Garden Grove blast fears spotlight industrial hazards in L.A.

A days-long threat of a catastrophic chemical explosion in Garden Grove has reignited concern that Southern California’s aging industrial system—piled among homes, schools and parks—has grown riskier as heat, population growth, and regulatory rollbacks converg

For several days, Garden Grove lived with a worry that no community should have to carry: the possibility of a catastrophic chemical explosion unfolding close to everyday life.

What officials faced in that Orange County city—the crisis centered on methyl methacrylate—has now become a window into a broader problem across the greater Los Angeles area. Aerospace plants and petrochemical facilities sit alongside homes, schools and parks. And experts say the region’s combination of older infrastructure. rising urban density. and shifting rules is making incidents like Garden Grove more likely.

The stakes are especially stark in a part of the country that built much of its modern identity around manufacturing. The greater Los Angeles area became a global hub for aerospace and defense manufacturing around the start of World War II. with companies here producing military aircraft. electronics. plastics. petroleum products and other specialized materials. As suburban expansion accelerated, the industrial footprint kept spreading.

Many of the operations in that industrial web used petrochemical products and solvents such as resins. adhesives and acrylic compounds. including methyl methacrylate—the chemical at the center of the Garden Grove crisis. While some work slowed after the end of the Cold War, many industrial sites remain active and tucked into communities.

“It’s not really whether industrial accidents are possible in the L.A. Basin — they are,” said Seth Shonkoff, executive director at the science research institute PSE Healthy Energy. He framed the question as one of readiness: “The important question is whether regulatory systems. emergency preparedness and land use decisions are keeping pace with changing industrial hazards and growing urban densities.” Shonkoff is also an associate researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Even when a specific incident is driven by particular system failures. he said the broader conditions are changing in ways that increase the odds of something going wrong again. Global warming. he said. is increasing the average number of extreme heat days in Southern California. which strains storage tanks and industrial processes that depend on keeping production materials cool. Aging infrastructure compounds the danger by increasing the chance of leaks, cracks or failure.

Then there is the human geography of growth. As more housing is built, more people move closer to existing industrial zones. Sometimes that means settlement along the wildland-urban interface, where wildfire risks rise. Other times, it means density itself creeping toward facilities that handle hazardous materials.

“When you increase the population density around these types of facilities, you are increasing the hazard that if something goes mechanically wrong, more people are going to be at risk,” Shonkoff said.

Those risks have never been evenly distributed. Deja McCauley. land use and health program manager with the nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles. said low-income communities and communities of color already experience disproportionate harms from pollution and other environmental hazards. She pointed to past disasters in the region. including decades of lead contaminants from the Exide battery plant in Vernon. as well as toxic dust and explosions from the Atlas Metals recycling plant in Watts.

Just last week, while emergency crews responded to the chemical crisis at a GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove, 2,400 gallons of crude spilled into the Los Angeles River near East Los Angeles, and a fire burned at a tire recycling center in South Gate, prompting a shelter-in-place order.

The pattern is not only about where people live, McCauley said. It is also about how rules shape what gets approved and how quickly. She said regulatory changes are making it easier for certain industrial facilities to be built closer to communities.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom passed two controversial bills that overhauled the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. The legislation exempted a broad array of housing development and infrastructure from environmental review to streamline construction and address housing scarcity. McCauley said critics warned that the exemptions would leave more vulnerable communities exposed.

One part of the law, she said, included an exemption for advanced manufacturing facilities—such as semiconductor plants, nuclear facilities, industrial factories and other sites handling high-risk hazardous material—to be permitted in some communities without environmental review.

At the federal level. she pointed to steps taken by the Trump administration to roll back regulations on emissions from industrial facilities. including mercury and other toxics emitted from coal plants. Earlier this year. the administration said it would loosen limits on emissions of ethylene oxide. a cancer-causing chemical often used in sterilization of medical devices. including at multiple facilities in Los Angeles.

“What’s happening at Garden Grove — we’re going to see a lot more of that due to these environmental rollbacks,” McCauly said.

A new state bill, SB 954, is advancing through the legislature. It would restore some of the CEQA protections removed last year. including narrowing the types of facilities that can bypass environmental review and providing more guidelines for siting sensitive places such as schools. homes and daycares.

Even with those debates. experts said part of the reason communities remain vulnerable is that many residents don’t fully understand the region’s industrial history. Peter Westwick. an adjunct history professor at USC and director of the Aerospace History Project. said L.A.’s manufacturing story is often obscured.

“Its association with Hollywood, which is what most people probably think of as ‘the industry’ in L.A., has probably obscured the manufacturing presence, along with L.A.’s suburban image,” Westwick said.

He described how L.A. industrialization began with natural resource extraction driven by the oil industry—an ongoing legacy that still poses threats. including the Chevron refinery explosion in El Segundo last year. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Westwick said, L.A. also had a thriving auto industry that was second only to Detroit, producing half a million cars at its peak.

“All this manufacturing provided a lot of jobs and drove L.A.’s remarkable growth in the early and mid 20th century. but it had a major legacy in air pollution. groundwater contamination and so on. ” Westwick said. He added that “the current emergency in Garden Grove is just an example of this longer embedding of industry around L.A.”.

At the moment. much of the burden of understanding risk falls to individuals. through tools such as CalEnviroScreen or PSE’s methane risk map. which can help people locate pollution sources. toxic facilities and other threats. State agencies such as the California Air Resources Board. the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment offer guidelines and enforcement mechanisms. but Shonkoff said their jurisdictions are fractured and disjointed.

He said the biggest factor that will determine when the next Garden Grove happens is not what residents do day to day, but how industry and regulators approach safety—especially where facilities are sited.

“The onus should be put on the facilities to manage their risk,” he said, “and also on regulators to make the important decisions of when ‘close’ is too close.”

The question now running underneath the Garden Grove emergency is simple and unsettling: with the region’s growth and heat climbing. and with rollbacks widening the space between potential harm and oversight. how long can Southern California keep treating industrial danger as something that only shows up in headlines—rather than in the daily fabric of where people live?.

Garden Grove chemical explosion threat methyl methacrylate PSE Healthy Energy Seth Shonkoff CEQA Gov. Gavin Newsom SB 954 Deja McCauley Doctors for Social Responsibility Los Angeles ethylene oxide industrial emissions Los Angeles River crude spill GKN Aerospace CalEnviroScreen