Editor’s note: This is part of our “My LA” series — a look at how changing demographics are shifting culture in LA’s historic neighborhoods and communities — told by the people from those communities.
I’m having shortness of breath; I feel nauseous, super dizzy and extremely lightheaded. There’s pressure on my chest, and my heart is racing. That’s what I tell the patient rep at the emergency room.
It’s 1:30 a.m. Friday, June 19 — two days after a fire broke out at the Lineage cold storage facility on South Los Palos Street, less than a mile from my house in Boyle Heights.
“Delusional.” “Discouraged.” “Defeated.” “Disappointed.” These words echo in my head as I’m waiting to find out why my body is failing me.
What the city knew
By the time I’m sitting in triage, the basic facts of the fire have already been established, even if I don’t know them yet. It started around 2:35 p.m. on Wednesday, June 17, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. Solar panels on the roof of the 500,000-square-foot warehouse ignited, and ammonia stored in the building triggered a shelter-in-place order that afternoon. That order was lifted by Wednesday night — then reissued Thursday afternoon, with officials again telling residents to stay indoors, shut their windows and turn off their AC.
A few minutes after I arrive at the hospital, they bring me back to triage. My blood pressure is high. Testing is rushed — EKG, chest X-rays, blood work — and hours pass before I’m released with instructions to follow up with my doctor. “No heart attack, which is what we’re most concerned about,” the doctor says. I sit there feeling silly instead of relieved. I didn’t want to hear “heart attack,” but I also felt like the whole night was a waste — of time, and of the sleep I’d dragged my husband out of. He has work in the morning. I felt guilty for pulling him into this.
We get home around 4:30 a.m. By 11 a.m., I’m up again, trying not to pass out from exhaustion. Same symptoms. And outside, the smoke hangs over my neighborhood in a huge white cloud.
It wasn’t a heart attack. It was the toxic smoke. But how would any of us have known when seemingly all the city leadership told us everything was safe?
No birds, no dogs
The morning after my ER visit started with an eerie quiet. No birds chirping. No dogs barking. Inside my own house, the air smelled like burning charcoal. I didn’t understand what was happening because Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s updates kept saying my neighborhood was fine.
On Instagram, 10:45 p.m. on June 17, she posted that shelter-in-place order had been lifted. By 12:30 p.m. the next day, her office said the fire was no longer “actively burning.”
Mayor Karen Bass would later tell reporters, as the fire continued to smolder through the weekend, that “the air is not dangerous” and that a mandatory evacuation “is not necessary.”
So why was I seeing something different? Why did I feel worse, not better? I felt like a loser for being so tired all the time. Was this all in my head? I must be delusional. This must just be in my head.
It wasn’t.
My neighborhood is not new to experiencing things like this where they’re livelihood and health aren’t treated with the same care or respect. But this felt different.
Residents living within steps of the warehouse were already experiencing what UCLA air pollution researcher Yifang Zhu would later describe to LAist: A fire burning through plastics, electronics, foam insulation and rotting meat produces smoke “highly enriched with toxic organics” and toxic metals — far beyond normal day-to-day pollution.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District had monitors tracking particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide near the site. But AQMD admitted it did not have the equipment to measure every possible toxin burning.
The city kept sending me text alerts and recorded calls: The shelter-in-place had been lifted, but residents were encouraged to stay indoors anyway. Like a lot of people in my neighborhood, staying home wasn’t an option. It didn’t pay my bills.
And I wasn’t the only one going to work. A few blocks from my house, the woman who sells jugos (juices) under the bridge on Indiana was posted up like always, no mask. The verdura truck stayed parked across from her, also no mask. I thought: They must have strong lungs. Stronger than mine, anyway.
But I was lucky to work in an office in Mid-Wilshire. I would leave for work early every day just to breathe.
A pale yellow
On Juneteenth, the Friday after the fire started, I spent the day working outside in South Central. The smoke billowed over rooftops, and nobody in the area seemed to think twice about it. But my body was shutting down — my brown skin turned a pale, sickly yellow. The dizziness was back. The shortness of breath. I’d already been through this once and been told it wasn’t my heart. The air was supposedly safe. So what was it? Dehydration? Low vitamins? Not enough sleep?
At the end of the night, my friends insisted on driving me home because I “didn’t look so good.” We pulled into my driveway, and my friend said, “OMG, look — you can still see the smoke from here.” I didn’t have much of a response. Just: “Yeah. Crazy, huh?”
The next day, my husband ordered an $80 air purifier from Amazon.We put it in our bedroom, and I confined myself there, like it was 2020 all over again. But it didn’t help much.
My husband — healthy, active, gym-going, the green-smoothie type — also started getting headaches and feeling sleepy in the middle of the day. We blamed it on missed coffee. “Just tired,” we told ourselves. I would later learn we weren’t alone in reaching for that excuse.
A few blocks from me, on Union Pacific Avenue, a resident named Ivan Arredondo told Boyle Heights Beat his throat had gone hoarse. Three blocks from the warehouse, a woman named Maria Gonzalez said the smoke had left her dizzy, with irritated eyes, and gave her daughter a cough. She’d been calling for days asking for a free air purifier. No one called her back.
‘I don’t know’
Saturday, June 20, came. Same silence. No dogs. A haze of smoke hanging over. Fewer birds.
Online, I saw a “smoke relief” center had just opened. I thought: finally, maybe someone there would have real answers. But when I got there, there were no answers.
It was just a handful of volunteers, some snacks, bottled water, and a few green military cots. One folding table. An elderly woman and two kids were sitting there, looking lost. Another woman was talking in a desperate voice to someone from the mayor’s office — someone I actually know, someone I respect.
I felt a flicker of relief. I fired off everything at once: How long is this going to last? When do we get the free air purifiers? Do we need to evacuate? It’s the same white smoke every single day, and I couldn’t breathe. He just said, “I don’t know. I’m waiting on those answers too.”
I feel the hope drain out of me. “How?” I asked him. “You work for the mayor!”
I couldn’t find a social media posts by anyone that morning — Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, Rep. Jimmy Gomez, Supervisor Hilda Solis, state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, Councilmember Jurado’s office, the mayor’s office.
The days kept passing and my symptoms didn’t get better. I keep checking the AQMD app, watching the readings climb from red to purple — unhealthy, then very unhealthy. By the time I’m done being discouraged, disappointed, defeated by how this has been handled, I was done waiting, period.
9 p.m., on Sunday, June 21. We leave our beloved Boyle Heights for safety. The symptoms that no doctor could explain went away almost as soon as we got to fresh air.
The week the city caught up
By Monday, June 22, the air had gotten bad enough that several schools running summer programs announced they’d move classes elsewhere as a precaution. Crews kept tearing open the warehouse’s exterior walls to chase pockets of fire still burning deep inside.
By Tuesday, Solis was publicly pressing agencies to be diligent about cleanup, warning that communities like ours have a history of becoming “the dumping ground” for whatever gets left behind.
Jurado, for her part, began demanding that air quality and environmental testing results get released in plain language, in English and Spanish — telling reporters that residents “shouldn’t have to guess about what they’re breathing.”
On June 23, she and Solis filed separate motions seeking answers about what caused the fire, the facility’s compliance history, and who was supposed to be inspecting it in the first place.
The fire was finally knocked down the following Wednesday, June 24 — a full week after it started.
We were finally able to go back home. But I came back stronger — no longer feeling crazy for knowing, all along, that I was being poisoned.
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