made up just as much of the population as the industrial folks.
Big cities are big for a bunch of reasons, basically. There are no simple answers at this scale.
Stuff like this happens in Texas on a fairly regular basis, but it rarely ever makes national news.
That being said California is very industry friendly and all the stuff about overregulation is from people who don't get California.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/robot-delivered-lethal-...
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.
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?
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.
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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'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.
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.
Chilling the water would massively complicate the logistics with a very marginal improvement in heat removal.
It is the same reason sweating cools the body much more effectively in low humidity than high humidity environments regardless of the temperature when you drink it. Attributing how drinking water cools the body via various effects is a classic introductory thermodynamics exercise.
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 to extract the liquid?
One of my other less serious ideas was to helilift a Chernobyl style containment structure around it, but I imagine they don't have one of those just sitting around waiting to be used.
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?
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_).
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Leaking is any unintended oozing, sweating, transfer of tank contents to outside tank.
With increased temperature and pressure, gauges red lining, etc. it's very probable there's been leakage and / or venting.
The creation of dikes and dams to contain greater spillage from a potential low level rupture is in anticipation of more than just a leak and ideally less than a full thermal run away and explosion.
If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.
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?
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?
“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-...
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In terms of population, the biggest London is 9.1 million people and the 2nd-biggest is under 500,000. Quite a big difference! I think that's why when someone says "London" one can usually reasonably assume they're talking about the one in England, unless otherwise specified (or unless they live near a different one).
The biggest Orange County is 3.1 million and the 2nd-biggest Orange County is 1.4 million, so the difference is not nearly as great. I'd even suggest they're in the same general category of size. In the context of a national/international website, it's far less clear that one of the "Orange County"s is so overwhelmingly what people refer to that its state need not be specified.
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
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.
It’s notoriously difficult to build here BECAUSE of NIMBYs, house values preservation, “preservation of character”, CEQA (a state law that gives LOTS of different people who shouldn’t have this power an effective veto for any new construction).
You design equipment, procedures, monitoring, training etc to account for the possibility of human error. Like computer security, you build systems with layers of fault tolerance and ways of minimizing risk or consequences.
Go watch the CSB youtube channel for a few hours and you'll see that basically none of these are "accidents" and most of them involve severe facepalm you-gotta-be-kidding-me situations.
From watching a lot of the videos, the causes seem to boil down to:
- poor training, either in the dangers of what workers were working with, signs of things going wrong, or how to handle things going wrong
- management / supervisors either tolerating or outright encouraging corner-cutting for the sake of productivity
- lots of looking-the-other-way especially in communities where the plant in question is the biggest, or only, employer around. If you're seen as someone who complains about safety issues, and you get fired - you don't have many other options for other places to work. If you complain and cause a work stoppage and people lose income, you're going to be mighty unpopular, fast.
- poor maintenance and upkeep
- badly designed, insufficient, flaky, or outright failed monitoring equipment that is ignored/tolerated
- poor emergency response planning
- people trying to "save" a situation, or waiting to act, because the corrective action would cause a lot of downtime, or wrecked material/product
- improper materials used for storage/handling (I exaggerate, but think: plastic seals on valve of a tank that someone pumps acetone into. acetone leaks through valve into another tank full of stuff that acetone Reacts Poorly To. Material incompatibility is featured in a lot of CSB videos)
Often it's multiple of the above. Say - something that should have been minor wasn't caught because Bob was poorly trained. It would have been OK if the monitoring system alarm rang at the security desk, but they moved the desk and the alarm is now in an accountant's office. Even then, if they had been checking the pressure relief pipe as part of their regular maintenance, they would have found it was blocked by an Eastern Spotted Wombat's nest, and the blockage meant the tank couldn't drain, and kaboom. That's basically how a lot of the CSB investigations play out. The US chemical industry is a barely-regulated clown show and the rest of us pay the price.
