‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food | Los Angeles
Something’s rotten around Boyle Heights.
For a week, thick black smoke filled the air as a large warehouse burned near downtown Los Angeles, prompting emergency declarations and evacuation orders in the immediate area as air quality worsened. Firefighters finally put out the flames on Wednesday, but half of the 85 million lbs of frozen food in the warehouse was lost in the fire; Approximately 40 million lbs of food is left to rot.
Residents of the area, who say they have been experiencing health problems since the fire started last week, now say their new concern is the pervasive, putrid smell of rotting meat, vegetables and frozen produce.
Kelvin Vasquez lives a block away from the 500,000-square-foot insulated warehouse and is so close he said he watched the fire burn from inside his home. He has been experiencing a sore throat, headache, constant dizziness and nausea since the emergency began on June 17.
He said it’s not Vasquez’s health issues that worry him right now. This is what happens to tens of millions of pounds of food that sits on the side, unrefrigerated, shrouded in smoke, for more than a week. And the smell is unbearable.
“It’s almost like a corpse,” Vasquez said. “Like a dead animal.”
In the aftermath of the fire, millions of gallons of water used to fight the flames had created a steady stream contaminated with debris, burnt insulation foam and previously frozen food items.
With the fire extinguished, clean-up operations are now the responsibility of the private property owner and the cold storage company Lineage Logistics, which rents the space. Lineage said expression It had hired a cleaning company to run operations on Friday.
Neither Lineage nor the cleaning company responded to questions about how long it would take for the cleanup to air. Los Angeles sanitation officials told the Guardian that the city was unaware of any plans for how and where to dispose of spoiled food.
Who is responsible for the fire?
Two companies are leasing space in the massive warehouse: Lineage, which has operations inside, and clean energy company Altus Power, which operates more than 300,000 square feet of solar panels on the warehouse roof.
Altus Power had previously sold electricity produced by solar panels at this Boyle Heights location to the Los Angeles water and power department through a “feed-in tariff” program. But a LADWP spokesperson told the Guardian that the city will stop buying energy from the property in 2024.
In company statements published on its website, Lineage blamed Altus Power for the fire and said it believed the fire broke out while workers were performing tests on the solar panel on the roof on the day of the fire.
Altus Power said in a statement that the cause of the fire “has not yet been determined.”
This isn’t the first time one of Lineage’s warehouses or Altus Power’s solar panels has caught fire.
Solar panels at the same Boyle Heights warehouse two years ago caught in fire. Fire crews quickly extinguished the flames before they spread, but the cause could not be determined.
Vasquez, who has lived next to the warehouse for two decades, said he felt like the property was a “ticking time bomb” after the 2024 fire.
Earlier that year, the Lineage warehouse in Finley, Washington, also caught fire. The fire raged for 60 days, and as in Los Angeles, residents complained of significant health problems related to the incident. Lineage is still handling civil litigation related to the Finley fire.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised at a news conference Thursday to “hold those responsible fully accountable.”
He also said he plans to sign an executive order mobilizing more resources to help clean up frozen food.
