‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food

Burned storage racks and debris are visible as firefighters continue to battle the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Photograph: Weston Hancock/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

Something is rotten in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

For a week, thick black smoke filled the air while a massive warehouse burned near downtown Los Angeles, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation orders in the immediate area as air quality worsened. Firefighters finally extinguished the flames on Wednesday, but not before half the warehouse’s 85m pounds of frozen food were lost in the fire – leaving roughly 40m lb of food to rot.