Authorities in Southern California on Friday were racing to figure out how to prevent the explosion of a storage tank that has been leaking a hazardous chemical used to make plastic parts, as some 40,000 people were under evacuation orders in the area.

A storage tank holding between 6,000 and 7,000 gallons (22,700 and 26,500 liters) of methyl methacrylate overheated Thursday and began venting vors into the air at an aerospace plastics facility in Garden Grove, a city in Orange County, the local fire authority said.

The tank could fail and crack, releasing the chemical onto the ground, or it could explode, Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey said Friday.

“This thing is going to fail, and we don’t know when,” Covey said. “We’re doing our best to figure out when or how we can prevent it.”

Officials ordered residents in Garden Grove to leave and expanded evacuation orders Friday to some residents of five other Orange County cities — Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster — after being unable to stop the leak overnight on the tank at GKN Aerospace, which makes parts for commercial and military aircraft.

No injuries or deaths have been reported, authorities said.

In an update later Friday, Covey said authorities have been able to maintain the tank’s temperature, buying time to figure out how to fix it.

Garden Grove is about 38 miles (61 kilometers) south of downtown Los Angeles and less than a mile from Disneyland’s two theme parks, which were not under evacuation orders Friday. The city is known for its vibrant Vietnamese community, one of the largest of any U.S. city.

Danny Pham said he was deep in a dream when his roommate banged on his door around 7 a.m. Friday morning and told him he needed to leave immediately. Pham had been working late the night before at a Vietnamese restaurant and had not seen the news.

“It was shocking to me,” said Pham, who lives only a couple blocks from the plastics plant. “I didn’t know how serious it would be. I never knew that a thing like this could hpen.”

By late Friday afternoon, Pham was still trying to figure out where he would stay the night and worrying that he had only the clothes on his back, possibly for days to come.

Covey said crews have created containment barriers with sandbags in case there is a chemical spill from the tank to prevent the toxic chemical from getting into storm drains or reaching creeks or the nearby ocean.

Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, the county health officer, said if the chemical heats up, it can release a vor that is harmful to people’s health. It can cause respiratory issues, itching and burning eyes, nausea and headaches.

Crews were initially successful and were able to neutralize one of two damaged tanks, but Covey said they determined Friday morning that the remaining tank was “in the biggest crisis.”

GKN Aerospace said specialized hazardous material teams are assessing the situation.

“There are no reports of injuries at this time and our priority remains the safety of our employees, responders, and the surrounding community,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We will provide verified updates as soon as more information becomes available.”

Kim Yen, a retiree in Garden Grove, was settling in for the night Thursday when she heard a sirenlike sound coming from her phone. An alert told her she needed to leave her home, which was just two blocks from the chemical leak.

As Yen drove to her daughter’s house in Seal Beach, she worried that others in the local Vietnamese community might ignore or not understand the evacuation alert because it was in English.

“They are family,” she said. “I’m hoping they stay alert and listen to the news and the authorities. This is scary.”

Yen, who is originally from Vietnam and has lived in Orange County since 1980, quickly stopped by her house Friday morning to grab important documents and medications. By then her neighborhood was “a ghost town,” and she was comforted to see police officers going door to door to make sure everyone had evacuated.

“We understand that this is frightening,” Garden Grove Mayor Stephanie Klopfenstein said. “But the evacuation orders are in place for your safety.”

Local Vietnamese television stations translated updates from officials and urged residents to take the situation seriously.

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Rodriguez reported from San Francisco, Rush from Portland, Oregon, and Schoenbaum from Salt Lake City.

The spacecraft reached its final destination — the Indian Ocean — despite some engine trouble, before erupting in flames upon impact. That last part was not unexpected, according to SpaceX.

Musk called it “an epic” launch and landing.

“You scored a goal for humanity,” he told his team via X.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman flew in for the launch, saying Starship is now one step closer to the moon.

There was no fireball this time until the very end. The spacecraft plummeted upright into the Indian Ocean under seemingly full control, then toppled over and ignited.

While the liftoff itself went well, not all of the engines fired as the booster attempted a controlled return. The spacecraft also had to make do with fewer engines, but kept heading eastward 120 miles (194 kilometers) up. A pair of modified, camera-equipped Starlinks ejected from Starship provided brief views of the spacecraft in flight — a remarkable first.

