The Great Group Chat Meltdown of 2026

This is a story without a satisfying conclusion. A little over a week ago, on the night before our 13 year-old’s season-ending regional championship volleyball tournament, a chemical tank in Garden Grove, south of LA, was threatening to explode. Officials were “buying time” against a potential blast that could produce a “toxic cloud” after the tank, containing a flammable, volatile chemical malfunctioned. This hazmat crisis led to evacuating some 40,000 people near a potential blast radius.

The championship tournament was downwind from this plant. A few parents were already saying they wouldn’t bring their child near that area, less afraid of an explosion than of a rushed evacuation out of a Disneyland area parking lot. (There is terror, and then there is hell, and evacuating Anaheim is probably the latter.)

The rest of us were going to play by ear and see if the crisis resolved overnight. One dad, who I will call Dave, quipped on the always-active parent group chat, “I have a chemical engineering degree, nothing to worry about.” Another parent, a chemist at Raytheon, shared some science I can’t understand:

At 5am on Saturday morning, the entire volleyball club, which was fielding at least a dozen teams in that weekend tournament, decided to drop out of Saturday play entirely — forfeiting all its teams matches to keep players safely at home. “We believe the risk/reward is too high still and we don’t want to put any of our athletes at risk,” the 5am message read.

But the tournament organizers did not cancel the event, and many, many other clubs headed down there to play despite the risks. That meant our club’s teams would lose any chance of glory, and every team in said club dropped in rankings (though theoretically had we played and lost all three matches on Saturday, we would have just maintained status quo).

Most of us parents were bummed for the girls but thought, YAAASSS we have our Saturday back! A bonus day! I said MOST of us parents, because one dad, the aforementioned Dave, blew his stack like that chemical tank never could.