CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Vampire Planet: The LA Fires This Time

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.........

© CounterPunch