Crews with the Los Angeles Fire Department have been grinding away for days at a stubborn blaze inside a massive cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights, and the fight is far from over.
The fire broke out shortly after 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 19, at a roughly 491,000-square-foot facility on South Los Palos Street operated by Lineage Logistics, according to FOX 11 Los Angeles and CBS Los Angeles. The building is essentially one enormous freezer — corrugated steel walls packed with dense foam insulation. "The best way to describe this is like a giant cooler," LAFD Chief Jaime Moore told reporters.
That construction is exactly what has made the job so brutal for firefighters. The flames burned deep beneath structural debris and a rooftop solar array, in spaces hose streams can't easily reach. So crews turned to tactics almost never seen on a structure fire: continuous water drops from helicopters alongside towering ground-level ladder pipes. The fire even re-ignited Friday evening after a wind shift, and by the weekend crews were warning that the building's structural integrity itself had become a concern, KTLA reported.
Through it all, there is one piece of good news worth honoring: no injuries have been reported, not among the firefighters and not among civilians. That is no small thing given the size of this fire and the hazards inside.
A "Biohazard Emergency"
And those hazards are serious. With the power and refrigeration knocked out, an estimated 85 million pounds of food — chicken, beef, pork, fish, bread and wheat products — has been left to rot. "What we're dealing with now is 85 million pounds of food that's about to go bad and to spoil," Chief Moore said, calling the situation a "biohazard emergency."
The danger isn't limited to spoiling meat. Crews have been working to pull ammonia from the facility's refrigeration tanks and haul it off-site, and to retrieve lithium-ion forklift batteries to cut down the fire risk, LAist reported. Monitoring teams have also detected trace levels of bromine and chlorine.
The smoke has become a public-health headache across a wide swath of Southern California. Air-quality officials extended a Particle Pollution Advisory after the Friday flare-up, with PM2.5 readings climbing into "unhealthy" and "very unhealthy" territory across central Los Angeles County, the San Gabriel Valley, the East San Fernando Valley and the northwest San Bernardino Valley. Shelter-in-place orders were issued and lifted twice; no broad evacuation has been ordered. The city opened respite centers, handing out N95 masks, air filters and bottled water.
Local and State Emergencies
Mayor Karen Bass declared a local emergency, telling residents the chief worry now is "biohazard smoke" rather than spreading flames. Gov. Gavin Newsom followed with a state of emergency, authorizing N95 masks, air purifiers and additional air-monitoring gear. "California is mobilizing to support Los Angeles as firefighters continue their work," Newsom said.
As for what started it: Lineage Logistics says the fire began while contractors hired by the third-party owner of the rooftop solar array were testing the panels. Arson investigators are on scene as a matter of routine, and the cause remains under investigation.
For now, the men and women of the LAFD remain on the line, doing the dangerous, exhausting work of putting this one out.
