‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food

Something is rotten in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights.For a week, thick black smoke filled the air while a massive warehouse burned near downtown Los Angeles, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation orders in the immediate area as air quality worsened. Firefighters finally extinguished the flames on Wednesday, but not before half the warehouse’s 85m lbs of frozen food were lost in the fire – leaving roughly 40m lbs of food to rot.Residents, who say they have experienced health issues since the fire began last week, now say their new concern is the pervasive, putrid smell of rotting meat, vegetables and frozen products.Kelvin Vasquez lives one block from the 500,000 sq ft insulated warehouse, so close he said he watched the fire burn from inside his home. Since the start of the emergency on 17 June, he has suffered from a sore throat, headache, persistent dizziness and nausea.Vasquez’s health issues aren’t what worries him now, he said. It’s what will become of the tens of millions of pounds of food next door that has sat unrefrigerated, shrouded in smoke, for over a week. And the smell is unbearable.“It’s pretty much something like a dead body,” Vasquez said. “Like a dead animal.”In the aftermath of the fire, the millions of gallons of water used to fight the flames had created a steady stream polluted with debris, burnt insulation foam and bags of once-frozen food items.A package of frozen tilapia fillets lies amid fire debris in Boyle Heights. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press Wire/ShutterstockWith the fire extinguished, cleanup operations are now the responsibility of the private property’s owner and Lineage Logistics, a cold-storage company that leases the space. Lineage said in a statement on Friday it had hired a cleanup firm to handle operations.Neither Lineage nor its cleanup firm responded to inquiries about how long the cleanup would take in time for publication. Los Angeles health services officials told the Guardian that the city was unaware of any plans for how or where the spoiled food would be disposed of.Workers with Signal, a cleanup contractor, clean the waste and debris pouring into the streets with the water from the fire hoses. Photograph: Amy Katz/Zuma Press Wire/ShutterstockWho’s to blame for the fire?Two companies lease space at the massive warehouse: Lineage, whose operations are inside, and Altus Power, a clean energy company that operates more than 300,000 sq ft of solar panels on the warehouse rooftop.Altus Power previously sold the electricity produced by the solar panels at this Boyle Heights location to the Los Angeles department of water and power through a “feed-in-tariff” program. But the city stopped purchasing energy from the property in 2024, a spokesperson for LADWP told the Guardian.Lineage has blamed Altus Power for the fire in company statements posted to its website, saying it believed the fire began while workers conducted tests on the rooftop solar array the day the fire broke out.Altus Power said in a statement that a cause of the fire “has yet to be determined”.It isn’t the first time that either one of Lineage’s warehouses or Altus Power’s solar panels have gone up in flames.Two years ago, solar panels at the same Boyle Heights warehouse caught on fire. Firefighters quickly extinguished the flames before they spread, but a cause was never determined.Vasquez, who has lived next to the warehouse for two decades, said he felt the property was a “ticking bomb” after that 2024 fire.Earlier that same year, a Lineage warehouse in Finley, Washington also caught on fire. That blaze burned for 60 days and local residents, like in Los Angeles, also complained of significant health issues related to the incident. Lineage is still engaged in civil lawsuits related to the Finley fire.In a Thursday press conference, Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, vowed to “hold those responsible fully accountable”.She also said she plans to sign an executive order mobilizing more resources to help with cleaning up the frozen food.