At what can only be described as an all hands on deck press conference Monday evening on the grounds of the Los Al Race Track, a full house of Orange County fire officials, law enforcement, hazmat specialists, county health care officials, federal, state and local emergency management teams, as well as congressional, state and local office holders lined up on the tarmac to present the good news that the imminent explosion of a 7,000 gallon holding tank containing chemically reactive toxic Methyl Methacrylate (MMA) on the grounds of a multinational aerospace contractor located in Garden Grove had been averted. They think. Or at least as OCFA Incident Commander Craig Covey put it, he’s confident “it’s headed in the right direction.”
Confident enough to roll back the roughly 50 square mile mandatory evacuation zone around the crisis site by 65%, shrinking the still existing evacuation area to the borders of Knott Avenue on the west, to Dale Avenue to the east, and from Garden Grove Blvd on the south to Orangewood St. on the north, leaving approximately 16,000 presumed evacuees still out of a home. Everyone else that was in the seven temporary Red Cross shelters set up around the county, or where ever they might have gone, could now go home.
That included Barbara Dotson of Stanton who said that the Kennedy High School evacuation center I spoke to her at was the third she had been shuttled through in as many days and she was “more than ready to go home” as she lifted her umpteenth shelter hot dog up to me as if to say enough of this.
Others within the reduced but still in effect evacuation footprint will have to wait a yet undetermined period of time, in what Commander Covey called a “phased approach,” before they will be allowed to return to their homes. No projected timeline offered. It was one of many questions left on the table at the highly anticipateed Monday evening press conference that highlighted many encouraging outcomes, heroic emergency efforts, and catastrophes averted at the GKN plant since the tank began to overheat last Thursday and threaten thousands of residents.
Yes, the feared boiler liquid expanding vapor explosion, or BLEVE, that could have blown the lid off the tank sending a plume of toxic cloud toward Knotts Berry Farm and Disneyland was averted. How close did we come to that game changing event? When asked by reporters at the planned Q &A for the press after the congratulatory cudos were concluded, no one among all the agencies lined up to respond could or would say. Temperatures certainly did reach or exceed 100 degrees. We know this because the temp guage on the tank maxed out at 100, and was at max for several hours over the weekend.
The “good news” said fire officials repeatedly was the temps are down to about 93 degrees. But when asked by CBS reporter Michelle Gile what is stable operating temperature, she and everybody in an OCFA uniform knew by this time it is 50 degrees. A long way from 93, which is still within dangerous levels of what chemical scientists call “thermal runaway,” a condition in which the volatile liquid MMA could rise in temperature precipitously, and still possibly leak or blow.
It was interim OCFA Fire Chief T. J. McGovern who took the lead at the press conference to assure the public that there was “zero” contamination threat coming from the toxic tank, despite the acknowledgment that there were cracks in the tank lining that apparently aided in depressurizing the tank.
Still, Chief McGovern was emphatic that there had been no leakage into the air or on the ground to date. Yet, it was GKN workers themselves who initially notified OCFA on Thursday afternoon that “an overheated tank had begun venting vapors” as reported by the OC Register.
Could the so called “crack” in the containment tank now relieving the dangerous pressure levels also be leaking toxic vapors from the still liquid contents of the tank? EPA and OCFA officials assured us some 20 atmospheric monitors set up at strategic points surrounding the site have registered no airborne contaminants as yet. But when the reporter followed up by asking for data to back those measurements up, no official seemed willing to step up and offer it.
GKN, the company that brought us to the brink of an eco catastrophe has accumulated fines into the $900,000 range at this and other of its aerospace facilities: operating equipment without permits, failing to maintain emission records, and failing to inspect machinery in service to name a few violations it has paid for but sometimes gone uncorrected, or for that matter post-inspected by regulatory agencies. When a reporter asked whose fault is that, no one in that solid formation of federal, state or local officials stepped forward to offer an explanation.
At the very end of the press Q&A I asked the OCFA moderator for the conference, Captain Greg Barta, about the oft cited number of residents evacuated in the course of this “incident.” Somewhere between 40 and 50 thousand is the claim. A simple calculation of the total possible evacuees into the 7 or so shelters set up around the evacuation perimeter could accommodate no more than a few thousand even at overcapacity. Add to that I suppose a few thousand more who found their own temporary accommodations with relatives or friends or self-funded hotel/motel options. But that is only a fraction of the total number OCFA cites as evacuated. So, where did the vast majority of unaccounted for evacuees go? Or did they go anywhere. Where did the 50,000 number come from? Begging the question how accurate is that 40-50K number, and how successful was the OCFA/Sheriffs mandated evacuation after all?
Captain Barta had no direct answer to that question or a projected time such statistics might be available. “Our officers were out there. I’m told we got good compliance,” Barta said, “I don’t know how many people did not follow our orders … we don’t have that information available.” Seems like good intel to have.
These are just a few of the many questions that are coming to light as the dust (or no dust as they claim) clears over the GKN facility. To be fair many of these unanswered questions may get addressed over time and with the wisdom of hindsight. Some deserve to be answered sooner than later for the public’s own safety and benefit. It is not enough to come to the podium and say “we did it, we mitigated and we resolved,” as Commander Covey pronounced at Monday’s press conference.
This “incident” ought to be a wake up call to all who call this complicated urban landscape home, often in proximity not only to neighbors and parks and grocery stores, but all too often also close, sometimes too close as in this case, to commercial-industrial operations you may not even be aware of that can harm you in ways that disrupt more than your Memorial Day weekend.