Irvine residents could soon know more about hazardous materials in their backyard under a new program proposed by city leaders to map and disclose hazardous material sites throughout the city.
The proposal comes after over 50,000 people evacuated in May due to a chemical tank in Garden Grove that emergency officials say nearly exploded, along with another incident in La Habra this month that saw an orange cloud of chemicals hang over the city for hours before dissipating with a handful of evacuations.
[Read: Are California’s Toxic Regulators Strong Enough to Protect Local Neighborhoods?]
Council members are set to discuss the new rules at their meeting at 4 p.m. on Tuesday evening.
City council members already ordered staff back in June to make a “preliminary inventory of Irvine facilities handling acutely hazardous materials,” according to the staff report, in which they found over 1,100 businesses using hazardous materials in town registered with the county.
It’s unclear from the city staff report how many of those businesses rise to the level of filing a Risk Management Plan, or RMP, with the county, but they noted only seven of the over 1,100 businesses reach the California Accidental Release Prevention program, which handles “acutely hazardous materials above State thresholds.”
Under that program, any owners or operators that “that handle, manufacture, use, or store a regulated substance above a chemical-specific threshold quantity,” with the county health care agency.
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