O.C.’s most overlooked city weathers chemical crisis
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Wearing scuffed brown shoes, wrinkled slacks and a polo shirt dotted with sailboats, Stanton City Councilmember Donald Torres looked like someone who had put on whatever clothes he found at the top of the laundry hamper.
That’s because he basically had.
He was one of more than 50,000 Orange County residents ordered to evacuate on Friday as authorities tried to cool down a rapidly heating tank holding a highly toxic chemical. Torres bounced around three locations over the next four days with his father, girlfriend, three parakeets, a dog and a turtle named Squirt while fielding calls from irate and scared residents.
He returned home to “a mess” Tuesday morning after officials lifted all evacuation orders. Hours later, he joined activists outside the Garden Grove City Council chambers to demand that the city deny GKN Aerospace an expansion permit and look into shutting down the 15.5-acre facility altogether.
But the first-term pol and lifelong Stanton resident, 26, had more on his mind than just the previous four days.
The rest of the approximately 50,000 evacuees in Orange County are safe to return after authorities said there was no remaining danger of a chemical tank explosion.
His hometown of about 40,000 residents — Orange County’s second-poorest and most ethnically diverse city — has long been a regional afterthought, the type of community that makes the news only when a tragedy happens. Local and national media didn’t even bother with that courtesy during the GKN crisis, focusing mostly on Garden Grove, which is four times more populous. Never mind that 85% of Stanton was evacuated. Or that most of the houses in the projected blast zone were a Shohei Ohtani homer away from GKN’s faltering tank. Or that the worst-case scenario toxic plume might have cut north through Stanton and passed right over Torres’ home.
During the crisis, no Stanton officials spoke at the daily news conferences with other local authorities. So when Torres took the lectern in Garden Grove, he wasn’t just there as an elected official. He demanded that the world give Stanton something it rarely gets:
Respect.
“As Stanton residents call me, I hear the hardship and a lack of adequate resources,” Torres read from a prepared text. “We have to rise to the occasion and act.”
Afterward, the councilmember shook hands with Carlos Perea, executive director of the nonprofit Harbor Institute and one of the news conference’s organizers.
“Thank you for including us,” said Torres, who works as a social emotional mentor and tutor at his alma mater, Western High School in Anaheim.
“Orange County always overlooks Latino areas, and politicians never take their concerns seriously,” Perea responded when I asked about Stanton, which is about 53% Latino and 27% Asian.
Nearby, Torres kept apologizing to people who asked for his business card — he didn’t have any on him.
“How many more disasters or near-disasters until working Latino families aren’t seen as an afterthought?” Perea added.
Torres has been in contact with the state legislators, Congress member and county supervisor who represent the city to see whether they can fund hotel and food vouchers for residents. He said he will push his City Council colleagues to ask insurance companies to help affected businesses. But he knows the road to recovery will be tough and unprecedented.
“In the pandemic, everyone at least was able to stay home,” Torres said after the news conference. “But right now, so many are displaced or were. It’s going to be harder for folks to come back to that.”
A failing tank holding 7,000 gallons of a highly reactive chemical at a Garden Grove aerospace plant forced 50,000 evacuations and nearly triggered a catastrophic explosion.
Stanton incorporated 70 years ago as part of O.C.’s post-World War II housing boom and thus shares the wide streets and tract housing of other central Orange County cities. But while others established national reputations — Anaheim for Disneyland and sports teams, Westminster and Garden Grove for their slices of Little Saigon — Stanton remained an outcast.
Neighboring towns looked down on its working-class residents and the beat-up motels along Beach Boulevard, which cleaves the city in half. Wagging tongues liked to point out that Stanton had first incorporated for a few years in the 1910s to stop Anaheim from making it into a sewer facility.
“We’ve come a long way from that ignominy,” joked Mayor David Shawver, who has lived in Stanton for 55 years and has served on the City Council since 1988. He evacuated his family while working from his home to help coordinate the city’s response to the chemical threat.
