Gillian Mohney

SFGate, San Francisco

(TNS)

Jun. 23—Warehouse company Lineage, a giant in the cold storage space, has been at the center of controversy this week as its massive facility in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights continues to burn, sending plumes of toxic smoke into the Southern California sky. As city officials and company leaders begin to deal with the fallout of the ongoing fire, which has stretched for seven days, some, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, are beginning to ask questions about the sheer volume of warehouse space tucked into vulnerable communities across California.

"It's interesting that these locations are only in particular communities, and we need to now take a look at that because we don't want environmental hazards or risk concentrated in particular Black and brown communities," Bass told reporters in a press conference this week.

Lineage operates the 500,000-square-foot warehouse in Los Angeles, where a fire has burned for seven days, and has dozens of facilities across California, including two cold storage buildings in the Bay Area. The company currently maintains 40 facilities in California, including a warehouse in Oakland and a San Leandro facility that can "store, handle and move temperature-sensitive products."

The amount of warehouse space dedicated to cold storage has been on the rise in recent years as more people turn to online grocery shopping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that California had the most cold storage area among U.S. states, with 400 million cubic feet in 2025. That was up from 2023, when the state had 370 million cubic feet of cold storage.

Experts say these types of cold storage warehouse buildings can become extremely dangerous if an uncontrolled fire breaks out, similar to the one at the Lineage-operated warehouse in the historic Boyle Heights neighborhood. In 2024, a similarly sized facility in Washington run by Lineage, then Lineage Logistics, burned for 60 days before finally being put out, according to news reports.

Anthony Tubbs, a captain and public information officer with the Los Angeles Fire Department, called the Boyle Heights fire a "very complex incident, unlike any other" and said the warehouse contains 50- to 60-foot high racks carrying an estimated 85 million pounds of food. Tubbs said that at the outset of the fire, about 150 firefighting personnel responded to the scene and remained on-site 24 hours a day.

Despite the fire starting last week, an air quality alert for the area stretched into Tuesday as firefighters continued to battle the blaze.

Tubbs told SFGATE that fire officials removed some walls of the building to better access the fire. Officials have also used drones and heavy-duty water hoses affixed to trucks to reach the flames without sending in firefighters.

Michael Gollner, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, said the reason these fires can be so hard to contain has to do with the structure of the facility itself and what it contains. Gollner said the insulated walls mean firefighters can't easily gain access to the blaze. Additionally, the insulation can be flammable, and coolants used to keep the interior cool can be toxic.

"The scale of these facilities is challenging," Gollner said. "... Once you have a fire deep-seated inside, it's really unsafe to go in there, unless there's a life safety concern." Lineage said the facility stored food and grocery store items, which Gollner said can mean a lot of flammable packaging.

"All of your frozen foods are in cardboard, or they're in plastic wrap," Gollner said. "Thin plastic ignites quickly [and] burns somewhat vigorously. Cardboard also is fairly easy to ignite, and once you get a large fire going, it's very easy to ignite more things."

These types of buildings should have effective fire detection and suppression systems to stop fires from spreading, but Thomas Azwell, the director of the Disaster Lab at UC Berkeley, said that often, sprinkler systems aren't fully tested until they're in use.

"The water is just sitting in these, so you only know if they work in case of an incident," Azwell said.

Azwell also said a large fire in a space like the warehouse can make the sprinkler system less effective.

"In the case of a massive fire, you'll have a drop in water pressure because there'll be a huge demand of water all at the same time," he said.

The ongoing LA fire is particularly troubling because of its location deep within a mixed residential area just east of downtown. Boyle Heights is an overwhelmingly working-class Latino community that's dotted with warehouses and storage facilities, and it has a median household income that's nearly half of the citywide average. In April, a similarly massive Kimberly-Clark warehouse fire burned unimpeded for days in the Inland Empire city of Ontario. Earlier this month in Tracy, smoke could be seen from space after a blaze ignited in a million-square foot warehouse.

These fires highlight ongoing struggles between local residents and warehouse and logistics facilities across California.

In a statement released Tuesday, Lineage officials emphasized they do not own the building and pointed to solar panels atop the building as a potential ignition source.

"We believe the fire started on the roof when the owner of the solar array, Altus Power, was doing tests," the statement read. "The solar array does not power the building directly but provides power into the city power grid. As we step up for the community, we are also urging Altus to join us getting the Boyle Heights community the support they desperately need."

Lineage also praised members of the Los Angeles Fire Department, calling their bravery "extraordinary." The company said the fire may be extinguished within days and said cleanup could start as early as Friday. It has also donated $2 million to the California Community Impact Fund and provided meals to both firefighters and local residents.

In a statement to SFGATE, Altus Power stressed that it reached out to local leaders immediately after the fire started and deployed resources to provide assistance.

"Our first concern is for the residents of Boyle Heights, everyone affected by this fire, and for the firefighters working to contain it," Jenny Volanakis, the company's head of communications, said in a statement to SFGATE. "The cause of the fire where our rooftop solar array is located at the Los Palos Street facility has yet to be determined. We are cooperating fully with the authorities as they investigate."

SFGATE SoCal Bureau Chief Farley Elliott contributed to this report.

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