About 40,000 residents in Southern California were under evacuation orders Friday after an overheating storage tank containing a hazardous industrial chemical raised fears of a potentially dangerous leak or explosion at an aerospace manufacturing facility in Orange County.
The emergency centered on a GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove, roughly 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles, where a storage tank holding between 6,000 and 7,000 gallons of methyl methacrylate began overheating Thursday and venting vapors into the air, authorities said. Evacuation orders were expanded Friday to include parts of Garden Grove, Anaheim, Buena Park, Cypress, Stanton and Westminster as emergency crews struggled to contain the situation. The Associated Press reported that schools in the affected area were also closed as a precaution.
