alt Hacker News> The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,
The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?
Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.
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It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).
In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)
In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.
MMA is not very toxic. It has the same LD50 as vitamin C. Table salt and baking soda are twice as toxic as MMA, for example.
Additionally it is almost certainly not in vapor form at 100 degrees. In sunlight it will also polymerize to a solid pretty quickly.
As such you'd practically have to drink it inside to hit the ld50.
The explosion would be much worse than a release of liquid or vapor based MMA during the day, and here it almost certainly solidified at this point
> insanely toxic
Some quick searching suggests that it’s toxic but not even close to “insanely toxic”. And it’s not persistent in the environment.
If you want a genuinely nasty chemical, check out methyl isocyanate, which is some two orders of magnitude more acutely toxic.
Opened a small round bottom flask of this when I worked in the lab. Closed it immediately when I felt burning in my eyes as did others around me.
It’s toxic but not insanely toxic. Isocyanates, phosgene, gaseous cyanides - now those are insanely toxic
On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.
I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.
It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).
So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.