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?
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
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?
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.
Time is funny that way sometimes.
Cheers. :)
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).
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).
The nearest houses were built in 1958 according to Zillow.
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.)
LA had a construction company tap into a crude oil pipeline this weekend causing a leak into the LA River.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/east-los-angeles-rup...
San Bruno had a buried gas main explode in 2010 in a residential neighborhood (which was a few blocks from a family member of mine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
Once a pipeline path is built, it’s inevitable tech debt that requires regular upkeep. You now have to trust PG&E (or whatever faceless expense-minimizing company) with regular maintenance of that pipeline.
Many railroads are interconnected, so the higher risk payloads can be routed further from residential areas when possible.
Ultimately risks can’t be completely avoided. The risks should be transparent to homeowners / renters. The city / county emergency crews are supposed to already have this info, so we know it’s available to some people but apparently not to every person whose life is impacted by these risks.
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.
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.
That being said California is very industry friendly and all the stuff about overregulation is from people who don't get California.
Stuff like this happens in Texas on a fairly regular basis, but it rarely ever makes national news.