The fire may be out, but Boyle Heights is now dealing with massive amounts of rotting meat and a foul smell as the cleanup phase from a weeklong fire at a massive cold-storage warehouse begins.
Outside the Lineage warehouse Thursday morning, the smell of heavy smoke was already being replaced with that of spoiling food and filthy water. Thick foam from the building’s insulation floated by on streams that leaked from the hulking shell, which firefighters have been drenching for days since the fire erupted on the roof the afternoon of June 17.
Three dump trucks carried waste away, but firefighters said it would still be days before crews would be able to access the remains of the burned-out interior.
Wendy Ramirez, 45, and her father-in-law, Jaime Ramirez, 69, fled the area when they could no longer bear the heavy smoke last week. They returned Thursday to check on their house and were greeted by the stench.
“Now you can smell the rotting food,” Wendy Ramirez said. Her two children have asthma, and she stayed with relatives during the fire.
In the first days after the fire, officials raised concerns that the unrefrigerated food might become so rancid as to create a biohazard risk. But the temperature was eventually stabilized and the threat eliminated.
But lesser risks related to the growing stench persist.
Jaime Ramirez, who went to his daughter’s house in West Covina, brought a mask in case fire remained, but said he instead needed it for the smell.
He and other neighbors worried the rancid food might draw rats and pose a further hazard to residents like him, who have not yet found it safe to come back home. The third day of the fire, he woke up with a runny nose, sore throat and chapped lips, he said.
The area surrounding the warehouse is home to at least 31,700 workers, roughly 8 in 10 of whom are Latino, according to a data analysis by researchers at UCLA. Nearly half of them earn less than Los Angeles County’s very-low-income threshold and more than half may have limited access to paid leave, health coverage or the ability to work remotely, the analysis found.
That means many couldn’t simply stay home or flee to avoid smoke exposure, said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, research director at the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute.
The results of the analysis weren’t a surprise, as Boyle Heights has a long history of being selected for potentially harmful infrastructure such as warehouses and factories, and residents often have few resources to mitigate the associated long-term health implications, Bustamante said.
“But I think that putting some numbers into these assumptions is important,” he said, “so that we can have an expectation of who are the most affected and we can have an idea of what type of policies need to be implemented to give relief to these populations.”
An Eastside community organizer with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, mark! Lopez, called the neighborhood “ground zero for environmental racism in Los Angeles,” pointing to a recent oil spill, the soil-contaminating legacy of the shuttered Exide battery recycling plant and the preponderance of rail yards and freeways.
“On any given day the air is unhealthy to breathe and so of course when you bring a disaster into it, it only exacerbates the existing issues,” he said.
Lopez believes that statements by public officials have minimized the potential health impacts of the heavy smoke, which at times overwhelmed areas from central L.A. to the San Gabriel Valley with fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot.
When inhaled, these microscopic particles can enter the lungs and bloodstream, potentially causing swelling and inflammation. Prolonged or acute exposure to smoke has been known to trigger heart attacks, strokes and other serious respiratory illnesses.
As of 10 a.m. Thursday, South Coast Air Quality Management District monitors and low-cost sensors near the warehouse weren’t detecting elevated levels of particulate pollution from the fire, regulators said.
But community members and advocates remain concerned about the potential of contaminated homes and long-term, possibly life-changing health effects, Lopez said. “The true impacts aren’t what we all saw in the sky,” he said. “It’s what we’re going to see at our doctors’ visits in the years to come.”
On Thursday, firefighters continued to shoot water into the building, where tall metal stacks of food could be seen through the remains of a wall that was knocked down so crews could fight the flames inside.
The fire was no longer at risk of growing, but it will still be a couple of days before it stops smoldering, said Capt. Anthony Tubbs with the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Fire officials expect to hand the building back to the tenant, Lineage, and the owner of the building on Friday, Fire Chief Jaime E. Moore said.
A department spokesperson said a smaller number of firefighters would remain on scene to monitor for hot spots and possibly continue shooting water and debris as a precaution.
The owner and lessee will bear the responsibility of clearing the debris and alleviating some of the effects of the fire and its aftermath, Moore said, including looking for ways to mitigate debris flowing out of the warehouse, and the smell emitted by the rotting food.
In addition to the burned contents of the warehouse, millions of pounds of food are also being stored in a portion of the building that was untouched by the fire.
Public health officials will assist with the cleanup and recovery by responding to community health concerns, including vermin complaints, and helping to ensure the spoiled food is properly removed and disposed of, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a statement.
Times staff writer Tony Briscoe contributed to this report.
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