Orange County is demanding $4 million from the owner of a Garden Grove plastic manufacturing plant where a chemical leak forced thousands of people from their homes earlier this year, officials said Friday.<\/p>\n
County Counsel Leon Page sent a letter to GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems Inc. on Friday demanding payment of $4,071,305 for resource deployment and operational expenses incurred from the incident, in which a problem with GKN\u2019s 34,000-gallon chemical storage tank cooling system caused a reaction of neutralized methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a toxic and highly flammable liquid used in the manufacture of acrylic plastics.<\/p>\n
The total includes a $500,000 expenditure to assist evacuees with expenses, but does not include expenses incurred by the Orange County Fire Authority, which are $2.8 million, county officials said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe blame for this disaster lies solely with GKN and the county should not be bearing the brunt of these expenses,\u201d said Supervisor Janet Nguyen, whose First District includes the Garden Grove plant. \u201cThe county works hard to stay in excellent fiscal shape and now we have 10 agencies with huge expenses along with the OC Fire Authority. We need reimbursement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hazmat emergency began May 21 when a leak was detected at the facility located at 12122 Western Ave. An estimated 40,000 people in Garden Grove, the entire city of Stanton and other nearby communities had to leave their homes for several days during the Memorial Day weekend as work continued to neutralize the toxic chemical stored in tanks that had become overheated, sparking fears of an explosion.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, a crack in the damaged tank relieved the pressure inside the tank and negated the risk.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis incident was clearly not an unforeseeable accident as GKN has a well-documented history of regulatory violations at the site dating back over a decade,\u201d Page\u2019s letter states. \u201cThese violations include numerous Cal\/OSHA citations as well as violations of environmental regulations in which $909,935 was paid by GKN to the South Coast Air Quality Management District in a highly publicized settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Page said the county is legally entitled to seek full restitution for public funds expended during the May 2026 hazardous materials crisis under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and the Hazardous Substance Account Act.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for GKN Aerospace released the following statement to City News Service on Friday:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe remain committed to the communities affected by the May incident and are continuing to explore appropriate next steps in the context of a complex legal environment. We will continue to engage with county officials as well as numerous regulators and authorities as we reset the Garden Grove facility.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company recently donated $3 million to the United Way\u2019s OC Community Resilience Fund to assist residents who were impacted by the evacuations, and gave another $1 million for \u201cbroader community initiatives\u201d across the county.<\/p>\n
At a June meeting of the Garden Grove City Council, GKN Aerospace Senior Vice President Steve Carlin apologized to the community on behalf of the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn behalf of GKN and the Garden Grove plant I want to say I\u2019m sorry this event \u2026 occurred,\u201d he said. \u201cI understand and realize sitting here tonight how unsettling it is to the greater community, and it\u2019s particularly unsettling to us at GKN because of the long history we\u2019ve had with Garden Grove and how connected we are to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carlin said the Garden Grove plant is \u201cknown throughout the world\u201d for its expertise in producing windows for the aerospace industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is literally the number one producer of aerospace transparencies \u2026 basically windows,\u201d Carlin said. \u201cWe make the most complex windows out there. \u2026 And they don\u2019t say we\u2019re going to GKN Aerospace or GKN Transparencies for windows \u2026 no matter where in the world. \u2026 They say we\u2019re going to Garden Grove. \u2026 That is literally how that plant is known around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Thursday, GKN said its environmental response partner, Arcwood Environmental, completed key environmental response activities at the Garden Grove facility, including the safe removal, transportation, treatment and disposal of MMA from two unaffected storage tanks at the facility.<\/p>\n
On June 10, federal authorities served a search warrant at the GKN plant. According to a search warrant affidavit, investigators were looking to seize any evidence of possible violations of federal requirements to prevent the \u201caccidental release of extremely hazardous substance into the ambient air.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Orange County is demanding $4 million from the owner of a Garden Grove plastic manufacturing plant where a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,1827,160456,7172,7997,10141,162227,17965],"class_list":["post-404334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-cleanup","tag-demands","tag-firm","tag-garden","tag-grove","tag-hazardous","tag-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404334","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=404334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}