The Garden Grove crisis exposes the hidden dangers of Southern California’s factories
The threat of days of catastrophic chemical explosions in Garden Grove exposed a pervasive but often overlooked industrial hazard hidden within everyday life in Southern California, where aerospace plants and petrochemical facilities are intertwined among homes, schools and parks.
Now, experts say this aging infrastructure is combining with population growth and lax regulations to increase the likelihood that similar incidents will happen again.
The greater Los Angeles area became a global hub for aerospace and defense manufacturing at the start of World War II, with companies here producing military aircraft, electronics, plastics, petroleum products and other specialty goods that helped transform the region into a dense manufacturing hub even as its suburbs grew.
Many of those processes used petrochemical products and solvents such as residues, adhesives and acrylic compounds such as methyl methacrylate, the chemical at the center of the Orange County disaster. Although some of that activity has declined since the end of the Cold War, many industrial sites are still active and mixed with communities.
That makes the possibility of another Garden Grove incident a matter of “if,” not when, said Seth Shonkoff, executive director of the PSE Healthy Energy research center.
“It’s not whether industrial accidents can happen in the LA Basin – they do,” he said. “The key question is how regulatory systems, emergency preparedness and land use decisions keep up with changing industrial hazards and urban population growth.”
While the Garden Grove incident was in some ways a fluke driven by a particular system failure, there are several factors that make it happen more often now, said Shonkoff, who is also a research associate at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
It includes global warming, which increases the average number of days of extreme heat in Southern California, which puts more strain on storage tanks and industrial processes that depend on the need to keep production equipment cool.
At the same time, the infrastructure of many of the region’s industries is aging, which in turn increases the risk of leaks, cracks or failures.
But perhaps most important is the pressure to build more housing in areas where housing is underdeveloped. Sometimes that means more people move to undeveloped areas near wild-urban uses, which can put them at greater risk of wildfires, but sometimes, it means they move closer to industrial areas.
“When you increase the density of people around these types of facilities, you increase the risk that if something goes wrong, more people are going to be at risk,” Shonkoff said.
Many of these areas are home to low-income communities and communities of color that suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental hazards, said Deja McCauley, program manager for land use and health with the nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles.
This has already been proven by previous environmental disasters, such as the decades of lead pollution that came out of the water. Exit the battery at Vernonor toxic dust and explosions from Atlas Metals recycling plant in Watts.
Last week, when emergency crews responded to a chemical crisis at the GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove, 2,400 liters of crude was spilled on the Los Angels River near East Los Angeles, and a A fire broke out at a tire recycling center at the South Gate, prompting a request for asylum in the area.
But while some communities are moving closer to existing industrial centers, there are also regulatory changes that make it easier for industrial centers to be built closer to communities, McCauly said.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom passed two controversial bills that revised the California Environmental Quality Actor CEQA. The law exempts a wide range of housing developments and infrastructure from environmental review in an effort to regulate construction and help address California’s housing shortage.
While some hailed it as a necessary cut of red tape, critics said the measure would expose the most vulnerable communities to potential harm: The law includes the release of advanced manufacturing facilitiessuch as semiconductor plants, nuclear facilities, industrial plants and other places that handle highly hazardous materials, which will be allowed in other communities without environmental review.
At the same time, the Trump administration has taken steps to roll back regulations on industrial emissions, such as mercury and other toxins. they come from coal plants. Earlier this year, the administration said it would happen loosen restrictions on ethylene oxide emissionsa a cancer-causing chemical commonly used in sterilization of medical devices, including at many centers in Los Angeles.
“What’s happening in Garden Grove – we’re going to see a lot of that because of this natural disturbance,” McCauly said.
The new state bill, SB954it is now moving forward through the legislature and will restore some of CEQA’s protections that were removed last year, including limiting the types of facilities that can undergo environmental review and providing more guidelines for zoning sensitive areas such as schools, homes and day care centers, among other changes.
But part of the reason communities here remain vulnerable to incidents like Garden Grove is that many people are unaware of the region’s long history of industrial manufacturing, said Peter Westwick, a USC history professor and director of the Aerospace History Project.
“Its association with Hollywood, which is what most people would think of as ‘the industry’ in LA, may have obscured the presence of brands, and the image of LA,” Westwick said.
Even before the development of manufacturing and aerospace, LA’s industrialization began with the extraction of natural resources driven by the oil industry, he said — a legacy that continues to pose threats such as the Chevron refinery explosion in El Segundo last year.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, LA also had a thriving auto industry that was second only to Detroit, producing half a million cars at its peak.
“All of this manufacturing provided a lot of jobs and fueled LA’s phenomenal growth in the early and mid-20th century, but it had a huge legacy in air pollution, groundwater contamination and so on,” Westwick said.
He added that “the current emergency situation in Garden Grove is an example of this long-term embeddedness of the industry in LA”
Currently, most of the responsibility for risk management falls on individuals. Tools like CalEnviroScreen or PSE methane risk map It can help people find sources of pollution, toxic areas and other threats in their environment.
State agencies such as the California Air Resources Board, the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment also provide various guidelines or enforcement mechanisms, but their regulatory areas are fragmented and incoherent, said Shonkoff, of PSE Health Energy.
He said the biggest factor that will determine when the next Garden Grove happens is not the actions of individuals, but how industries and regulators approach the safety of these facilities, including where they should be located.
“There must be a responsibility on the institutions to manage their risks,” he said, “and on the regulators to make important decisions about when the ‘closure’ is too close.”
