‘Like a dead body’: after warehouse fire, LA residents say air thick with smell of rotting food

Something is rotten in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. For a week, thick black smoke filled the air while a massive warehouse burned near downtown Los Angeles, prompting a state of emergency and evacuation orders in the immediate area as air quality worsened. Firefighters finally extinguished the flames on Wednesday, but not before half the warehouse’s 85m lbs of frozen food were lost in the fire – leaving roughly 40m lbs of food to rot. Residents, who say they have experienced health issues since the fire began last week, now say their new concern is the pervasive, putrid smell of rotting meat, vegetables and frozen products. Kelvin Vasquez lives one block from the 500,000 sq ft insulated warehouse, so close he said he watched the fire burn from inside his home. Since the start of the emergency on 17 June, he has suffered from a sore throat, headache, persistent dizziness and nausea. Vasquez’s health issues aren’t what worries him now, he said. It’s what will become of the tens of millions of pounds of food next door that has sat unrefrigerated, shrouded in smoke, for over a week. And the smell is unbearable. “It’s pretty much something like a dead body,” Vasquez said. “Like a dead animal.” In the aftermath of the fire, the millions of gallons of water used to fight the flames had created a steady stream polluted with debris, burnt insulation foam and bags of once-frozen food items. A package of frozen tilapia fillets lies amid fire debris in Boyle Heights. …