Garden Grove Chemical Tank Could Be Inching Toward Explosion, Authorities Say
Firefighters still have few options to prevent a tank of toxic chemicals in Garden Grove, Calif., from leaking or exploding.
Heat and pressure continued to build overnight in an unstable tank of toxic chemicals at a Southern California industrial site, the authorities said on Saturday, meaning that the tank could be inching closer to a rupture or an explosion that could spew toxic materials into a Los Angeles-area suburb.
It is also possible, officials said, that the increase in temperature is occurring because the liquid inside the tank is solidifying. If so, and if the tank holds, that could make a rupture less likely.
Still, some 40,000 residents of towns surrounding the plant in Garden Grove remain evacuated to shelters outside the potential blast zone.
In an update posted to social media on Saturday morning, Craig Covey, an incident commander with the Orange County Fire Authority, said that external temperature readings of the tank, taken via drone, had initially given officials hope that efforts to cool and stabilize the tank were successful.
But the tank’s internal temperature gauge, which the team glimpsed overnight for the first time since Friday morning, showed otherwise. The temperature inside the tank had risen by an average of one degree per hour, to 90 from 77 degrees.