At 407 feet (124 meters), the latest model eclipses the older Starship lines by several feet (more than 1 meter) and packs more engine thrust.

The revamped booster sports fewer but bigger and stronger grid fins for steering it back to Earth following liftoff, and a larger and more robust fuel transfer line to feed the 33 main engines. This fuel line is the size of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first-stage booster. The retro-looking, stainless steel spacecraft also has more of everything — more cameras and more navigation and computer power — as well as docking cones for future rendezvous and moon missions.

Starship is meant to be fully reusable, with giant mechanical arms at the launch pads to catch the returning rocket stages. But on this latest trial run, nothing was being recovered. The Gulf of Mexico marked the end of the road for the redesigned first-stage booster, and the Indian Ocean for the spacecraft and its satellite demos.

NASA is paying SpaceX billions of dollars — and also Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — to provide the lunar landers that will be used to land Artemis astronauts on the moon.

The two companies are scrambling to be first.

While Starship has reached the fringes of space on multiple flights lasting an hour at most, Bezos’ Blue Moon has yet to lift off, although a prototype is being readied for a moonshot later this year.

NASA is following ril’s successful lunar flyaround by four astronauts with a docking trial run in orbit around Earth planned for next year. For that Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking their Orion csule with Starship, Blue Moon or both.

A moon landing by two astronauts — Artemis IV — could follow as soon as 2028 using either Starship or Blue Moon, whichever lander is safer and ready first. It will be NASA’s first lunar landing with a crew since 1972’s ollo 17. The goal this time is a moon base near the lunar south pole, staffed by astronauts as well as robots.

SpaceX is already taking reservations for private flights to the moon and Mars on Starship.

The world’s first space tourist, California businessman Dennis Tito, and his wife signed up 3 1/2 years ago for a flight around the moon. The timing is uncertain.

This week, another wealthy space tourist — Chinese-born bitcoin investor Chun Wang — announced he will fly to Mars on Starship’s first interplanetary mission. Wang previously chartered a SpaceX polar flight in a Dragon csule last year and, along with his hand-picked crew, became the first to orbit above the north and south poles.

No price tag or date was revealed for his Mars cruise.

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“I don’t know if y’all noticed this, but Donald Trump endorsed me,” Paxton told a small rally in a town outside Austin, inciting whoops and plause from the crowd.

Paxton has been turning his focus to the Democratic nominee, state Rep. James Talarico. Paxton opened his event Thursday with attacks on Talarico, a sign of his confidence heading into the runoff.

Paxton then gave a biogrhy of his political life and tried hammering home the reason he says he should be the nominee: his history of lawsuits defending conservative values. It is the type of resume that endears Paxton to the “Make America Great Again” faithful, some of his supporters said.

“He’s a fighter, he’s a person of action, he’s proven that as attorney general,” said Jeffrey Sonnier, 72, who attended the rally and echoed the sentiment of many supporters at the event.

As for Cornyn, said Sonnier, “he’s inactive for five years and digs out to become a supposed active Republican MAGA person every six years.”

Who is closer to Trump?

Paxton’s campaign said Thursday that it’s pulling negative ads against Cornyn. Instead, starting after Trump’s Tuesday endorsement, the campaign and a super political action committee that supports his candidacy began airing separate ads promoting Trump’s favor.

Cornyn’s campaign and groups supporting him, however, were outspending the pro-Paxton groups 3-to-1 and had reprised an ad they began airing last year noting Cornyn’s support for Trump’s agenda and featuring video clips of Trump praising Cornyn.

“He’s called me a friend, and that’s no surprise because I’ve supported him and his policies, you may have seen a commercial or two to that effect, 99.3% of the time,” said Cornyn in a video posted to X from a recent event.

Cornyn has also long worked to shift the race to focus not on fidelity to the president but on character.

If Paxton is the nominee, that will be litigated in a general election against Talarico, where voters will be less “willing to overlook all the corruption, the self-dealing and the scandals,” Cornyn argued at a recent campaign event. “Ken Paxton would hand it to (Democrats) on a silver platter.”

