Southern California officials lifted a sweeping evacuation order in Orange County late Tuesday after firefighters announced they had stabilized a damaged chemical tank that had posed a risk of a potentially catastrophic explosion or spill.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, the damaged tank, at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove, Calif., had forced nearly 50,000 residents from their homes.
More than 30,000 people were allowed to return on Monday night, but the remainder had been told to stay away until Tuesday’s night announcement.
“We did it,” Craig Covey, an incident commander with the Orange County Fire Authority, announced, interrupting a crowded community meeting in Garden Grove where residents were demanding accountability for the crisis.
Residents were forced to evacuate late last week after firefighters determined that a pressurized container containing a toxic substance had overheated and was poised to burst at GKN Aerospace’s manufacturing plant in Orange County. GKN, which is based in Britain, produces components for military and civilian aircraft.
The crisis, which officials had feared would end either in a catastrophic blast or a devastating hazardous waste spill, drew worldwide attention and prompted state and federal authorities to declare an emergency.
Emergency responders and scientific experts raced to cool down the bulging tank and safeguard surrounding communities. They doused the tank for days with water sprayed from fire hoses and opened more than half a dozen evacuation sites in a matter of hours on a holiday weekend.
By Monday, firefighters reported that the tank’s temperature had started to drop and that it was safe for most of the evacuees to begin returning.
On Tuesday, Greg Barta, an Orange County Fire Authority spokesman, reported that the temperature inside the tank, previously in the triple digits, had dropped to about 92 degrees and was holding steady.
And on Tuesday evening, during the community meeting, fire officials lifted the evacuation order for all residents.
The incident has prompted members of the communities around the plant to demand accountability from GKN and the local authorities.
“The imminent threat has been taken out of the equation, but this raises serious questions about the extent to which the government allowed this facility to expand,” said Carlos Perea, executive director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant & Economic Justice, one of several local organizations that called for the relocation of GKN Aerospace from Garden Grove, where it has operated for decades.
“This was a military manufacturing facility with dangerous equipment operating literally in the middle of working-class neighborhoods.”
In a letter to GKN, Representative Derek T. Tran, the area’s congressman, called on company executives in Britain to meet with his constituents in Orange County.
“Lives have been upended and livelihoods disrupted,” he wrote. “A community cannot thrive while living in fear of potential hazards in its own backyard.”
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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