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

Burned storage racks and debris are visible as firefighters continue to battle the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Photograph: Weston Hancock/Sopa Images/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Burned storage racks and debris are visible as firefighters continue to battle the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Photograph: Weston Hancock/Sopa Images/Shutterstock ‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food Cleanup under way after week-long fire at a Boyle Heights facility spoiled tens of millions of pounds of frozen 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. A fire in LA has been burning for days. What’s taking so long to put it out? Read more 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. View image in fullscreen A package of frozen tilapia fillets lies amid fire debris in Boyle Heights. Photograph: Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock With 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. View image in fullscreen Workers with Signal, a cleanup contractor, clean the waste and debris pouring into the streets with the water from the fire hoses. Photograph: