Topline:
With the primary election tomorrow, we're getting an early look at the total number of votes by mail and in person ahead of the Tuesday 8 p.m. deadline to cast your ballot.
Keep reading ... for the latest on votes returned to date and what to watch for in the days and weeks ahead.
Here's what you should know about the vote totals currently released:
Keep in mind that June 9 will be the final day for votes postmarked by June 2 to arrive at county elections offices, so the bottom line on the vote totals won't be known until then.
In L.A. County, the combined tallied votes as of Monday morning add up to about 10% of registered voters.
In Orange County, the current tallies represent about 21% of registered voters.
In L.A. County, updates on the counting are expected to continue through June 26.
Election night: After the polls close at 8 p.m., expect updates every 15 minutes or so through the early morning hours Wednesday.
Post election night: Expect updated counts around 5 p.m. on the following days: June 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 24 and 26.
Final results must be certified by July 10.
That hasn't been true in quite a while. It takes a while to get results because after the initial tallies on election night, there are still many, many votes to count and more mail-in ballots are usually arriving.
Here’s what we know so far:
Los Angeles County has more than 5.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:
What's next:
Orange County has more than 1.8 million registered voters. As of Sunday, May 31:
What's next:
Political Data Inc. is tracking ballot returns across California and in some high-profile races.
As of midday Monday, turnout statewide was at 16%. While Democrats outnumber Republicans statewide by almost double, Republicans have returned more ballots pre-election (21% of their voters compared to 16% for Democrats).
Because of the increasing use of vote-by-mail ballots, the vote tally has gotten longer, according to the California Voter Foundation. In an analysis, the organization found:
Election officials must physically open mail-in ballots and verify signatures.
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, recently wrote about the ripple effect of turning in mail-in ballots by hand or in drop boxes on election day. She wrote, for our partner newsroom CalMatters:
"We turn in ballots in envelopes on Election Day that take time and care to process and cannot be processed until after Election Day. Processing these ballots — which account for as much as a quarter of all ballots cast — creates a bottleneck I like to call 'the pig in the python effect. It prevents counties from doing other tasks they need to do to certify the results."
Topline:
California air regulators on Friday approved a contentious overhaul of the state’s carbon market, creating a program that could steer billions of dollars in free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters over the objections of environmental groups, key lawmakers and three of the board’s own members.
Why now? Ten members of the California Air Resources Board voted to adopt the changes to its cap-and-invest program after two days of lengthy hearings, including a full day dedicated to hundreds of public comments.
How we got here: The overhaul followed intensive lobbying by the oil industry as well as pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to help keep refineries operating in the state amid rising gas prices.
The context:The approval sets up a potential budget fight in Sacramento. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that quarterly auction revenue for state climate programs will drop from roughly $4 billion a year to about $2 billion under the new overhaul.
Read on... for more on the overhaul and its implications.
California air regulators on Friday approved a contentious overhaul of the state’s carbon market, creating a program that could steer billions of dollars in free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters over the objections of environmental groups, key lawmakers and three of the board’s own members.
Ten members of the California Air Resources Board voted to adopt the changes to its cap-and-invest program after two days of lengthy hearings, including a full day dedicated to hundreds of public comments.
The overhaul followed intensive lobbying by the oil industry as well as pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to help keep refineries operating in the state amid rising gas prices.
The approval sets up a potential budget fight in Sacramento. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that quarterly auction revenue for state climate programs will drop from roughly $4 billion a year to about $2 billion under the new overhaul.
Such a shortfall would effectively zero out programs lawmakers spent last year fighting to fund: affordable housing, public transit, drinking water in low-income communities and pollution monitoring in California’s most polluted neighborhoods.
The governor’s office praised the measure as a compromise that balanced economic uncertainty with the state’s climate goals. Refinery closures and the Iran-Israel war have driven average California gas prices above $6 a gallon.
Newsom, in a statement, used the moment to draw a contrast with President Donald Trump.
“While Trump sows ongoing chaos and uncertainty, California is staying focused by protecting our economy, safeguarding public health, and doubling down on the clean energy future all Californians deserve,” he said.
Environmentalists warned the changes to the program amount to a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that weakens California’s only program setting a firm cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California senior director for the Environmental Defense Fund, called the decision “deeply misguided” for prioritizing polluters over communities.
“Newsom’s air regulators are handing billions to oil executives at the expense of our climate, health, and affordability for working families in a rushed process that has shortchanged meaningful public participation,” said Bahram Fazeli, policy director at Communities for a Better Environment.
