Eighty-five million pounds of frozen food have been burning inside a 500,000-square-foot cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights since June 17. The smoke is so thick it's visible from Dodger Stadium. Residents on two streets near the Lineage facility on South Los Palos Street were evacuated. An ammonia line was compromised.
Mayor Karen Bass was in Chicago.
Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jamie Moore described the structure as "like a giant cooler" — corrugated steel walls packed with dense foam insulation that made the blaze almost impossible to suppress, even with helicopter water drops from above. The fire erupted five days ago. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency four days after it started, which in Sacramento apparently qualifies as swift action.
Reporter Ben Bolch, covering a game at Dodger Stadium, wrote that "the smoke from the nearby Boyle Heights warehouse fire has enshrouded Dodger Stadium in an acrid, nasty haze." Roughly 70 people were evacuated from streets near the 101 Freeway, bounded by Washington Boulevard, Soto Street, and Indiana Street. Families in East LA have been breathing toxic air since last Tuesday.
Former California State Senator Gloria Romero asked what everyone was thinking: "So once again, she was out partying and failed to act quickly when East LA caught fire?" The "once again" refers to January's Palisades wildfire disaster, when Bass was reportedly sipping cocktails in Ghana while her city burned. Former mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt put it more bluntly: "Karen was sipping cocktails in Chicago when the Boyle Heights Fire erupted, just as she was sipping cocktails in Ghana."
Former Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, now running for State Senate, directed her frustration at Bass directly: "It is a disgrace that you have not done more to help East LA families who are inhaling toxic smoke."
The city's defense will be that a warehouse fire is different from a wildfire, that cold storage facilities are uniquely difficult structures, that the ammonia line was eventually secured. All true. None of it explains why the mayor wasn't in the city, why the governor waited four days to act, or why the same Lineage facility had a solar panel fire in August 2024 without anyone flagging it as a high-risk structure.
This is the same city that just survived the most destructive wildfire season in its history. The same leadership that promised reforms. The same governor who shows up for press conferences after the cameras are already rolling. Bass and Newsom aren't incompetent in the way that suggests they'd improve with better staff or more resources. They're absent in a way that suggests they don't believe the job requires their presence.
Eighty-five million pounds of food burning for five days, toxic smoke drifting across a major American city, and the people in charge had to be publicly shamed into responding. According to LifeZette, the pattern is now so established that critics don't even bother with outrage — they just note the location of the cocktails.
When your city is on fire and your constituents have to Google where you are, the emergency declaration isn't the crisis. The leadership is.
