https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...
In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them.
Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.
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.
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...
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.
Flash forward to today, we are still in quite the same position where robots can do fancy, flashy tech demos, but when it comes to doing something useful that is also unpredictable, the know-now is still not there. Even teleoperation is not a robust answer to this yet, it still has some maturing to do.
There are other "Orange County"s in the U.S.
Because there are other Londons.
https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC127140100&...
Acrylates in general are truly awful. Our guys died with their faces boiling and breathing in their own vomit while also still vomiting. From a relatively brief exposure.
A bigger public risk of MMA is actually the extremely low odor threshold (in the parts per billion). The god-awful smell can make an area temporarily "unlivable" even below any known health thresholds. And it affects very large areas, because of the very low odor threshold.
No, if it's injected in your bloodstream it won't immediately kill you, but if you inhale a few milligrams of vapor you'll wish you could cough up a lung.
Also, the vapors are heavier than air, so if you fall in a ditch near the hypothetical blown tank you would likely suffocate and die.
I wonder why they can't drain the tank into another facility. Maybe they just lack an appropriate container.
But also, the chemical is actively undergoing an exothermic reaction (which is why the tank is at risk for failure). How do you transport such a toxic fluid without putting much more of the public at risk?
But I’m just some guy.
If so, that could be one of the best outcomes. As long as it does not blow up before the process completes.
They are using a lot of water, as most as possible, from pipes at whatever temperature it is. There are no enough mobile refrigerators, not enough electricity to make them work, and it's very hard to transport cold water or ice if you don't use the pipes.
Also, the center of the tank is hot and reacting, but the external part is a nasty block if plastic that acts like a shield and isolate it from the cold water outside.
This is a common problems in big chemical plants when you have exothermic reactions. It's not enough to cold it down, you need to ensure all parts are cold down.
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
Chilling the water would massively complicate the logistics with a very marginal improvement in heat removal.
If they didn't have to worry about it imminently exploding I wonder if they could somehow wrap it with reinforcement (e.g., wrap some high strength metal around the tank to prevent it from deforming when drilled into) and then drill into it to extract the liquid?
One of my other less serious ideas was to helilift a Chernobyl style containment structure around it, but I imagine they don't have one of those just sitting around waiting to be used.
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.
To put it differently, think through what it would take to refrigerate the volume of water that they are spraying. Can someone pull that together in a matter of minutes or hours?
I've known people who've died from both, separately, as well as ethyl acrylate and acrylic acid. I've gotten a few bursts of them in the face as well, luckily nothing too awful. I'll repeat that acrylates in general are truly awful chemicals to be exposed to.
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.
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.