California’s 13-year-old carbon market forces major polluters to buy permits while the state lowers the overall cap each year. Friday’s vote will reduce those permits – and creates a new subsidy program carved out of the market.
The program, which may still see changes, could make available a new pool of free pollution permits available to industry valued at as much as $4 billion. Companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency may qualify for the permits in exchange for investments in clean energy.
The pool will be capped at 118.3 million permits — the same number the air board has said must come off the market for California to hit its 2030 climate target. Environmentalists say the proposal risks wiping out those reductions.
Half are reserved for the fossil fuel sector. A recent Berkeley analysis, by the chair of an independent committee that oversees the carbon market, found refineries could end up with more free permits than they need to cover their emissions.
The air board has defended the design. Officials say the credits will go only to companies undertaking decarbonization projects, will be limited and temporary and can be clawed back if companies misuse them. The plan, they say, is meant to keep California refineries operating at a time of mounting closures and global market pressure. According to air regulators, the amended program will spur clean-energy investment as Trump cuts federal support.
Topline:
New research reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely.
The findings: Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put recent college graduates in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers. The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads — those under the age of 29 — rose 20% after the pandemic. Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees."
AI not as big a factor: To see how the rise of AI chatbots may have contributed to rising unemployment among the younger set, the researchers used another index that divides occupations into those more exposed to AI, such as engineering and accounting, and those less exposed, such as teaching and nursing. They found exposure to AI didn't explain the divergence in unemployment rates in the 2022-24 time period. Remote workflows were much more of a driving force.
The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates.
But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work.
An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely.
Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers.
The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads — those under the age of 29 — rose 20% after the pandemic, while unemployment among older college grads fell slightly.
The study compares unemployment rates pre-pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, with unemployment rates after the pandemic, from 2022 to 2024.
Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees."
The research began with a look at how much feedback software engineers at a Fortune 500 tech company were getting, says Emma Harrington, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia and one of the authors of the report.
"What we saw was this pretty striking pattern that software engineers got about 20% more feedback if they were sitting near their colleagues than if they were distant from them," she says, adding that that was true even before the pandemic.
But after the pandemic, feedback plummeted.
"And that really hit young workers much harder," says Harrington. "It was these people who had the most to learn that really saw this deficit in feedback."
The researchers then looked deeper into who was getting hired at the tech firm. Turns out, as the company embraced remote work, they switched away from hiring younger people.
"So they used to hire a bunch of new grads for their software engineering jobs," Harrington says. "Then they shifted really towards hiring much older people, like a decade older on average."
Later, the company pivoted again, implementing what Harrington calls a "pretty aggressive" return-to-office policy. At that point, the company resumed hiring new graduates.
"So [there was] some sense that these problems with mentorship were translating into whom this firm was deciding to hire," she says.
The researchers then wanted to see if what was happening at that single tech company was playing out in the broader economy.
Using a widely-used index that measures how feasible it is to do a job from home, the team divided all occupations into two categories: "remotable," which included software engineering, and "non-remotable," which included mechanical engineering.
They found the gap in unemployment between recent graduates and older workers was significantly higher in "remotable" jobs than in jobs that have to be done in person.
The unemployment rate for younger grads in "remotable" jobs jumped by almost a full percentage point after the pandemic, while the unemployment rate among older grads fell marginally.
They concluded that remote work explained nearly two-thirds of the rise in unemployment among young graduates during this period.
"This relative increase in young people's unemployment coincided with the pandemic and has remained elevated since then, as have rates of remote work," the researchers write.
To see how the rise of AI chatbots may have contributed to rising unemployment among the younger set, the researchers used another index that divides occupations into those more exposed to AI, such as engineering and accounting, and those less exposed, such as teaching and nursing.
They found exposure to AI didn't explain the divergence in unemployment rates in the 2022-24 time period. Remote workflows were much more of a driving force, Harrington says, while emphasizing that this could change.
"It's always hard to make guesses about what's going to happen with generative AI," she says. "It's certainly possible that this story could really change over the next few years."
Researchers at the London School of Economics have reached a similar conclusion — that remote work is having a clearer impact on early-career hiring than AI — in a working paper examining new hires in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.
Regardless of the cause, the New York Fed report warns that a high unemployment rate among young college grads is concerning.
