California Chemical Plant That Threatened to Explode Was Making F-35 Parts for America’s Forever Wars
Sometimes, fueling the Iran War causes 50,000 people to get evacuated from their homes because a chemical tank might explode.
Photo via Unsplash, Y S Splinter
Last week, residents of the Southern California city of Garden Grove, south of Los Angeles, waited with bated breath to see if their world would be turned upside down via a cruel stroke of corporate incompetence. Some 50,000 residents of the area were forcibly evacuated after a chemical tank at the GKN Aerospace manufacturing facility became compromised, with its temperature and pressure rising to dangerous levels. For days, officials and emergency response teams monitored the site, attempting to either cool the tank or safely release the pressure, which apparently occurred when the tank of highly toxic methyl methacrylate (MMA) ultimately cracked, alleviating the threat of a catastrophic, flaming explosion that could have engulfed nearby homes in burning chemical residue. Frightened residents now returning home (and preparing to join class-action lawsuits) are naturally wondering what the hell happened, but at least they can rest assured that the chemical facility in their backyards was doing the most noble of work: Helping to provide murder machines to fuel the U.S. and Israel’s endless wars in the Middle East!
That news is courtesy of an investigatory piece in The Intercept, which goes deep on how the GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove is one of the few sites responsible for the manufacture of the acrylic bubble of ultra-strong material that encases the see-through F-35 fighter jet cockpit, referred to as a transparency canopy. The United States has both made extensive use of this jet in its war in Iran, and provided dozens of the jets to Israel for its on ongoing strikes on Gaza and Lebanon–primarily paid for, naturally, by funding from the U.S. State Department, aka tax dollars. Which is all to say: You think you’re far removed from the butterfly effects of conflicts like the ones perpetuated by the U.S. and Israel across the Middle East? Well, maybe not–your home might be swept away in a chemical fireball because the plant you never even knew existed is rushing to expand in order to produce more next-generation fighters that cost $135 million a pop! Dear lord, look at the photo below and see how close these single family homes were to the chemical tanks looming in the background.
Potential crack found on Garden Grove chemical tank, reducing explosion risk
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes.com) 3:00 AM · May 25, 2026
The timing, suffice to say, looks pretty bad when only a few days before the crisis with the chemical tank began, Garden Grove city officials approved a permit for the GKN Aerospace facility to begin a 34,000-square-foot expansion of its operations. According to The Intercept, “on its website, the company cited increasing demand for F-35 jets as the reason for the expansion, which would enable the company to double its production of aircraft canopies.” Because god knows, what this country most direly needs at this particular moment is greatly elevated fighter jet production. I mean, Israel isn’t going to build these supersonic death-dealers for themselves, right? That’s facetious; of course they won’t.
And wouldn’t you know it, the GKN Aerospace facility (a division of UK aerospace company Melrose Industries) in Garden Grove had already incurred 10 violations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in inspections since 2018, and had reportedly been penalized for not properly inspecting its machinery. In 2025, GKN Aerospace also settled a lawsuit with the Southern California Air Quality Management District, paying $909,935 after it was found they had violated recordkeeping laws related to the emission of nitrogen oxide. All of these incidents have now naturally resurfaced in heated debate and condemnation at Garden Grove City Council meetings, with local activist groups launching campaigns seeking to close the facility entirely.
“This crisis was not unpredictable,” said Layal Bata, an organizer for the Palestinian Youth Movement, at one of those meetings. “It is the result of a company and an industry that prioritizes war profiteering over people.”
Multiple class-action lawsuits representing some of the 50,000 local residents who were evacuated have already been filed, alleging that the company was negligent in the maintenance of its facility and created a hazardous situation for local residents, who are disproportionately of lower income.
“Fifty thousand people were told to leave their homes,” said attorney Caleb Marker of firm Zimmerman Reed, which filed one of the suits. “This case is about what made that crisis preventable—and about accountability for families left to carry the cost of someone else’s failure to safely maintain hazardous chemicals next door to their neighborhoods.”
Filippo Marchino, another attorney of the Pasadena-based X-Law Group who launched a second class-action suit related to the incident, pointed out how quickly such an out-of-control scenario could have gone from local headlines to national tragedy: “Failures involving storage tanks or containment systems can escalate into large-scale public safety emergencies within minutes. Garden Grove families did not sign up to live next door to a major industrial chemical emergency.”
The unfolding disaster in Garden Grove sits at the nexus of the oil industry and the military industrial complex (the facility manufactures f-35 parts) representing two of the most powerful lobbying blocs in DC that make their fortunes on advocating for deregulation. This will happen again and again
Some of the activists now mobilizing were themselves among those evacuated, and didn’t even know that the facility existed before the day that the government told them they needed to flee their homes in case those homes would be shortly wiped off the face of the Earth. One of them, Dwight Hua, an activist with Vietnamese social justice organization VietRise, lives less than a mile from the GKN facility, and gave voice to the frustration that surely every one of these people were no doubt feeling: “Why has a company like GKN been quietly existing in our neighborhoods? Now the mask is off … this is not a mistake, this is a deliberate result of an industry and company that treats our communities as disposable.”
Without such facilities built in our immediate backyards, though, how would we maintain the ability to deliver missiles that cost $1 million each into Iranian elementary schools? Who will build the murder machines, if not us?
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