Orange County is demanding $4 million from the owner of a Garden Grove plastic manufacturing plant where a chemical leak forced thousands of people from their homes earlier this year, officials said Friday.
County Counsel Leon Page sent a letter to GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems Inc. on Friday demanding payment of $4,071,305 for resource deployment and operational expenses incurred from the incident, in which a problem with GKN’s 34,000-gallon chemical storage tank cooling system caused a reaction of neutralized methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a toxic and highly flammable liquid used in the manufacture of acrylic plastics.
The total includes a $500,000 expenditure to assist evacuees with expenses, but does not include expenses incurred by the Orange County Fire Authority, which are $2.8 million, county officials said.
“The blame for this disaster lies solely with GKN and the county should not be bearing the brunt of these expenses,” said Supervisor Janet Nguyen, whose First District includes the Garden Grove plant. “The county works hard to stay in excellent fiscal shape and now we have 10 agencies with huge expenses along with the OC Fire Authority. We need reimbursement.”
The hazmat emergency began May 21 when a leak was detected at the facility located at 12122 Western Ave. An estimated 40,000 people in Garden Grove, the entire city of Stanton and other nearby communities had to leave their homes for several days during the Memorial Day weekend as work continued to neutralize the toxic chemical stored in tanks that had become overheated, sparking fears of an explosion.
Ultimately, a crack in the damaged tank relieved the pressure inside the tank and negated the risk.
“This incident was clearly not an unforeseeable accident as GKN has a well-documented history of regulatory violations at the site dating back over a decade,” Page’s letter states. “These violations include numerous Cal/OSHA citations as well as violations of environmental regulations in which $909,935 was paid by GKN to the South Coast Air Quality Management District in a highly publicized settlement.”
Page said the county is “legally entitled to seek full restitution for public funds expended during the May 2026 hazardous materials crisis under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act and the Hazardous Substance Account Act.”
GKN did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter.
The company recently donated $3 million to the United Way’s OC Community Resilience Fund to assist residents who were impacted by the evacuations, and gave another $1 million for “broader community initiatives” across the county.
At a June meeting of the Garden Grove City Council, GKN Aerospace Senior Vice President Steve Carlin apologized to the community on behalf of the company.
“On behalf of GKN and the Garden Grove plant I want to say I’m sorry this event … occurred,” he said. “I understand and realize sitting here tonight how unsettling it is to the greater community, and it’s particularly unsettling to us at GKN because of the long history we’ve had with Garden Grove and how connected we are to the community.”
Carlin said the Garden Grove plant is “known throughout the world” for its expertise in producing windows for the aerospace industry.
“It is literally the number one producer of aerospace transparencies … basically windows,” Carlin said. “We make the most complex windows out there. … And they don’t say we’re going to GKN Aerospace or GKN Transparencies for windows … no matter where in the world. … They say we’re going to Garden Grove. … That is literally how that plant is known around the world.”
On Thursday, GKN said its environmental response partner, Arcwood Environmental, completed key environmental response activities at the Garden Grove facility, including the safe removal, transportation, treatment and disposal of MMA from two unaffected storage tanks at the facility.
On June 10, federal authorities served a search warrant at the GKN plant. According to a search warrant affidavit, investigators were looking to seize any evidence of possible violations of federal requirements to prevent the “accidental release of extremely hazardous substance into the ambient air.”