The Lineage Fire in Boyle Heights. Photograph by Chelsea Mosher.
This week in the Anthropocene
A black cloud hangs heavy, casting a dark, ominous shadow. The air is suffocating and smells of burnt plastic and chemicals. It is Day 7 of a raging fire in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, where a 500,000-square-foot refrigerated storage facility housing 85 million pounds of food is in flames. An electrical fire that reportedly erupted beneath the building’s solar panels quickly spread to its dense, foam-insulated steel walls, making it difficult for crews to extinguish.
Boyle Heights, like many working class neighborhoods in LA, is sandwiched by large industrial sites and crisscrossed by trucking routes and freeways, forcing it to absorb the pollution they generate. It’s one of the most vibrant and engaged places in this sprawling city. Once home to the largest Jewish community west of the Mississippi, Boyle Heights is now over 90% Latinx and proud of that fact.
Environmental crimes have long plagued Boyle Heights, where, for over 90 years, a lead-acid battery recycling plant in neighboring Vernon left residents cloaked in air laden with lead and arsenic, toxins still present in soil samples today. Lineage, the company behind the current blaze, has faced various fines and was responsible for a 2024 fire at a facility in Finley, Washington, that burned for 8 days.
The Boyle Heights warehouse may not have contained hazardous waste, but its extensive refrigeration system used ammonia as a coolant. An ammonia leak, as the fire broke out, prompted the city to issue “shelter in place” orders. Ammonia is not only highly flammable, it’s also toxic, causing skin and eye damage. If it builds up in the lungs, it can kill. Another disaster is also unfolding, and few have noticed. A stream of water used to douse the fire, containing insulation and other pollutants, has flowed into the storm drain and the LA River, which eventually empties into the ocean in Long Beach.
This is the single largest environmental disaster LA has experienced since the horrific 2025 fires. 
“My eyes burn, I can still taste smoke inside of my mouth. My skin is irritated and there is still a heat wave ongoing so I’m sweating,” said LA Taco reporter Izzy Ramirez from Boyle Heights. “It’s harsh and intense out here.”
In recent years, Boyle Heights has been a flashpoint in LA’s gentrification battles, and local activists have successfully forced high-end art galleries to close and would-be gentrifiers to flee. As a 2017 NPR article put it, “protest art” is a verb on the streets of Boyle Heights, and you can bet this recent blaze will further radicalize the community that fearlessly faced down ICE.
Mayor Karen Bass, beware.
“We still do not have enough clear information about what burned and what may still be burning,” said Los Angeles city councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights.
Mayor Bass, taking a cue from the Fire Dept. Chief Jamie Moore, admitted the air quality was poor but “not to the extent that required a mandatory evacuation.” However, many substances, such as volatile organic compounds and chemicals from insulation, paint, and plastic particles, are not routinely tested for during urban fires. Bass, per usual, is sticking to the status quo, and as anyone who lived through the failed response to the 2025 fires knows, the status quo is not enough.
“The longer the exposure time, the more dose you’re getting, or the more potential chemicals that you’re inhaling. So you’re gonna be increasing a potential risk,” Jill Johnston, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at UC Irvine, told the Los Angeles Times.
Given the fire’s unknowns, a “shelter in place” advisory was the bare minimum. Residents in Boyle Heights and other affected areas should have been fully evacuated as soon as firefighters knew the severity of the situation. Doing so would have required Mayor Bass to admit that the fire was potentially deadly and that the smoke spreading across the LA basin was hazardous to all who breathed it. With the World Cup games in LA and the Olympics forthcoming, Bass was quick to prioritize business interests over public health and safety, jetting off in the midst of the disaster to Chicago for the opening of Obama’s presidential center.
No doubt, if this commercial fire had left mansions in Bel Air blanketed in black soot, Bass would have remained on the front lines, ordering extensive environmental testing of the fallout. Even though she pays lip service to environmental racism, she’s done her best to perpetuate it. Bass is facing a tough reelection against left-leaning Nithya Raman, but even Raman has failed to hold Bass accountable for her complacency.
As the great radical historian Mike Davis pointed out, it’s the poor, Black, and brown people like those residing in Boyle Heights tenements and on LA’s Eastside who suffer the most when disaster strikes.
This fire, sadly, only confirms such a prognosis.
The Lineage Fire in Boyle Heights. Photograph by Chelsea Mosher.
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In other news this week, France’s record-setting “Omega” heatwave forced a nuclear plant to shut down because the river it draws water from was too hot to cool its reactors. And, as people sought refuge from the swelter, forty drowned while swimming in unsupervised waters.
Climate chaos kills in all sorts of sinister ways, like increasing the risk of snake bites and wildfires, the latter of which emit even more carbon into the atmosphere. It’s a deadly, self-perpetuating cycle.
Yes, we are burning up. There are at least seventy fires across the West right now, and it’s only June. It’s equally bad for our neighbors to the north. Canada has experienced over 1,700 fires so far this year.
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In more upbeat news (maybe?). It’s the perfect time to pre-order my forthcoming book, Bad Energy, which should ship by mid-August. We’re partnering with Pilsen Community Books for pre-sales, so head over, create an account (it takes 30 seconds), and order a copy or two if you can afford it.
Stir that in your drink, and I’ll see ya next week.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.