"Early-career experiences can have lasting consequences," the researchers write. "Research finds that individuals who began looking for jobs in slacker labor markets tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression relative to comparable peers who began their job search in better market conditions."
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Korean Americans have debated Bass’ comments on South L.A. liquor stores for years, and some say they’re sick of their pain being used as a campaign talking point.
Why now: With voting for the June primary well underway, mayoral candidate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt is resurrecting one of the most painful chapters in Korean American history in Los Angeles — and he’s not getting the details quite right. On social media this week, Pratt’s campaign claimed Bass is racist and accused her of “Asian hate” as she “cheered on the destruction of Koreatown in the riots” — a reference to controversial comments she made after the 1992 unrest about liquor stores in South Los Angeles.
More details: The campaign’s claim blurs two distinct parts of the 1992 story: the devastation Koreatown suffered during the unrest and a separate debate over the oversaturation of liquor stores in South LA. While Bass’ comments in 1992 were tied to the latter, they have long been a source of pain for the Korean community, as many of those stores were Korean-owned at the time.
Read on... for more on how some Korean Americans are responding to it.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
With voting for the June primary well underway, mayoral candidate and reality TV star Spencer Pratt is resurrecting one of the most painful chapters in Korean American history in Los Angeles — and he’s not getting the details quite right.
On social media this week, Pratt’s campaign claimed Bass is racist and accused her of “Asian hate” as she “cheered on the destruction of Koreatown in the riots” — a reference to controversial comments she made after the 1992 unrest about liquor stores in South Los Angeles.
The campaign’s claim blurs two distinct parts of the 1992 story: the devastation Koreatown suffered during the unrest and a separate debate over the oversaturation of liquor stores in South L.A. While Bass’ comments in 1992 were tied to the latter, they have long been a source of pain for the Korean community, as many of those stores were Korean-owned at the time.
In November 1992, Bass told the New York Times that it felt like “a miracle” that many of the liquor stores community activists had wanted to close in South L.A. were destroyed during the unrest.
Her comments have come up repeatedly in local politics, including during the 2022 mayoral race, when Bass apologized to a group of Korean American liquor store owners during a private meeting.
Bass’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Pratt’s campaign said he was traveling and unavailable to provide comment.
“The night before the uprising, a lot of us were in a meeting discussing how we might reduce the number of liquor stores in South Central, and a few days later, like a miracle, a large chunk of the stores we wanted to close were burned to the ground,” she told the New York Times in 1992.
“That’s not the way we wanted it to happen, but the rioting accomplished in a few days what we have spent decades working to achieve.”
She did not celebrate the destruction of Koreatown as Pratt’s campaign said on X.
Some Korean Americans say they’re sick of their community’s trauma being reduced to a campaign talking point.
Filmmaker So Yun Um, whose 2022 documentary “Liquor Store Dreams” explores the experiences of second-generation Korean Americans raised in liquor stores in L.A. and the first-generation immigrant parents who operated them, says Pratt is exploiting the community.
Um’s family until recently operated liquor stores in Hawthorne and West Athens. So she understands why some Korean Americans continue to feel anger toward Bass.
“It was insensitive of Bass to say that,” Um said.
But she added, “What’s important to us is that she acknowledged what she said and apologized.”
“As a family who has lived in Koreatown their whole lives and are part of the liquor store community who has experienced the 1992 L.A. Uprising, we know all too well when our narratives get skewed,” she said.
Pratt is fusing two separate grievances into one narrative for his campaign, Edward J.W. Park, chair of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University, told The LA Local.
“From the campaign’s point of view, it is a convenient sort of confusion that Karen Bass saw the destruction of these liquor stores in South L.A. as an opportunity to rebuild South L.A. without these liquor stores,” he said.
Park was involved in rebuilding and organizing efforts in the Korean community after the unrest. He has spent decades documenting the political and social aftermath of what happened in 1992.
The second grievance, Park said, is more current — frustration among some Koreatown residents who may feel the neighborhood has been neglected by the city for years, particularly when it comes to homelessness and public safety.
“I think at the heart of it is this feeling where some residents don’t understand why it is just conventional wisdom that Koreatown is forced to live with rampant homelessness, open drug use, drug trafficking, tents, the outrageous homeless problem that we have in this city,” he said.
The controversy stems from Bass’ work as a community organizer in South LA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
At the time, community organizers in predominantly Black neighborhoods across South L.A. were organizing against what they saw as an overconcentration of liquor stores tied to drug activity and crime.