The mayor acknowledged that Stanton has long had to fight an unsavory reputation but argued that those days are past. Crime and homelessness are down, and a long-standing brickyard will soon make way for a mixed-use development.
“All my neighboring cities were so supportive of what our needs were,” he said, “and hopefully will continue to do so once we figure out what our residents need.”
Torres told me to meet him at Western and Cerritos avenues so we could check in on some of the businesses in his district. As I drove there, the well-kept strip malls of Garden Grove transitioned to scruffier ones on the Stanton side. The houses and apartments looked less polished. Stanton Central Park, the city’s biggest green space, was empty save for a trio of electric cars at charging stations.
“When I would tell people that I’m from Stanton, a lot of people ask, ‘Where is that?’” Torres told me in front of Carniceria El Novillo, which he has patronized his entire life. “We’ve felt that stereotype always, but it makes us have more pride. We double down on who we are.”
Torres greeted owner Adalberto Barrera Valencia, who has run the store for 18 years. Barrera Valencia and his family had to rent a place in Orange because their house was in the evacuation zone, and “hotels went from $180 to $400 within two days,” he told us in Spanish.
It was his first day back at the store. Only six customers had stopped in by the time Torres and I arrived around 1:30 p.m.
Barerra Valencia had to throw out a bunch of meat because it had rotted during the days the store was closed, he said. He gestured toward his wife, who stood behind a counter usually filled with premade food such as enchiladas and chiles relleno. “I told her, ‘Let’s close early today, no one’s coming,’ but she said, ‘We need to make what we can.’ We have a $1,800 electricity bill we have to pay this week.”
Torres told Barrera Valencia to note all of his losses to see what the city could do. Barrera Valencia, 59, smiled wearily. Just a few weeks earlier, he had complained to Torres about rising food prices.
“We just get hit here again and again,” he said.
The crisis at a Garden Grove aerospace firm that required the evacuation of 50,000 people was likely caused by the failure of a cooling system designed to regulate the temperature of the chemical tanks, officials told The Times.
The sentiment was the same at every business we visited. Panaderia El Cortez worker Esperanza Cancharí said the store had to throw out all of the pan dulce it had made fresh on Friday morning after it went stale during the evacuation. The nearby apartments where her customers mostly come from “were completely empty.” Hair Colab, where Torres gets his hair cut, didn’t close, but owner Carlos Gomez said there were “a lot of cancellations. People were too scared to come, and I don’t blame them.”
At Island Liquor, owner Dalbir Singh said his well-appointed store had been busy all morning. “People are tired of being in hotels — what else is there to do?” he said with a sad chuckle. He had to close all of Memorial Day weekend, typically one of their busiest stretches. But he had no problem with the evacuation.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” the 53-year-old Fullerton resident said.
We ended our tour at Cerritos Nutrition. Maria Ngo had spent most of the day tossing expired items and rotted produce from the small grocery store — casualties of the forced shutdown. She was fine, but her sister in Anaheim has friends staying with them for the foreseeable future.
“It hasn’t been crazy over there, but here is something else,” the 29-year-old said, fanning herself.
Torres wrote down his phone number and told Ngo to call him if she needed anything. Ngo didn’t realize he was a councilmember until then.
“Is it really close to here?” Ngo said, referring to the site of Stanton’s near-catastrophe. Torres replied that the problem plant was just down the street but that authorities had mostly neutralized the situation.
Then, Ngo asked what every Stanton resident will ask in the weeks and months to come, as authorities investigate what happened and how to prevent it from happening again:
“So are we going to be OK?”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article portrays Stanton as Orange County’s “most overlooked” city, arguing that the community’s suffering during the GKN Aerospace chemical emergency drew far less media and political attention than neighboring, better-known cities even though most of Stanton’s residents were ordered to evacuate.
It emphasizes that Stanton is small, working class, Orange County’s second-poorest city, and among its most ethnically diverse, with a majority Latino and sizable Asian population, and suggests this demographic profile is a key reason officials and news outlets historically overlook its needs and perspectives.
