Los Angeles fire at frozen-food warehouse keeps spewing smoke after six days

Smoke from a 500,000-square-foot cold food storage facility in Boyle Heights kept drifting across Los Angeles six days after flames were first reported on its roof. The blaze, at a site on South Los Palos Street, had triggered shelter-in-place orders, a local emergency from Mayor Karen Bass and a state of emergency from Gov. Gavin Newsom. By Monday, June 22, the fire was still sending smoke into surrounding neighborhoods and beyond.

The smoke plume reached far beyond Boyle Heights, affecting central Los Angeles County, the San Gabriel Valley, the East San Fernando Valley and the Northwest San Bernardino Valley. The South Coast Air Quality Management District said particle pollution reached very unhealthy levels in multiple parts of the region. Residents in the affected areas were told to stay indoors, keep windows and doors closed, and use air purifiers or air conditioning if possible.

Newsom declared the state of emergency on Saturday, June 20, and his office said California was preparing 5.5 million N95 masks, air purifiers, bottled water and other emergency supplies. The state also moved to support air-quality monitoring and emergency operations as the smoke continued to blanket parts of the region.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, said the community had endured days of smoke, shelter-in-place orders and disruptions to daily life. She called for urgent emergency response, air monitoring, hazardous-debris removal, environmental remediation and public-health protections. The prolonged burn turned the warehouse fire into more than a single-site industrial incident; it became a regional public-health problem affecting thousands of people downwind.

The fire at the Lineage Logistics cold storage facility has underscored how quickly a warehouse blaze can ripple through a dense urban corridor. With smoke still rising days after the first alarm at about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, officials were still confronting a blaze that had not only damaged a major food-storage site but also forced neighborhoods to live under emergency conditions for nearly a week. The crisis was not over.