Toxic smoke from warehouse blaze even worse for LA than 2025 wildfires

Los Angeles is gasping for air.

People are inhaling smoke, soot and other airborne detritus following the Boyle Heights warehouse fire, and new findings show the poor air quality has put the damage from the LA wildfires of January 2025 to shame.

Just three days after the fire broke out last month, a monitoring station at Eastman Avenue Elementary School hit a staggering 755 micrograms of PM (particulate matter) 2.5, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. 

By contrast, 650 micrograms of fine particles in Pasadena following the Eaton fire in 2025 was enough to be labeled dangerous.

Residents are still in the dark about exactly what they breathed in after flames ripped through the 490,000-square-foot Lineage warehouse on South Los Palos Street; but one thing is clear: people got sick.

Emergency room visits by residents living within 10 miles of the massive blaze more than tripled in the days after the fire compared to the previous two weeks, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Michael Jerrett, an environmental health professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, warns that this isn’t your average campfire haze; it’s a dangerous cocktail of toxic components.

“These contain many particularly toxic components and we know little about how these mixtures affect health,” Jerrett told the LA Times.

Several air quality monitors detected concerning amounts of brain-damaging lead and cancer-causing arsenic as a result of toxic paint used in older homes burning during the 2025 LA wildfires. It’s unknown the exact kind of health-damaging chemicals that are currently in the air around Boyle Heights.

During the fire’s early stages, LAFD noted low levels of hydrogen fluoride, a lithium-ion battery byproduct. The mobile monitors deployed by the air district and the US Environmental Protection Agency also detected bromine and chlorine levels below health thresholds.

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