“The air is not dangerous.” That’s what Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said as the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights smoldered over the weekend, sending smoke across much of the city.
Residents living near Lineage Logistics may not exactly know what they’re breathing in, but the symptoms don’t lie.
They feel dizzy and anxious. They’re experiencing eye irritation, headaches, and nausea. They feel chest pain.
Smoke has seeped into their homes. It’s all over their clothes and couches. Air purifiers are in high demand. Meanwhile, a particle pollution advisory continues to be extended day after day.
“It’s terrifying. It’s horrible. Everything smells bad — really bad,” Carmelina Chan, who lives steps away from the fire site, said on Tuesday. “I wish this would end. My throat burns.”
As the fire has burned for a week, community advocates and residents say they don’t understand why evacuations have not been issued for the many homes within steps of the cold storage facility, despite days of smoke exposure and reported health impacts. Public health experts say smoke may contain toxins, but officials maintain that conditions do not warrant evacuations.
“Given the disaster that this is, it doesn’t make sense for there to not be evacuation orders,” said mark! Lopez with Eastyard Communities for Environmental Justice, which for a week now has advised residents within a mile of the facility to leave, if they’re able to do so, until the smoke clears and the site is under control.
“Coming from working-class backgrounds, we’ve seen our parents go to work when they’re sick, when they’re injured. We’ve gone to school when we’re sick. We are always pushing through, and that’s what people are doing right now,” Lopez said. “We shouldn’t have to.”
For years, Eastyard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos in the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East LA oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the LA River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.
“The city, the county, the state should put evacuation orders in place, and should have hotel, food, transportation vouchers ready to support community members,” Lopez added.
Bass on Sunday said a mandatory evacuation “is not necessary;” state guidelines tie evacuation orders to immediate threats to life or property. For those who wish to voluntarily leave, “we have the facilities for you,” she said. She and LAFD Fire Chief Jaime Moore have repeatedly advised residents sensitive to smoke or who have respiratory concerns to stay indoors, close their windows, wear masks when they do need to go outside and head to established shelters if they need more relief.
“If you feel more comfortable relocating elsewhere, please do what is right for you and your family,” Moore said, calling the fire impacts an “inconvenience.”
“We are grateful for your patience and your cooperation,” he said.
Councilmember Ysabel Jurado on Monday called for the public release of air quality and environmental testing results in English and Spanish and for a full report detailing the materials that burned at the facility. Boyle Heights residents, Jurado said, “deserve the very basic right to know what is in the air.”
On Tuesday, Supervisor Hilda Solis urged agencies to be diligent in the cleanup process. “Some of our communities have become particularly alarmed about being the dumping ground for hazardous or toxic material…,” Solis said.
Authorities say they’ve cleared the most hazardous materials — ammonia and lithium-ion batteries — from the fire zone. A spokesperson for the LA Fire Department said foam insulation, wood pallets of food, and solar panels on top of the 500,000-square-foot building continue to smolder.
Materials including plastics, electronics and even rotting meat are likely burning, which means the pollution particles emitted “tend to be highly enriched with toxic organics, toxic metals, that are above and beyond what just normal, day-to-day air pollution would look like,” said UCLA air pollution researcher Yifang Zhu.
She said air quality indexes may capture the concentration of particulate matter in the air, but not necessarily the specific toxins in them.“You’ll have almost like a double jeopardy in a sense that the levels [of particulate matter] are higher, and the toxicity is also higher,” she said.
Measuring heavy metals or volatile organic compounds requires special monitoring equipment, Zhu said.
“It’s very difficult to measure,” she said.
Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the contaminants associated with this fire “are going to have potential respiratory impacts.”
“They’re usually going to start out with things like their eyes itching, a headache that won’t go away, potentially dizziness and nausea, probably a burning sensation. Those who have already suffered from things like asthma, you might see an increase in asthma exacerbation.”
She added that clinics and hospitals in the area may see an increase of visits due to these symptoms.
Ornelas Van Horne thought of the thousands who were evacuated in the Garden Grove chemical tank emergency last month. “In this case, the circumstances are different, but it seems like there is no transparency on the circumstances that are considered in declaring an evacuation,” she said.
“I would question, if we saw similar things in fires in other areas, what is the logic between that and here?” Ornelas Van Horne said.
“There’s been so much emission and contaminants that have already been documented by the respective agencies … what makes this case different?” she added.
East LA resident Althana Ávalos, an LAUSD preschool teacher, is among those who voluntarily evacuated after struggling through the effects of the smoke for days. She spent her first night at the LA County City Terrace shelter on Monday after her older son began complaining of chest pains and as her 6-month-old with eczema began excessively crying and “scratching himself.”
The family, which also includes a 9-year-old with asthma, had been spending their mornings and afternoons at the shelter since Saturday. They’d go back home to sleep, but smoke conditions just got too unbearable, Ávalos said.
“We don’t have an AC. We had one air purifier just in one room and it was getting stuffy,” she said. “Every time we would leave the room to use the restroom or the living room or the kitchen, the smoke would right away hit us.”
“Families should have gotten evacuated right away. The smoke is very intense,” Ávalos added.
Ávalos said she was taken to the emergency room after experiencing a series of headaches. She got blood work done and will pick up her results in the coming days. Her husband experienced the same symptoms.
For, Ávalos voluntarily evacuating was the only option for her and her children.
“I had to do what I had to do, and that was to leave, find a shelter [and] keep them away from there as much as I could,” she said.
Boyle Heights Beat reporter Laura Anaya-Morga and LAist contributed to this story.
