Crews in Orange County conduct overnight operation to assess chemical leak

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Today is Monday, May 25th. I'm Christine Lazar in for Kina Estrinos.

[00:00:04]>> Good morning. I'm Chris Halmstrong. We do have some breaking news for you in Garden Grove where the operation to contain a chemical league faced a crucial test overnight. Orange County firefighters have been on the scene all night and evacuations remain in place all weekend.

[00:00:18]>> CBS LA's Tina Patel is live outside the Emergency Command Center in Cypress where we're hoping to get an update this morning. And I know residents are probably going to listen in and hope for some good news.

[00:00:30]Yeah, I just talked to officials. They say they are still briefing each other on the operations that happened overnight. So, they don't have any information to release to the public just yet, but again, we are all waiting to hear about what the plan is moving forward and whether any of those evacuations could be lifted. Now, I want to show you right now Skycal is over GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove. There is still a chance that the 7,000galon tank there could explode. So, it was risky sending firefighters in, but officials say that was the only way that they can get the information that they need about whether the tank is holding or whether chemicals are leaking out. It's full of a flammable toxic chemical known as MMA.

[00:01:09]I want to show you video last night because that's when we could see firefighters going right up against the tank. It looked like they were chipping away at the tank's exterior.

[00:01:16]Firefighters have been trying to determine the temperature of the chemicals inside the tank. It went from 77 degrees on Friday to 90° on Saturday.

[00:01:25]Then yesterday, the last reading was 100°, but that is actually the highest number that the gauge can show. So, it's possible the chemical inside could actually be hotter than that. Officials are continuing to spray water on the outside of the tank to try and cool it down and buy them some more time. Now, a crack was spotted on the tank yesterday.

[00:01:41]Officials say that could be a good thing because it could help relieve the vapor pressure inside the tank and lessen the chance of a blevy, which is a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. Here's the interim fire chief of the Orange County Fire Authority last night.

[00:01:57]>> The BVY threat is the worst case catastrophic event that we've been talking about. We are not there yet. We need to run this operation tonight.

[00:02:07]Please help us stay out of the evacuation zone >> because fire officials say even if there is not an explosion, that worst case scenario, the chemical could still leak out and then toxins could get in the air. So again, they're being very cautious. We're hoping that within the next hour or two, we might get an update on what they learned overnight. And of course, we'll let you know as soon as we have new information. We'll send it back to you. Okay, Tina, thank you so much for that update.