Along Union Pacific Avenue in Boyle Heights, rat traps sit about every 10 feet along the sidewalk, with the aim of catching hungry rodents drawn to the burned-out warehouse holding millions of pounds of rotting meat.
But Lisett Navarrete, a 34-year-old resident, has little faith that they’ll do the job.
“It’s not like little house rats. They’re giant rats,” she says. “They don’t fit there.”
Since the Lineage cold-storage warehouse burned last month, the company has been trying to remove tons of rotting meat.
But with temperatures spiking, the crisis over smoke from the fire has given way to a second crisis over putrid smells, insects, rodents and growing concerns over sanitation.
To hear neighbors tell it, the deodorizers, misters and other efforts to mitigate the issues aren’t enough. There are flies, rats and, if the wind shifts every so slightly, a waft of thick, nauseating air from the warehouse.
“We can’t run away from it, it’s all around us,” Navarrete said. “It smells so bad, you don’t even want to have breakfast.”
There are also challenges for local businesses, which say customers are staying away because the stench is so sickening.
Air regulators say they have received nearly 1,000 complaints about smells from the facility. And no one is sure how long it is going to take to remove all the meat.
On Tuesday, residents from East L.A. went to the county Board of Supervisors meeting to air their grievances about how things are going at the warehouse and called for the county to issue an evacuation order for the area so the government could provide them assistance.
“No one is taking responsibility for it,” said Alma Marquez, an organizer with the local group Protect L.A. Now, which has been communicating with neighborhood residents about conditions around the warehouse.
Last week, Mayor Karen Bass announced Airbnb had committed to $1 million in emergency housing for city and county residents in the immediate area surrounding the warehouse. The company, according to a statement from Bass’ office, has provided more than 1,000 nights of free emergency housing.
But Marquez said an evacuation order would open up other resources for more residents, including home insurance clauses for homeowners that provides assistance. Staying, she said, is not just a nuisance but also unhealthy.
Supt. Hilda Solis, in a statement, said she understood the frustration and concerns of residents, including those calling for a mandatory evacuation.
But Solis said the decision for a mandatory evacuations rests with the incident command structure led by the city because the warehouse is located in city limits.
Solis said she had directed the Department of Public Health to deploy teams to canvass the neighborhood. During those efforts, Solis said in the statement, residents shared they wanted odors addressed and the site cleaned, but the majority of residents wanted to stay in their homes.
“A mandatory evacuation order would impact many residents who have expressed that they do not want to leave their homes, as well as any businesses in the area,” she said in the statement.
Since the fire, Southern California’s Air Quality Management District has slapped Lineage with multiple violations tied to the warehouse.
The company on Tuesday provided its latest action plan to L.A. city officials to mitigate the smell, but even some elected officials are skeptical.
“Lineage met with regulators and offered the same explanations the community has already heard,” said Councilmember Ysabel Jurado in a statement. “Boyle Heights residents should not have to submit to hundreds more complaints before someone acts. … They should not be expected to tolerate conditions that would never be accepted in wealthier communities.”
According to Lineage officials, 521 truckloads of waste — more than 1,506 tons of waste — have already been removed from the warehouse, which housed about 85 million pounds of food, including Kirkland brand meat that fills Costco freezers.
The company said earlier it would abide by an order from Mayor Bass to remove the waste within 45 days and has weeks to go.
A spokesperson for the company said in a statement Wednesday that Lineage was in discussions with the AQMD, and that it had already implemented, or was in the process of putting into place, “all reasonable and effective mitigation efforts throughout the cleanup process.”
That includes surrounding the damaged building with odor-control sprayers, applying odor neutralizer to the waste several times a day, wrapping the building to contain the odor, and placing carbon filters in the building to mitigate emissions. Food waste, the company said in the statement, is being transported in sealed containers, loaded trucks are sealed, and workers wash runoff and loading areas daily.
“Lineage is committed to the fastest and safest cleanup possible, including aggressive efforts to reduce odors and monitor air quality throughout the process,” said Alex Rodriguez, vice president of operations at Lineage, in a statement to The Times. “We are committed to working closely with South Coast AQMD to address concerns and mitigate the impact of the warehouse fire on the surrounding community.”
When the warehouse is cleared, 70-year-old Sabino Soto hopes to see things go back to normal. The Boyle Heights resident said he hadn’t been able to keep his cat, Push Push, inside for weeks. It, along with about half a dozen other felines, are constantly on the hunt, Soto said.
“I call them the cat patrol,” he said.
Martin Ramirez, 49, who manages a nearby body shop, said a rat sneaked into his shop just days after the fire was knocked down. For three weeks now, it’s been hiding somewhere in his office.
“This big,” Ramirez said, putting his hands about a foot apart from each other. “We haven’t been able to get it out. We can’t put poison out because we have a little dog. So we have put some glue traps or something.”
Though he’s gotten used to the smell, he said he was losing about $10,000 a week in business because clients refused to make the trip to his shop after learning they’re next to the Lineage warehouse.
“They say, ‘Well, then maybe we’ll wait,’” he said. “A client came and she nearly vomited.”
There are also flies — big blue and green flies with large, bright red heads — that residents are constantly swatting at outside their doors and windows. Many have set up traps outside their homes, hanging sticky tape from trees and fences to trap the flies and reduce the size of the swarms.
But soon, the traps are filled and the flies remain.
Two traps that Soto set up outside his home — vertical, clear cylinders reminiscent of a hummingbird feeder — were filled with dead flies within days, he said.
Along some streets, flies gather near fruit-bearing trees or on parked cars, making it difficult to pass through without swatting at dozens of them in the air. Residents have to sweep away the dead ones on the ground day after day.
But it’s not just the buzzing that’s annoying residents in this working-class neighborhood — there are health concerns.
Many of them keep their windows tightly shut, fearful that one of the flies should land on their lunch or buzz around a refreshing drink
What if that fly, they wonder, has just been in the warehouse?
“We can’t even eat food,” Ramirez said. “Imagine that a fly lands on it. We don’t know what that fly is going to be carrying.”
These days, Ramirez and his workers drive about a mile away to a restaurant for their lunch break to escape the smell and flies. When they can’t, they close the door to a small, stuffy office to eat their lunch — the same office where the rat has been hiding for three weeks.
Bryan Regis, 26, manager at Xclusive Grills, about a block from the warehouse, said workers at his shop had set up a small break room and blasted a large fan their way to keep flies away from their food.
On Monday, Regis said, he briefly walked away from his hamburger when a worker called out to him. When he walked back, a fly was sitting atop it.
He tossed it out.
“It just ruined my day,” he said.
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