The hazards of the chemical overheating are well known. So was the tank's size, and the radius in terms of a catastrophic failure, and the number of people inside that radius. There was no reason they couldn't have had a deluge standpipe to douse the exterior of the tank.
There's a chemical that can bring the stuff under control by injecting it into the tank. It sounds like it wasn't stored on-site but was brought in by a "response team" that arrived well after the whole mess started. Given the danger level to the surrounding population people on-site should have been trained in emergency response, and that chemical should have been readily accessible if not part of a connected system where a button push or valve opening would disperse the counteragent.
The valves they could have used to inject the chemical were stuck shut. I saw someone claim it was because of the pressure, but it feels pretty laughable that the pressure in the tank was high enough to cause the valves to stick, but not high enough to cause the tank to rupture. From watching a lot of CSB videos, I can almost guarantee that if it gets investigated (Trump has wiped out almost all of the CSB) investigators will find the valves were poorly maintained.
There's also no excuse for them not having a contingency plan to do something like using a self-piercing device to pierce either the tank or a pipe that connects to the tank, and inject it. Self-piercing taps/valves/whatever are used for all sorts of things - it's not some uber complicated technology.
Again: if 40,000 people are within the radius of harm if Easily Angered Chemical goes exothermic, then you need to have solid plans with multiple ways to address it and people ON SITE who can address it.
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.)
Also notable that the people who live across the street from the tanks don't live in Garden Grove. By a miracle of local agency boundaries, the factory is in Garden Grove but the houses are in Stanton. Welcome to California.
(Because, I mean: If this thing is as sketchy as it is made out to be, then nobody is just walking over there with a spanner to loosen a cover. There aren't enough dollars nor PPE available to make this happen.)
That being said, in no way, shape or form am I an authority on the subject.
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.
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So while I do agree that the evaporative cooling is probably doing most of the heavy lifting (in fact, necessarily so if the water temp ~= the tank's exterior temp), it's not unreasonable to suggest that using colder water would be more effective.
In fact, the wet bulb temperature there is apparently right around 16C, so they've basically cooled the outside of the tank as much as they can using evaporative cooling alone. They can certainly use it to _keep_ it there, but without something else they wouldn't be able to cool it further.
Presumably if there's an exothermic reaction happening internally then the core will continue to rise in temperature based on the temperature gradient through the material forming in the tank. I would assume (since my understanding is that it's some kind of plastic) that it has a fairly low thermal conductivity, so the core temperature will continue to rise as more of it turns to plastic even as the outside is cooled to the same ~16C.
In the limit if they were able to immerse it completely in very cold water (~0C) then the exterior of the tank would also be ~0C (supposing they were able to access sufficient quantities of water). I don't think that's practical of course, but again I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that cold water would make a meaningful difference.
That's not even funny:
1: Snowmaking equipment doesn't involve any chillers, they work by spraying a fine mist when the temperature is below freezing.
2: (Unless something changed in the last decade), the vast majority of snow in Tahoe is natural, not man-made.
3: There are closer ski areas than Tahoe. Mountain High, Mammoth...
4: Even if snowmaking involved chilling, (which it doesn't), it requires a significant amount of water and pressurized air, which requires specialized equipment and access to an energy source. It's assembled in the off season. Is it even practical to assemble all that in a matter of hours? Heck, is it even practical to disassemble it at a ski area's snowmaking equipment, truck it, and then re-assemble it?
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Lesson for you: Keep your assumptions in check. You keep coming up with very creative, but highly impractical, solutions.
If you're on an engineering team, bring your suggestions with a dose of humility, learn to listen, and see how more experienced people solve problems.
Furthermore, in a time-sensitive situation, constantly explaining to someone why their creative ideas are impractical takes precious time away from solving the real problem.
Refrigerated liquid transport absolutely exists. Milk trucks is an example off the top of my head. Liquified natural gas is another.
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.
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Time is funny that way sometimes.
Cheers. :)
The nearest houses were built in 1958 according to Zillow.