The GKN chemical disaster in Garden Grove may have slipped from the headlines, but its implications are far from forgotten. This event underscores a pressing need for enhanced chemical disaster regulation and public awareness. Across the United States, chemical disasters occur almost daily, yet many remain unnoticed, hindering efforts to mitigate risks. This gap in awareness and regulation drives both our research and teaching as social scientists focused on environmental and disaster governance.
At the University of California, Irvine, we educate students on analyzing environmental injustice and governance failures in communities across California. A key aspect of this education is identifying disaster risks, which we categorize into three types: fast (requiring emergency response), slow (routine pollution), and combowhere multiple risks are exacerbated by extreme weather, war, or terrorism. Despite their dramatic nature, fast disasters are often the most challenging for students to grasp. Communities may have risks but no actual disasters, and potential disasters rarely generate news coverage or discussion. Even infamous cases like the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, which remains the world’s worst industrial disaster, have faded from public memory.
The Hidden Risks of Chemical Disasters
Our students at UCI learn to navigate the complexities of chemical disaster risks, much like the public in Garden Grove and beyond. These challenges have been exacerbated by regulatory rollbacks and the elimination of crucial programs under the Trump administration. In the United States, facilities with the potential for catastrophic off-site consequences are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Risk Management Program (RMP), established in response to the Bhopal disaster. However, it was not until 2014, following a catastrophic chemical disaster in West, Texas, that the extent and inequity of chemical disaster risks in the United States were thoroughly mapped by non-government organizations.
Kids in Danger Zones found that one in three children in the United States live within the vulnerability zone of at least one RMP facility, with many children residing in areas overlapping multiple facilities. A separate report, Who’s in Danger? Race, Poverty, and Chemical Disastersrevealed that Black, Latino/a, and low-income communities are disproportionately located in these vulnerability zones. Despite these findings, little progress has been made in reducing these risks and associated inequities in the subsequent decades.
The Decline of Critical Data Tools
In the last 18 months, many tools for characterizing chemical disaster risks in the U.S. have been decommissioned. The EPA’s EJScreen, which allowed users to compare their community’s proximity to RMP facilities with the rest of the country, has been taken down. The EPA’s RMP Public Data Tool, providing information on specific facilities, has also been removed, and the Chemical Safety Board, which analyzes the causes of chemical disasters, is at risk of being defunded. In California, the Accidental Release Prevention (CalARP) program regulates more facilities by including more chemicals and lower thresholds. However, local knowledge about chemical disaster risks remains limited.
The CalEPA’s Regulated Site Portal integrates data from many regulatory agencies and databases but does not provide a simple way to determine whether a facility is regulated by RMP or CalARP. To address these data gaps, we submitted a Public Records Act request for the names and locations of the more than 2,000 CalARP facilities. The map we built has important limitations, such as assuming a one-mile vulnerability zone due to a lack of information on chemicals and volumes at each facility. It is just one step toward better chemical disaster education.
The Need for Comprehensive Chemical Disaster Education
Missing or hard-to-find information is just the tip of the iceberg. The lists of chemicals regulated by RMP/CalARP do not include methyl methacrylate (MMA), the chemical of concern in Garden Grove, nor do they include ammonium nitrate, which caused disasters in Beirut in 2026, West, Texas in 2013, and Texas City, Texas in 1947. Adding chemicals to regulatory lists is a politically and scientifically fraught process that can take decades. Our students learn about these complexities as well.
Regulators analyze facilities individually, one chemical at a time, without considering how risks compound. On our map, we can see that the GKN facility is on the edge of an industrial corridor, with three CalARP facilities within a mile. The potential impact of an explosion on these facilities was never addressed. There is also what we call data divergence. CalEPA’s Regulated Site Portal indicates that the maximum amount of liquid MMA that should be stored at GKN’s Garden Grove facility is 600-1199 gallons. Official reports, however, described the failing tank as holding 7,000 gallons of MMA, with other tanks of MMA nearby. What explains this discrepancy? We want our students to be ready to ask these kinds of questions.
The point we want to emphasize is that more chemical disaster education is urgently needed—and it must do more than teach people how to respond when alarms go off and evacuation orders are issued. We need our students—and the wider public—to understand and advocate for fundamentally new approaches to chemical disaster risk characterization, reduction, and response.
