This way, beckons Thành Tran, urging his visitors to follow him through his white side gate. They trail him into his backyard, where he grows dragon fruit, tangerines and guava.
If you stand on the low brick wall, you can see the tank that threatened to blow up his home of 16 years. “Go ahead,” he says, prompting his guests to step up. “See that tank?” And there it is — the tank’s silver rim is visible over the top of a barbed-wire fence.
Tran, a 68-year-old retired letter carrier, lives on Santa Rosalia Street, just across some railroad tracks from the aerospace plant that made national news over the Memorial Day weekend when that compromised tank threatened to either leak dangerous chemicals or, worse, explode and send a toxic plume over Orange County.
More than 50,000 people were evacuated from six cities, including Tran’s neighborhood in Stanton that borders an industrial corridor of Garden Grove.
Santa Rosalia Street is a strip of mostly one-story homes, nestled in a quiet, friendly neighborhood, residents say, where Fisher-Price toys are scattered on green lawns. The street’s exterior doesn’t betray the unease residents are feeling.
Tran had seen the 15-acre GKN Aerospace plant for years — most clearly from his upstairs window — but he and his wife never knew what the facility was or that they were working with potentially dangerous chemicals.
The plant on Western Avenue is a leading worldwide manufacturer of cockpit windshields, jet canopies and aviation windows for civil and military aircraft. Methyl methacrylate, a volatile, highly toxic chemical, is critical to its operations.
“Nobody knew,” he insisted. At least, not until a police officer showed up at his door on Thursday, May 21, and told him he needed to leave.
“For now, we don’t feel safe,” Tran said.
‘Nerve-wracking’
A little over a week after they were allowed to return to their homes, GKN Aerospace’s neighbors have settled back into their homes. But “settled” doesn’t describe how they’re feeling.
“It’s a little nerve-wracking,” said Alexandra Montenegro, a 31-year-old behavioral analyst. She, with her 5-year-old daughter, has been renting a house just across Santa Rosalia for a little over a year. Every day, Montenegro sees people driving in the neighborhood, tracking air quality.
“It’s more so frustrating that, I guess, this was an issue before,” Montenegro said, referencing GKN’s past safety violations. “And it escalated to this point.”
If she’d known about the facility’s prior safety violations, she said she would have reconsidered renting this house. “I’m not in a place right now to move.”
Montenegro’s neighbors echo her sentiment — if they’d known about the facility, they wouldn’t have moved here. But now, they either can’t or won’t move.
“We’re here for good,” said Robert Hope, an 84-year-old retired insurance investigator. He and his wife have been here for more than 50 years. They raised their son here, and now their grandson comes over to visit. His wife was an instructional aide at Wakeham Elementary, right around the corner. This is home.
Before the chemical incident thrust Garden Grove into the national spotlight, Orange County’s fifth-largest city was probably best known as one of four cities that make up Little Saigon and for its proximity to Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort area.
It’s the seventh densest of Southern California cities with a population of more than 100,000. With about 9,481 residents per square mile, Garden Grove roughly mirrors Seattle.
“It’s frustrating, not having known that that was there and that it was a dangerous chemical all those years,” Hope said. “Fifty-four years, and nobody said diddly about it. Even the real estate gal, you know, when we first bought it, said nothing.”
Now, Hope is starting to rethink things. About two-and-a-half weeks before the evacuations, he said, he developed a cough and his wife began experiencing headaches, sinus problems and dizziness. “It just makes me wonder — had that thing been leaking for a long time prior to whoever found it on Thursday?” Hope asked.
For 20 years, Josefina Peralta said she has noticed a funny smell coming from the plant. The air smelled like nail polish, a smell that burned in her lungs and her stomach. It gave her headaches. She’d see smoke coming out of the facility, mostly at night. Peralta said she and some of her neighbors have been calling GKN Aerospace’s public phone number for years to complain.
That is, until recently, when they stopped answering.
Peralta, 54, has lived in her home since 2002 with her husband and three kids, 23-year-old twin boys and her 21-year-old daughter. Her family has poured a lot of love into this house — her husband, who works in construction, built much of what’s in the backyard, including a gazebo, a dark wood table, a chair and a bench. But if she’d known that more than 20 years later she would be evacuated, she never would have moved here, she said.
Keeping their receipts
When a police officer arrived at 6:30 a.m. Friday morning to notify them of the evacuation orders, Hope and his wife left immediately. They checked into a Courtyard by Marriott in Irvine for five nights until they could return home the following Wednesday.
For them, the shelters weren’t an option. Hope’s wife has chronic kidney disease and lung problems. “I couldn’t see going to one of the shelters and exposing her,” he said.
He estimates they spent about $1,500 on hotel bills, food, gas and medications. “When we left, we were so — I guess you’d say scared, nervous — we left with nothing. That police officer said, you know, you get out or you stay, but if it explodes, you know, you’re going to be right in it. So we just sort of grabbed what we could.”
Hope said he’s “more frustrated” than relieved at this point. “We were afraid of losing the house.”
On the Thursday before they were ordered to evacuate, the smell of burned plastic permeated the neighborhood, Peralta said. She was able to return that night, but the next day she was evacuated again. She went to a hotel in Orange, but, by Saturday night, it was all booked up. So she spent the night in her car.
Her sister saw news on Instagram that evacuees could receive $500 in cash assistance. That’s not nearly enough, Peralta said. When they evacuated, they didn’t even have time to pack, so they had to buy clothes. “Everybody is nervous and crying,” she said.
She spent $160 for one night in the hotel, then meals three times a day for five people. “This is expensive,” she said. She’s keeping her receipts, she said, hopeful that someone will reimburse her.
Now Peralta is worried about her property value declining, but she’s not in a position to consider moving. Since the evacuation, she’s received flyers in the mail with lowball offers to buy her house. She remembers one offer for $785,000. Property values on the street are well over $1 million.
“Every day, I check in that direction,” she said. Standing atop a bench in her backyard, she can see the tank that threatened to destroy her neighborhood. But every day, it’s the same. “I feel unsafe.”
Neighbors won’t forget
One thing residents are united on: They want GKN Aerospace out.
“Just shut it down completely,” Hope said. “People living here want to get it shut down.”
The evacuations were chaotic. Montenegro’s daughter “was scared,” she said. “She kept telling me, ‘I don’t want my house to blow up. I want to go home.’ ” At Montenegro’s father’s house, the two shared a twin bed. Her daughter couldn’t bear to sleep separately.
The ordeal was particularly stressful because Montenegro had surgery that week, something she’d scheduled weeks in advance. She’s battling tongue cancer, and, on Thursday, she had nearly half her tongue and some of her lymph nodes removed. The night before her surgery, her street was still blocked off.
She says she approached officers, crying, begging them to let her through so she could pick up clothes and medication she needed to take after her surgery. “I was like, ‘Please, I have cancer, I have surgery tomorrow,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Please I just need to go over there.’ ”
Montenegro said she wants to move on and “to not have to worry about this anymore.”
But this ordeal is not something people will get over quickly, Hope said.
“I don’t think it’s going to be forgotten,” he said. “We were at ground zero.”