The remaining 16,000 Garden Grove and Stanton residents still under evacuation orders can now go back home.
On Tuesday evening, the last of the evacuation orders from the chemical tank emergency in Garden Grove were lifted, giving residents the first all clear to go home since Thursday night.
“All evacuation orders related to the Garden Grove hazardous materials incident have been lifted,” reads an update from OCFA on X. “No chemical leak. No threat of explosion. No threat of fire. No risk to the public.”
The decision was made after firefighters turned off the cooling systems on the tank this afternoon to see if the situation stabilized, according to interim Chief TJ McGovern, who said they needed a few hours after turning off the system to determine if it was safe for people to go home.
“Once we know that temperature is stabilized, we will be taking the fire risk off the table. When we take the fire risk off the table, that affects our evacuation zones. If there’s no fire risk, our evacuation zones are going to shrink. When we shrink those, we start repopulation. Yesterday, you saw a massive repopulation,” McGovern said at a community forum at Cal State Fullerton.
It’s the first positive update residents have received since firefighters confirmed the tank would not explode, with the fire authority’s Tuesday morning update just noting they were continuing to monitor the temperature of the tank.
“We want to get you home as soon as possible,” said Capt. Greg Barta in that update.
Congressman Derek Tran praised first responders and noted that he would continue pushing for accountability.
“While the immediate danger to public health and safety has been lifted, residents are still left to pick up the pieces of the chaos and disruption caused by the hazmat incident in Garden Grove,” reads his statement.
“Our community is rightfully angry, and I will continue working around the clock to demand accountability from all responsible actors.”
It caps off a disrupted Memorial Day weekend that saw around 50,000 people hit with evacuation orders in the heart of Orange County amid concerns that a destabilized chemical tank at an aerospace industrial plant could explode or leak into the surrounding neighborhood.
The chemical tank at GKN Aerospace on Western Avenue began malfunctioning Thursday, with OC Fire Authority officials saying a cooling system on a tank carrying 6,500 of methyl methacrylate failed – causing the chemical to heat up.
The chemical, used to help make a wide variety of aerospace products, was in a 35,000-gallon tank that also saw safety valves fail, causing pressure to build up and sparking fears of a massive explosion.
While most of the people evacuated were cleared to return home on Monday night, there were over 16,000 residents from Stanton and Garden Grove that were still caught in the evacuation zone.
A series of class action lawsuits are already in the works against GKN Aerospace, the company that owned the plant, after fire authority officials confirmed the cause of the fire was a broken cooling system in the chemical tank.
GKN has declined multiple requests for comment, but issued a brief statement apologizing for the disruption on their website.
City Council members from Garden Grove and Stanton are meeting tonight to discuss what happened and what the next steps are for their cities, with Westminster set to discuss the issue in a special meeting tomorrow afternoon.
At tonight’s meeting in Garden Grove, officials announced the evacuations will be lifted at 7:30 p.m. as residents lambasted elected officials over their handling of the crisis and for allowing GKN to operate in their backyard.