About 40,000 people were under evacuation orders and schools shut down Friday in Southern California after a storage tank continued to leak a hazardous chemical used to make plastic parts that officials said could rupture or explode.
A storage tank holding between 6,000 and 7,000 gallons (22,700 and 26,500 liters) of methyl methacrylate overheated Thursday and began venting vapors into the air at an aerospace plastics facility in Garden Grove, a city in Orange County, the county's fire authority said.
