At what can only be described as an all hands on deck press conference Monday evening on the grounds of the Los Al Race Track, a full house of Orange County fire officials, law enforcement, hazmat specialists, county health care officials, federal, state and local emergency management teams, as well as congressional, state and local office holders lined up on the tarmac to present the good news that the imminent explosion of a 7,000 gallon holding tank containing chemically reactive toxic Methyl Methacrylate (MMA) on the grounds of a multinational aerospace contractor located in Garden Grove had been averted. They think. Or at least as OCFA Incident Commander Craig Covey put it, he’s confident “it’s headed in the right direction.”
Confident enough to roll back the roughly 50 square mile mandatory evacuation zone around the crisis site by 65%, shrinking the still existing evacuation area to the borders of Knott Avenue on the west, to Dale Avenue to the east, and from Garden Grove Blvd on the south to Orangewood St. on the north, leaving approximately 16,000 presumed evacuees still out of a home. Everyone else that was in the seven temporary Red Cross shelters set up around the county, or where ever they might have gone, could now go home.
That included Barbara Dotson of Stanton who said that the Kennedy High School evacuation center I spoke to her at was the third she had been shuttled through in as many days and she was “more than ready to go home” as she lifted her umpteenth shelter hot dog up to me as if to say enough of this…