Early Friday, an overheating tank filled with a toxic chemical at a Southern California industrial site took a turn for the worse.<\/p>\n
Firefighters in Garden Grove, Calif., had responded on Thursday to the site, belonging to GKN Aerospace, where an industrial tank containing about 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate was becoming pressurized and releasing gas as it overheated. The tank was bulging dangerously, a sign that it could eventually explode.<\/p>\n
They cooled the tank down with sprinklers. Residents who had evacuated their homes were allowed to return.<\/p>\n
Methyl methacrylate, used to make plastics, has a low boiling point so it can easily overheat and turn to gas. Chemical plants typically have many fail safes for situations like this, experts said.<\/p>\n
But when GKN Aerospace\u2019s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid\u2019s volatility, they learned that the tank\u2019s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Craig Covey, an incident commander with the Orange County Fire Authority.<\/p>\n
That left no clear options to prevent the tank from failing, Mr. Covey said.<\/p>\n
It is possible that the tank could crack and allow the 7,000 gallons of liquid to pour out, he said. The fire department has made sand barriers to prevent the chemical from spilling into storm drains and river channels, he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the best-case scenario, believe it or not,\u201d Mr. Covey said.<\/p>\n
Worse, there could be a massive explosion that launches a fireball into the air, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019ve ever seen videos of tank cars on a railroad track blowing up \u2014 and that fireball it puts out \u2014 and it blows half the tank car half a mile down the train track, that\u2019s the incident potential we are dealing with if this suffers a catastrophic failure,\u201d Mr. Covey said.<\/p>\n
He said that he was working with state and local officials, as well as experts across the country, to try to come up with a way to stop the tank from failing. The evacuation area was designed to be large because officials were not able to predict where a fireball from an explosion would land.<\/p>\n
Methyl methacrylate is toxic when inhaled, and causes irritation to the respiratory system and potential damage to other organs. If the pressure keeps building inside the tank, the chemical inside eventually \u201ccould be shot outwards everywhere and then you have this cloud of toxin,\u201d said Elias Picazo, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California.<\/p>\n
It is unclear why the liquid in the tank cannot be released in a controlled way to reduce pressure in the tank. It is possible that so much liquid has already vaporized inside that there is too much pressure to do that safely, said Faisal Khan, the head of the chemical engineering department at Texas A&M University.<\/p>\n
The worst-case scenario, he said, would be a rupture of the tank that launches fire and debris into the air. Mr. Khan said that it would be similar to a car collision in which the gas from the vehicles vaporizes and causes a mushroom of destructive fire. In those cases, however, the fireball tends to stay close to the ground. Here, the fireball could fly upward and cause damage elsewhere, he said.<\/p>\n
If about half of the material in the tank is released, the fireball from this explosion could be about the size of a house, Mr. Khan said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Covey, the fire authority official, said on Friday evening that the tank temperature had stabilized, providing responders some more time to try to prevent an explosion.<\/p>\n
He said that they were monitoring the temperature of the tank with a drone. If the tank reached a certain high temperature, he said, all staff would be removed from the area \u201cto let the tank do what it\u2019s going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joseph E. Shepherd, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who studies chemical explosions, said that the 7,000 gallons of liquid could explode into a very large fire that would need special foams to extinguish. Worse, it could create a fireball that is blasted into the air.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn an event, it\u2019s not a good thing,\u201d he said. \u201cYou could have a combustion event that could be pretty catastrophic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early Friday, an overheating tank filled with a toxic chemical at a Southern California industrial site took a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,25112,21194,136581,136580,129098],"class_list":["post-328854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-chemicals","tag-fires-and-firefighters","tag-garden-grove-calif","tag-hazardous-and-toxic-substances","tag-orange-county-calif"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}