Paxton supporters at his Thursday rally shrugged off the accusations.

“He’s had his flaws, but so have we; we all make mistakes,” said Daniel Vega, 18, adding, “He’s repented, let’s move on.”

A contest where spending reached beyond $100 million

Through this week, Cornyn’s campaign and groups supporting it will have spent roughly $90 million in advertising, according to the ad- firm AdImpact. That includes more than $20 million since the March 3 primary election.

Paxton’s campaign and the single super PAC have combined to spend roughly $10.5 million on advertising, with roughly $6.1 million since that contest.

The ads have flooded voters.

“The commercials are leading me against Paxton, that he might be a little crooked,” said Gail Licea, 74, a retired registered nurse, who attended a Cornyn event before Trump’s endorsement. Then again, she said, “I’ve been led to believe that sometimes John Cornyn doesn’t back President Donald Trump, and that concerns me.”

The advertising has been so concentrated, it was unclear how much the late pivot by the groups would affect Tuesday’s outcome, said Wayne Hamilton, former executive director of the Texas Republican Party.

“There is so much noise out there right now,” said Hamilton, who is an adviser to Gov. Greg Abbott and is unaffiliated with either of the Senate candidates. “I don’t know how any one message is going to break through.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the risk of global spread remains low, but that the U.N. health agency was revising upward its assessment of the risk within Congo from its previous categorization of “high.”

The WHO chief noted that 82 cases have been confirmed in Congo, with seven confirmed deaths, though he said the outbreak is believed to be “much larger.” He said there are now almost 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths.

Supplies were being rushed to Ituri province in the northeastern corner of the country, where the illness has been spreading for weeks in areas were many people have been displaced by armed conflict.

Frontline medical staff have struggled with a lack of resources and, in some cases, pushback due to what has been characterized as misinformation or situations where medical policy has clashed with local customs such as burial rites.

Response clashes with local customs

On Thursday, an Ebola treatment center in Rwampara was set on fire by youths who were angered when they were blocked from retrieving the body of a friend who parently had died of Ebola, according to witnesses and police.

Bodies of Ebola victims can be highly contagious, and medical authorities are trying to control burials whenever possible.

Julienne Lusenge, president of Women’s Solidarity for Inclusive Peace and Development, a local aid group, said the population’s anger is mostly due to misinformation.

“We have lived through years and years of conflict and hardship so rumors spread easily,” she said.

She said some churches have told their large congregations that the outbreak is fake and that divine protection makes medical care unnecessary.

Aid is being flown in, but frontline staff lacks resources

The United Nations said Friday it released $60 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund to accelerate the response in Congo and in the region.

The U.S. has pledged $23 million in funding to bolster the response in Congo and Uganda, and said it would also fund the establishment of up to 50 Ebola treatment clinics in the affected regions.

But Ugandan authorities said Thursday on X they were not aware of any treatment center being set up by the U.S.

Lusenge said her group’s small hospital near the Ituri provincial cital of Bunia lacks basic protective equipment as health workers struggle to respond to the outbreak.

Patients showing symptoms are first examined at the hospital before being referred to a larger treatment center, exposing nurses and doctors to possible infection, she said.

“We have made requests to different partners, but we have not yet really received anything,” Lusenge said. “We only have hand sanitizer and a few masks for the nurses, but we need much more than that.”

The outbreak is bigger than official figures show, WHO says

Both the WHO and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe the outbreak is larger than the cases detected so far.

“I expect the number of cases to increase as surveillance becomes more and more rigorous,” Africa CDP Director-General Jean Kaseya said.

The region’s already-weak health infrastructure and surveillance cacity has been further weakened by international aid cuts, experts say.

Local leaders said an attack by militants linked to the Islamic State group killed at least 17 people on Tuesday in Alima, a village in Ituri.

“The outbreak can still be contained but the window for action is narrow,” Gabriela Arenas from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Friday. “What hpens in the coming days in homes, in communities and across borders will matter enormously.”

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Pronczuk reported from Dakar, Senegal. Keaten reported from Geneva. Associated Press writers Jean Yves Kamale in Kinshasa, Congo; Mark Banchereau and Wilson McMakin in Dakar, Senegal contributed to this report.

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