In the days after the Lineage warehouse fire blanketed the Eastside in thick smoke, Althana Ávalos desperately searched for an air purifier for her 9-year-old son with asthma.
The 33-year-old Los Angeles Unified School District teacher closed the windows and doors of her East LA home, and her family wore KN95 masks. But it wasn’t enough. They soon began feeling the effects of the smoke: sore throat, eye and skin irritation, nausea and headaches.
When she called the office of Councilmember Ysabel Jurado to have an air purifier delivered to her home, she was told she didn’t qualify.
“I’m sorry,” the person on the phone told her, according to Ávalos. “Due to the address that you’re providing, you are on the other side so you don’t qualify … You belong to the county.”
“Really? This is a disaster,” Ávalos remembers thinking. “My son has asthma. What am I going to do?”
The moment captured what many residents say they experienced for days following the fire: For some seeking help, access to emergency resources often depended less on how close they lived to the fire and more on which side of an invisible border they called home.
A crisis felt across invisible borders
Ávalos lives on the east side of Indiana Street, in unincorporated East Los Angeles, not the city of LA. Just across the street, on the west side of Indiana, is Boyle Heights, where the Lineage warehouse is located.
Although the warehouse is in Boyle Heights, it sits near the borders of East LA and Commerce, separated by short stretches of roads and industrial blocks. Walking a few feet places residents in a different jurisdiction entirely.
Those geographic boundaries shaped who distributed supplies, where residents went for help, and, in some cases, who qualified for resources such as air purifiers.
While Boyle Heights residents are represented by Los Angeles city officials, including Jurado, and LA Mayor Karen Bass, residents in unincorporated East LA fall under Los Angeles County and are primarily represented by Supervisor Hilda Solis.
Where do you live?
Boyle Heights: Highlighted in blue, Boyle Heights is a neighborhood within the city of Los Angeles. Residents are represented by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado and Mayor Karen Bass.
East Los Angeles: Highlighted in orange, East Los Angeles is an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County. Residents are represented by Supervisor Hilda Solis.
Maps created with ArcGIS.
Finding help wasn’t always easy
When the fire broke out on June 17, elected officials responded and posted updates on social media as firefighters battled the blaze.
And when the flames reignited within the building two days later, officials declared local and statewide emergencies while agencies worked to acquire and distribute air purifiers, pass out masks and open up smoke relief shelters across the Eastside.
But residents say accessing those resources wasn’t always straightforward.
Some distribution events required proof of residency. On social media, residents asked whether they qualified for assistance if they lived near the fire. Others were clearing up confusion from commenters about whether their addresses were actually within Los Angeles city limits.
For Ávalos, it was confusing that strict government rules still applied for the neighboring jurisdictions even during a crisis.
“I knew I belonged to the East LA area. It didn’t hit me that in, you know, in this case of emergency, or in this situation, they were going to be asking,” said Ávalos.
Community groups and neighbors filled the gaps
Henry Perez, executive director of InnerCity Struggle, said his organization repeatedly heard about people running into the same issue of being turned away at distribution sites.
“It’s extremely frustrating and infuriating,” Perez said. “To be told that they couldn’t get the air purifier because of where they lived on the dividing line, that is just heartbreaking.”
As demand for clean air grew, groups including InnerCity Struggle, Proyecto Pastoral, the East LA Walking Club and The Maravilla Community Advisory Committee, as well as individual volunteers, organized their own distributions, regardless of jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Ávalos’ family continued searching for relief as their conditions worsened.
On Saturday, June 20, they went to the smoke relief shelter at City Terrace Park. During a visit to the shelter, Sen. Durazo stepped inside to talk to families.
After explaining how she was turned away from receiving an air purifier, Durazo, upset by the situation, called on one of her team members to help get one, Ávalos said. A few hours later, the air purifier had been personally delivered to her at the shelter.
State and local elected officials, including Durazo, Assemblymembers Mark Gonzalez and Jessica Caloza, and U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez, also spent time in the affected neighborhoods sharing updates and connecting residents with resources.
Ávalos wasn’t the only resident who described frustration over jurisdictional divides.
Martin Ramirez, who owns N&M Auto Repair on the corner of Union Pacific Avenue and Indiana Street, said he tried to get an air purifier for his business from Our Lady of Victory Church in East LA but was turned away because his business address put him in Commerce.
Officials emphasize unity as the response evolves
As the fire continued burning, city and county leaders began appearing side by side at press conferences, stressing that government agencies were working collaboratively.
Later in the response, public messaging also appeared to shift.
At a press event on Thursday, June 25, Bass pushed back when asked by a local reporter about the miscommunication between county and city departments.
“First of all, I know the two of us here, the three of us here, we’re not going to put up with jurisdictional divide,” Bass said. “People can go to the county for help and if the resources…happen to be on the city side, the bottom line is that if the people of this community need help, we’re going to do everything we can to get it there.”
Around the same time, in a social media post promoting purifier distribution on Friday, June 26, Hilda Solis wrote that aid was “open to adjacent communities.”
A community resource center that opened up in Boyle Heights over the weekend presented a similar shift, stating services were open to “residents and businesses of Boyle Heights and nearby communities.”
Still, some residents said the changing guidance added to the confusion.
In written statements to Boyle Heights Beat, both Jurado and Solis acknowledged the challenges residents faced along the Boyle Heights and East LA border.
“Emergency doesn’t recognize jurisdictional boundaries, but government often does,” Jurado said.
Jurado said city departments and county agencies are now coordinating around air quality monitoring, debris and food waste removal, traffic and hauling plans, water runoff protections, public health resources, and community outreach.
Solis shared a similar sentiment, stating that although the county stayed in close communication with the city on emergency response from day one, it had become streamlined by day seven.
“By the end of the first week, that included broader resource distributions, expanded health services, planning for the Community Resilience Center, and connecting residents, workers, and small businesses with recovery resources,” Solis said.
What residents want to see change
Perez of InnerCity Struggle said officials should use the Lineage fire as a lesson before the next disaster.
“This isn’t going to be the last environmental crisis or, just, emergency crisis and they need to recognize that there are certain parts of the city and the county that border one another,” Perez said. “What we want our elected leaders to really learn from this experience is that preparedness is critical.”
One of the biggest lessons Councilmember Jurado said she learned through the process was that environmental emergencies “require neighborhood-level preparedness” before disaster strikes.
“In future emergencies, residents should not have to chase government for information. Government needs to show up where people already are: at their doors, at trusted community organizations, at schools, churches, clinics, recreation centers, and neighborhood gathering places,” Jurado said.
For residents like Ávalos who live along the city-county lines, the fire reinforced how a divide in resources — from health care and law enforcement to services like trash and public works — can shape access to help.
“If something like this were to happen again … I don’t think that [where you live] should matter,” Ávalos said.
