The company that owns the vast cold storage warehouse scorched in a June blaze that plagued neighbors in Boyle Heights with smoke and stink said it doesn’t deserve the pummeling it got for how it contained the catastrophe. The company, Lineage Logistics, told The Times it didn’t cause the fire and went above and beyond to put it out and speed the cleanup of truckloads of rotting food that attracted rats and flies. Lineage has been a pariah in the community, with residents and Los Angeles officials speaking out after the company missed the city’s 45-day deadline to remove the waste.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District received more than 4,900 odor complaints, “reporting persistent rotten, sour and garbage-like odors,” and issued the company 38 violation notices for public nuisance. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health has opened inspections with both Lineage and Pearce related to the fire, the agency confirmed soon after the blaze. The Los Angeles Fire Department is investigating the cause of the fire.
Some residents called for the company to leave. Mayor Karen Bass has said the company had “run out its welcome.” Lineage filed a lawsuit last week, saying the company that operated a solar array on the building’s roof is to blame for the fire. Fixing the mess has been the company’s top priority since the fire started June 17, Lineage Chief Executive Greg Lehmkuhl told the Los Angeles Times in an exclusive interview.
The 500,000-square-foot Los Angeles warehouse, known within the company as Big Bear, held more than 89 million pounds of frozen food. The company said it spent more than $150 million fighting the fire and cleaning up the aftermath. Company leaders worked with Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore and paid for firefighter assistance.
We were doing anything we could, at frankly any expense, to try to minimize the impact of this fire on the community.” When the fire was out, Lineage faced an unprecedented challenge: getting rid of mountains of rotting meat, seafood, bread and other food. Getting the rotting food off racks towering six stories high required hundreds of workers in protective suits to dislodge the moldering food. Crews used forklifts to push the waste outside, where it was loaded into sealed trailers for transport to special dump sites in several states.
About 400 workers per day logged 210,000 hours and still couldn’t meet the Aug. 14 cleanup deadline. Lineage worked with neighbors affected by the blaze, interacting with almost all of the hundreds of directly impacted households, he said. In the lawsuit, Lineage said that Altus Power, which operated a network of solar panels on the warehouse roof as a tenant, was responsible for the fire.
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