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May 25, 2026 / 12:52 PM EDT
/ CBS News
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Cypress, California — Fifty thousand Southern California residents remain under evacuation orders Monday after emergency crews raced to prevent a tank holding a volatile industrial chemical from exploding at an aerospace facility in Garden Grove. Officials announced Monday morning that they believed they turned a corner but that a threat still remained.The threat centered on a tank containing methyl methacrylate, or MMA, at a facility operated by GKN Aerospace. Officials worried the chemical could undergo a dangerous "thermal runaway" reaction, causing temperatures and pressure inside the tank to rise to potentially catastrophic levels.Evacuees face hardship, uncertaintyEntire neighborhoods were evacuated over the Memorial Day weekend as authorities warned that, in the worst-case scenario, the tank could explode and trigger additional blasts in nearby containers.For displaced residents, the uncertainty has become its own crisis."We don't know how much longer it'll be," said Jackie Urquiza, who evacuated with her 7-year-old son Kyle from their home about a block from the facility. "Now we need clothes, and we're going to run out of medication."Urquiza said she had no idea dangerous chemicals were stored so close to her neighborhood."We absolutely did not know this was near our home at all," she said.