“Liquor stores were everywhere, but they were incredibly concentrated in South L.A.,” Park said.
A majority of those stores were owned by Korean immigrants, who increasingly entered the liquor and convenience store industry in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the few available paths toward “an American dream” of economic mobility amid discrimination and limited job opportunities.
Bass, then the director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, wrote in a June 1992 Los Angeles Times op-ed that many South L.A. residents viewed the concentration of liquor stores as contributing to crime and deteriorating quality of life in their neighborhoods.
Hyepin Im, president and CEO of Faith and Community Empowerment, said Korean liquor store owners felt they were unfairly portrayed in the media and in Bass’ op-ed.
Im was active in community rebuilding efforts post-1992 and has worked to bridge tensions between Korean and Black Angelenos.
In the years before the unrest, several Korean shopkeepers were killed during robberies, and fears of violence were a reality of daily life for many store owners, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“The negative sentiments toward these storeowners failed to consider the reality of these storeowners providing a service while putting their lives on the line,” Im said.
Tensions between the Black and Korean community were simmering before the unrest. In 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Soon Ja Du, a Korean liquor store owner who accused her of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice.
Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but did not serve jail time, sparking anger in the Black community.
After the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, violence erupted across the city.
“There was almost a targeting of liquor stores that were owned by Korean Americans during the riots and a lot of people said that was related — ‘remember Latasha Harlins,'” former L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn told LAist in 2012.
Koreans made up less than 2% of LA’s population, but they lost roughly 2,300 businesses and sustained an estimated $350 million of the city’s $785 million in property damage during the unrest, according to scholars. Many felt abandoned after police pulled out of Koreatown during some of the worst violence and destruction.
Steve Kang, the former director of external affairs at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center who now serves as president of the Board of Public Works and as Bass’ film liaison, helped organize a private conversation between Bass and Korean American liquor store owners during her 2022 mayoral campaign.
At the time, Kang said billionaire Rick Caruso’s campaign had gained traction among some Korean American voters, making Koreatown “sort of a centerpiece in one of the key battlegrounds for the mayoral election.”
“And because of that, I think people dug up old archives and things that the mayor said when she was an organizer,” he said.
Bass apologized for the comments during the private meeting, saying “while the concerns about the stores were not about the race or nationality of the owners, I understood how my comments could have been hurtful,” according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times.
Not everyone has accepted Bass’ apology.
In a video posted by Pratt’s campaign, Scott Suh, a former president of the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council and former city planning commissioner, says Bass tried to block Korean store owners from rebuilding after the unrest. He goes on to say that anyone who supports Bass is endorsing “hate crime and racism.”
Suh did not respond to requests for comment.
Kevin Kang, a pastor at Tujunga United Methodist Church whose family operated a business in South L.A. during the unrest — and whose mother still does — said communities of color are too often politically co-opted.
“We know that’s out of context,” he added, referring to Pratt’s use of Bass’ comments. “I don’t think he actually cares about Koreans. We just become another tool for them to prove their point.”
Topline:
A tank at a Garden Grove aerospace plant came within a crack of exploding and forcing a toxic chemical cloud over 50,000 evacuated residents — here's what regulators knew before it happened.
Why it matters: Air quality regulators had flagged compliance problems years before the crisis. Prosecutors are investigating whether the company violated any laws. And community advocates and chemical-safety experts say residents still deserve a clearer accounting of what state and local regulators knew, what safeguards existed and why the tank came so close to catastrophe.
A potential chemical safety gap: California’s toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical that nearly exploded in a Garden Grove tank and forced 50,000 people from their homes. Methyl methacrylate is a volatile compound and one of the most widely used chemicals in plastics manufacturing. Officials feared the GKN tank would rupture as the liquid overheated, spilling thousands of gallons of chemicals or even exploding.
Read on... for more on what we know.
For six days over a holiday weekend, a chemical tank in an Orange County aerospace plant threatened to explode, and more than 50,000 people had to leave while crews figured out how to stop it. The tank kept getting hotter. A valve in the tank’s cooling system had failed. Officials used drones to read the tank’s temperature from the outside. Ground crews set up an “unmanned ground monitor” — a portable water cannon — blasting water across the tank’s side.
At the height of the emergency at GKN Aerospace — which makes cockpit windows and shields for military aircraft in Garden Grove — officials feared the tank could explode. California deployed more than 700 people to the city, the governor’s office said.
