Lineage Chief Executive Officer Greg Lehmkuhl said the company has not decided whether to rebuild its Boyle Heights warehouse, nearly three months after a fire destroyed the facility.
“We haven’t even come close to making a decision or determination there,” Lehmkuhl said in a phone interview Friday. “We’re still focused on holding the right people accountable here and making sure that we’re continuing to support the community.”
Lehmkuhl spoke to Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local a day after Lineage sued solar power provider Altus Power, Inc. and its contractor, blaming them for the fire that destroyed its cold storage facility and plagued Boyle Heights and surrounding communities with polluted, foul-smelling air for months. Altus Power and its contractor dispute those claims.
The CEO’s comments about the uncertainty surrounding a rebuild come after permit applications were filed in late July to restore the warehouse in Boyle Heights. Lineage described it as a repair permit that’s typical when a building is significantly damaged, adding it was filed by the building’s owner via a contractor.
Lehmkuhl said the “misconception here is that cold storage was the issue,” adding that the “real issue here is a shoddy solar array.”
But to residents who have been forced to bear the brunt of the fire and the monthslong cleanup of 88 million pounds of rotting food — the putrid odors, the toxins in the air, an infestation of flies and rats and the thick smoke that blanketed the region for days — the lawsuit is just another example of companies blaming one another instead of dealing with the fire’s impacts.
At forums following the fire, Eastside residents invited local officials to “come sleep where we live.”
Irene Gonzalez attended a town hall in early July to tell Lineage officials and elected leaders what it has been like living near the Boyle Heights warehouse. She wanted them to “spend one night or one day in the community” she calls home, where she ran five air purifiers 24 hours a day while struggling with the smell of rotting food.
At a South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing in early August, people questioned why communities near industrial facilities are often asked to endure pollution and health risks while waiting for action. “We are witnessing environmental racism,” Eve Sanchez said.
A St. John’s Community Health report found serious respiratory, eye and mental health problems among hundreds of patients seen after the June 17 fire. Residents also reported skin rashes, headaches and nausea.
Asked if he would feel comfortable having his family living across the street from a Lineage warehouse, Lehmkuhl said, “Absolutely,” before a company representative intervened to change the topic.
Lehmkuhl said the community should trust Lineage because “cold storage wasn’t the source of the fire.” He referred to cold storage as the “critical infrastructure that feeds LA, California, America and the world.”
In the meantime, Lehmkuhl said Lineage is storing “tens of thousands of products” in Arizona instead of California.
“That makes no sense logistically. It just means a worse carbon footprint, and it ultimately means that the food in Boyle Heights will cost more because we have to transport this product farther,” he said.
He said that while his company did not build the facility in the first place, they pursued hosting their business there because of Boyle Heights’ proximity to major transportation hubs.
“Boyle Heights is strategically located to distribute food to LA. It’s a great location from the Port of LA,” Lehmkuhl added.
The company accuses Altus and its subsidiary Los Palos Street Operating, LLC, as well as Pearce Services, a Lineage contractor, of failing to address faults in the massive solar array installed on the 500,000-square-foot facility’s roof. Faulty electrical in that array led to a fire in 2024, and the same problems sparked the fire on June 17, Lineage claims in the suit.
Altus and Pearce dispute those claims and have vowed to fight them in court. The Los Angeles Fire Department has not finished its investigation of the June fire and has yet to publicly determine an official cause for the blaze.
Lehmkuhl repeated Friday that the solar contractors were on the roof at the time the fire broke out and have not contributed to the subsequent cleanup efforts, which the company has claimed have cost more than $100 million.
“We had informed them in writing that they are not to energize this [solar] array until we could both jointly agree that it was safe to turn it back on,” Lehmkuhl said. “And despite our, you know, direct orders, if you will, they energized it and were up there working on it and started the fire.”
Boyle Heights Beat reporter Laura Anaya-Morga contributed to this report.
