A leaking chemical tank at GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove put thousands of Orange County residents under evacuation orders Friday as officials warned the equipment was at risk of failure or explosion. By Friday afternoon, the orders had widened to cover tens of thousands of people in six cities: Garden Grove, Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster.

Families who had already left their homes gathered late Friday at the Cypress Community Center, while another evacuation center was set up at the Garden Grove Sports and Recreation Center on Deodara Drive. Officials had not said how long the evacuations would last, leaving residents to decide whether to wait in shelters, stay with relatives or try to find rooms in a market that had turned sharply more expensive for Memorial Day Weekend.

For Jude Thomas, the order had already become a second uprooting in 24 hours. He and his family were first evacuated Thursday afternoon when firefighters responded to the plant after a report of a problem with the tanks. They were briefly allowed back into their apartment Thursday evening, then told to leave again early Friday. Thomas has lived less than a mile from GKN Aerospace for about six years, and he said the disruption would not end with the evacuation itself. “Everything will change, for sure, once this is done,” he said. “We will think about moving out from there.”

Other residents were still trying to make sense of the sudden expansion. Miguel Loo, who lives about two or three miles from the leaking chemical plant, said he got home at about 3 a.m. Friday morning with headaches. Around noon Friday, while shopping in Irvine, he said his family received notice to evacuate and began pulling together medication, supplies for their French bulldog, Wednesday, important documents and other essentials. “So we’re trying to evacuate, and I’m getting dizzy with a headache in the middle of it,” he said.

Loo said the scramble was made harder by the cost of finding a place to sleep. He said hotel rooms that normally go for 60 or 70 bucks were running about $200 to $400 for the holiday weekend, a price jump that could push some families toward shelters even if they would rather have privacy. “Pretty much everything I make this weekend is going to go to that,” he said.

That strain was still visible at 7:30 p.m. Friday, when John Montanchez said it was unclear whether overnight lodging would be available at the evacuation center. The uncertainty left residents waiting for a signal that the danger had passed and that their neighborhoods could be reopened.

The scene in Orange County is the kind of emergency that starts with one tank and ends up reshaping a whole weekend. What began as a response at GKN Aerospace spread into a broad evacuation across six cities, and the biggest unanswered question by Friday night was not why people had been moved — it was how long they would be out, and what it would cost them to stay away.