The company’s tank cooled only after it cracked just enough to relieve pressure without unleashing a chemical explosion. By Tuesday night, the evacuations were lifted — but the questions remained.
The near-disaster exposed gaps among multiple regulatory systems that state and local agencies have not fully addressed.
Air quality regulators had flagged compliance problems years before the crisis. Prosecutors are investigating whether the company violated any laws. And community advocates and chemical-safety experts say residents still deserve a clearer accounting of what state and local regulators knew, what safeguards existed and why the tank came so close to catastrophe.
Even as GKN Aerospace worked to resolve environmental compliance notices, regulators and local planners began considering an expansion of the facility that would increase its capacity to manufacture components for military F-35 fighter jets.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District has inspected GKN three times in the last decade. For much of that time, the facility was classified as a “minor source” of emissions within the district’s permitting program, a designation that meant that regulators weren't required to inspect the facility frequently.
That limited oversight may have contributed to what records show was a yearslong compliance problem.
Those violations did not involve the problematic storage tank that holds methyl methacrylate, regulators said.
But in 2020, GKN self-reported certain issues that led South Coast air regulators to inspect the facility and review its records. The air district’s investigation found that the company was out of compliance with multiple rules stretching back to 2017. The facility, located within a mile of homes and schools, had failed to maintain required records about its emissions, was operating new equipment without permits and was using equipment that didn’t match the description in its existing permits, according to regulatory reports.
It took until April 2021 for the air district to issue a formal notice of violation, and until late 2024 for the agency to sign a settlement requiring GKN to pay more than $900,000. The company did not admit liability in the settlement, which resolved 14 alleged violations.
The district now treats GKN as a “major source” of emissions – a type of facility that the South Coast air district inspects yearly. A spokesman said that the company has applied for a more comprehensive permit, at the direction of regulators.
For Tracy La, the timeline told its own infuriating story.
“That delay and allowing GKN to operate with pretty much impunity has caused so many tens of thousands of residents of Garden Grove to pay for it,” said La, director of VietRISE, a nonprofit that supports Vietnamese and immigrant communities in Orange County. Displaced residents have had to pay for housing, replace medication, seek transportation and rack up other costs associated with evacuating their homes, she added.
“It's just frustrating that regular everyday people are constantly having to pay the price for our government officials unwilling to hold these powerful, rich corporations accountable,” La said.
Garden Grove is a cornerstone of Little Saigon, one of the largest Vietnamese American communities in the United States — a community that includes immigrants and refugees from the Vietnam War.
Some residents know methyl methacrylate not as an aerospace chemical but as a workplace hazard — one they spent years fighting to eliminate.
Lisa Fu directs the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which represents Vietnamese manicurists across the state. Her members waged a long campaign against the chemical, documenting its effects on workers' lungs, skin and eyes.
In 2015, the state banned the chemical from nail salons and cosmetology schools after workers flagged health concerns. Now the same chemical was leaking from a tank a few miles from Little Saigon. Fu says collaborative members and their neighbors reported nosebleeds, itchiness and the deaths of pet birds.
Air monitors deployed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the South Coast air district around the facility have shown pollution levels within normal ranges. But Fu said the gap between those readings and what residents experienced has deepened distrust of regulators and their enforcement record.
“You hear in the press conferences that there's no fumes, no vapors, no leak, no contamination,” Fu said. “They are saying it is safe. Safe for who? We believe the community when the stories don't stop coming.”
Community advocates are now asking Garden Grove city leaders to shut the facility down and adopt a moratorium on military manufacturing facilities and expansions in the city.
GKN has an application for a more comprehensive permit under consideration at the South Coast air district, and the public may soon have the opportunity to weigh in. A district spokesperson told CalMatters it had aimed to release the permit for public comment by year’s end, but the timeline may shift because of the emergency.
California's toughest accidental-release prevention rules do not cover the chemical that nearly exploded in a Garden Grove tank and forced 50,000 people from their homes.
Methyl methacrylate is a volatile compound and one of the most widely used chemicals in plastics manufacturing. Officials feared the GKN tank would rupture as the liquid overheated, spilling thousands of gallons of chemicals or even exploding.
“It’s like a soda can that you left in your car in the middle of a hot summer,” said Andrew J. Whelton, a Purdue University environmental engineering professor. “The pressure built up within the can exceeds the capacity of that metal can.”