Through Councilmember Donald Torres, the piece argues that Stanton residents endured chaotic and exhausting displacement—crowding into hotels or relatives’ homes with pets and family members—while receiving limited clear communication and support, which intensified existing feelings of marginalization.
The article highlights the economic toll on local small businesses, describing grocers, bakeries, salons, liquor stores and small markets forced to close or throw out spoiled inventory, and presents owners’ complaints about lost revenue, soaring hotel prices and mounting utility bills as evidence that low‑income, immigrant‑serving corridors bear disproportionate costs when disasters hit.
It underscores a sense of environmental injustice by quoting activists who contend that “working Latino families” are routinely treated as an afterthought in Orange County, and by linking Stanton’s experience in this incident to a broader pattern of Latino neighborhoods being overlooked when it comes to safety, investment and emergency aid.
At the same time, the article notes Mayor David Shawver’s view that Stanton has come a long way from its old reputation as a dumping ground, citing declines in crime and homelessness and new development plans, but frames this progress as fragile and easily overshadowed when crises arrive and attention shifts elsewhere.
The piece depicts Torres as a grassroots, under-resourced elected official scrambling to respond—lacking even business cards at a news conference—yet pressing state and federal representatives for hotel and food vouchers, urging city colleagues to seek help for businesses, and calling for Garden Grove to block GKN’s expansion and consider closing the facility altogether.
By ending with a local shopkeeper’s question, “So are we going to be OK?”, the article suggests that even after evacuations are lifted, residents’ fear and mistrust will linger, and that the real test for authorities will be whether they deliver long-term protection and respect to a community that feels chronically sidelined.
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the article’s focus on neglect and looming danger, local officials and emergency responders have stressed that the response to the GKN incident was aggressive and highly coordinated, involving the Orange County Fire Authority, city departments and state and federal regulators working in tandem to stabilize the overheating tank and manage risk.[1][2]
While the piece highlights residents’ fears of contamination and catastrophe, fire officials and federal environmental teams have repeatedly said that air monitoring across the evacuation zone showed no readings above health-based action levels, with the Environmental Protection Agency reporting no exceedances on its 20 monitors in surrounding neighborhoods.[1]
Authorities have also emphasized that, despite the frightening scenarios laid out early in the incident, there was ultimately no chemical leak into the community, no confirmed off-site contamination and no reported injuries—points used to argue that the evacuation orders were effective and that the public was protected throughout the crisis.[1][2]
Coverage from other outlets notes that the evacuation zone included multiple cities—Garden Grove, Cypress, Anaheim, Buena Park, Westminster and Stanton—framing the emergency as a regional industrial accident rather than a localized injustice targeting a single, predominantly Latino community.[2][3]
Emergency officials have defended the breadth and duration of the evacuations as a necessary precaution given the volatile nature of methyl methacrylate and the risk of tank failure or explosion, and some have pointed to the fact that people were allowed to return only after the immediate threat subsided as evidence that safety, not politics or demographics, drove decision-making.[1][2]
GKN Aerospace and public agencies have highlighted that company specialists worked side by side with fire crews and “outside technical experts” throughout the incident, a narrative that casts the facility not as a rogue operator but as a regulated industrial site cooperating with authorities to mitigate an unforeseen equipment problem.[1]
Whereas the article amplifies calls to deny GKN’s expansion and even consider shutting the plant, other reporting leans more heavily on officials’ statements that the situation has been stabilized, that the worst-case scenarios are no longer expected, and that continued monitoring and contingency plans are in place, implicitly suggesting that stringent oversight and improved safety protocols—rather than closure—are the appropriate next steps.[1][2]
Some local leaders and commentators, focusing on the lack of injuries and successful prevention of an explosion, have framed the episode as an example of emergency planning working as intended, arguing that the region’s swift evacuations, school closures and public information efforts show that authorities did respond seriously to all affected communities, including Stanton, even if media coverage varied by city.[1][2][3]
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