Firefighters continue to cool a chemical storage tank with water to prevent it from breaching or exploding. Some 40,000 residents near the Orange County plant have been evacuated to shelters.
By Soumya Karlamangla and Pooja Salhotra, The New York Times 5/23/26
Fire officials said on Saturday that there was renewed hope that their strategy of using water to douse a tank filled with an extremely toxic chemical would help slow a reaction that could lead to an explosion that had the potential to ignite a large fireball at a plant in Orange County, Calif.
Still, they warned that the temperature inside the tank had risen more than 20 degrees over the past day, showing the limitations of their cooling efforts. And they acknowledged that a worst-case scenario was still possible.
“Letting this thing just fail and blow up is unacceptable to us,” said Craig Covey, an incident commander with the Orange County Fire Authority. “Our goal is to find something and not allow that to happen, not let it damage our community, not let it damage our environment.”
As efforts continued, tens of thousands of residents remained out of their homes — some for the second consecutive day — as health officials continued to warn that they were unsure of the extent of the potential danger.
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