When the tank started overheating, it triggered a chemical reaction that responders could not stop — in part because the reaction had “gummed up” the valves they needed to inject a neutralizing agent, Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey said at a May 22 press conference.
Methyl methacrylate is not a regulated chemical under either the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program or California's parallel system, known as CalARP. That may mean the tank was regulated under an alternate or lower-tier hazardous-materials program — leaving regulators with fewer tools to oversee its storage.
“If you’re living there — you’re a neighbor — can you go see what chemicals they have stored on site?” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “No, you can’t.”
The federal program’s chemical list has not added reactive chemicals to its list of covered chemicals, despite recommendations from the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents. The Trump administration aims to eliminate funding for the chemical safety board after October and proposes to roll back the 2024 Risk Management Program amendments that had begun to expand chemical safety requirements.
The same gap exists in California.
The California Environmental Protection Agency confirmed to CalMatters that methyl methacrylate is not a regulated substance under the state's Accidental Release Program.
Orange County health officials confirmed to CalMatters that GKN had a hazardous materials business plan on file — a lower-tier document listing chemicals stored on site — but no risk management plan. The agency said CalARP does not apply to the facility because methyl methacrylate is not a listed chemical under the program.
CalMatters also asked the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health whether worker-safety rules for high-hazard industrial processes applied at the facility — which would have made it eligible for the accidental release program under a separate pathway. The facility had been the subject of multiple workplace safety and health inspections before the tank emergency. Cal/OSHA did not answer that question by deadline.
Chemicals that fall outside federal and state accident prevention programs may also be left out of community emergency planning and drills, Williams said. That means nearby residents may not know what risks they face or how officials would respond.
GKN did not respond to written questions on deadline. In recent days, the company’s statements have emphasized gratitude for the community and first responders. “We recognize there is more work ahead,” said GKN Senior Vice President Steve Carlin, who oversees the Garden Grove site’s programs.
Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said neighbors to companies like GKN have every reason to think someone’s enforcing rules.
When something like this happens, people “get angry because they were like, ‘Wait, nobody was paying attention to this and now I'm sleeping on the sidewalk?’”
The system, she said, was built around the wrong goal entirely. “We have a system that's built on the notion of getting facilities to return to compliance, but we need to have a system that's about making sure facilities are operating in a way that is safe — and some facilities may not have a culture that allows us to put our lives into their hands.”
Whether any single institution will provide a comprehensive accounting of what went wrong is unclear.
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office has opened a criminal inquiry, spokesperson Kimberly Edds confirmed to CalMatters. Prosecutors sent letters to GKN ordering the company not to destroy or manipulate evidence.
At an anonymous tipline, the office is seeking information about the chemical release, the facility’s operations and the maintenance of the tanks and systems involved.
California law makes it a crime to knowingly or recklessly handle or store hazardous waste in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of fire, explosion, serious injury or death. Edds declined to say what areas of the law the investigation would cover.
In a similar case in 2024, Alameda County prosecutors indicted a scrap metal company after a fire exposed years of hazardous materials violations. They later said they could not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and dropped it.
On the regulatory side, no single agency has the task of producing a comprehensive account of the event. Rather than one joint review, each agency involved in the emergency will produce its own separate findings, released according to its own policies and timelines, said Brian Yau, a spokesperson for the Orange County Fire Authority.
Hazardous materials officials, air regulators, environmental officials and the company were developing a site cleanup plan, Yau said. On Friday, the fire authority handed over cleanup and remediation oversight to the county health care agency, said Greg Barta, a spokesperson for the fire authority.
Asked whether he was concerned about industrial facilities operating near dense residential neighborhoods, Gov. Gavin Newsom praised local and state first responders and said the state is reviewing the facility's safety records. Then he offered a candid assessment of the limits of state action.
“As it relates to industrial facilities in and around urban centers,” Newsom said at a press conference Thursday, “that’s a more challenging issue of geography.”
State Sen. Tom Umberg, a Democrat from Santa Ana, said there will be new proposed laws in response to the narrowly-averted disaster.
Williams, of California Communities Against Toxics, said the incident should force a broader look at California’s rules for hazardous industrial sites – not just at GKN, but at every facility storing chemicals that fall outside the state's toughest oversight programs.
“Everyone wants to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, because their nervous systems are all on fire, and the way in which you calm your nervous system is to be in your house and sit on the couch and hold your cat,” she said. “But in a situation like this — where you had a massive near miss — you really need to make sure that the safety systems that failed are not the only safety systems there at risk.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
