Liz Zamora could hardly make it out of her apartment on 1st Street last week, between all the people packed around a giant screen playing the Mexico vs. South Korea World Cup match in the middle of the street, and others spilling out of the bars and restaurants between Vicente Fernandez and State Street in Boyle Heights.
This was on the second day of the neighborhood’s eight-day fire at the Lineage warehouse just a couple of miles away.
Almost a week later, when Mexico faced off and eventually beat the Czech Republic’s national soccer team, 1st Street was practically empty, other than one small outdoor watch party. Zamora could now not only exit her apartment, but could now comfortably take her dog for a walk. But when she stepped outside this time, she made sure to wear a KN95 mask.
“The air quality keeps making me cough. I keep getting headaches ever since the fire started,” Zamora says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but people are scared.”
As mutual aid groups run around the city passing out masks, the city, state, and federal governments insist that no harmful pollutants, other than the smoke from the fire itself, have been detected. Late this past Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Fire Department declared the fire “knocked down,” meaning no active flames remained.
But Boyle Heights residents like Zamora are wary. Across the massive (and massively polluting) commercial freight train yards from the Lineage warehouse is the site of the shuttered Exide battery recycling plant, which emitted neurotoxic metal dust over decades across nearby neighborhoods.
“They don’t live here,” Zamora says about the L.A. city government. “They don’t seem to care.”
As local candidates begin to gear up for the November general election, many of them promising to fight for Angelenos, I reached out to the current city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. I wanted to see if she planned to investigate and file charges against Lineage Logistics, or Altus Power, the owner of the solar panel arrays on the roof of the warehouse – which Lineage claims to be the epicenter of the fire – or any of the other companies or subcontractors involved in the fire.
Feldstein Soto’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
“Well, I think that speaks volumes,” says city attorney candidate Marissa Roy. “We need to make sure that we hold the responsible corporations accountable to the community. And then we need to win the recovery that can be reinvested in the community. That is all what the city attorney's office can do, but generally, the reason that we don't see action is because of a lack of political will.”
If she’s elected in November, Roy said she would start an investigation of the company (or companies) responsible for the fires on her first day in office, using unfair competition law.
“And what these lawsuits do is they not only hold accountable the corporations to make sure that they're following safety standards, but they win recovery that we then reinvest in the community that has been harmed. We reinvest it for when you have environmental harms and health harms. We reinvest it in greening projects, in remediation, in health support, in reimbursing people for what they've had to expend,” Roy says.
At the time of publication, Feldstein Soto’s office has not announced any investigation of the perpetrators of the fire.
Roy compared a future (as-yet-hypothetical) investigation of the fire to a lawsuit she mounted when she worked for the L.A. City Attorney’s Office in 2018 against two car washes that paid their mostly undocumented workers as little as $4.50 an hour, she said.
In a settlement with the companies, car wash workers got between $10,00 and $40,000 each, she added.
“The reality is, it's not fair to expect the people who have been harmed by these corporations to then have to shoulder the burden of advocating for their rights all by themselves,” Roy says. “Not against these corporate Goliaths. That's the value of the city attorney's office is we can stand up to those corporations.”
The campaign of John McKinney, the police union-backed candidate running in the city attorney election against Roy, declined to comment as to whether he would pursue litigation against the perpetrators of the fire.
“They don’t want to have to answer tough questions,” says Elvis Perez, the owner of Supernova Thrift on 1st Street, when I told him the current city attorney and one of the candidates for the office hadn’t commented on this story.
Perez, a resident of Boyle Heights, says he sent his family to Las Vegas for the week so they didn’t have to be exposed to the smoke from the fire. He debated closing his shop until the fire was out, but he can’t afford to not be open for business.
A little table next to the cash register displays the many KN95 masks that he’s reached out to mutual aid groups like Mask Bloc LA and Centro CSO to help distribute at his store.
“Once again, we are taking care of ourselves,” Perez says.
The fire, and the repeated use of the phrase “Boyle Heights fire” to describe it, has caused a noticeable dip in business, Perez says.
“It should be called the Lineage Logistics fire,” he says. “They should definitely be held accountable,” he added.
A spokesperson for Lineage declined to comment on the potential of future litigation against the company.
“We want to be transparent with the community about what is stored in this building. This building is used to store food—meat, bread and other foods you would find at a grocery store—not hazardous materials,” the spokesperson wrote in an email sent to L.A. TACO. “We’re providing air purifiers and masks to the community, and we are going to keep that going as long as they are needed. We also brought in food trucks to provide almost 1,000 meals to residents of Boyle Heights and firefighters. In addition, we have donated $2 million dollars to the California Community Impact Fund that is being used to deliver immediate support to Boyle Heights residents.”
The company’s team “quickly removed ammonia from the site, with no concentrations of ammonia being detected in the air at any time since the fire began,” the spokesperson added.
