At N&M Auto Repair, about 60 feet and one deep breath away from the smoldering wreck of Lineage Logistics warehouse in Boyle Heights, Julio Reyes wields a rotary saw over the metal hulk of a once-white sedan, unmindful of the gray smoke billowing around him.
Down the street, inside Jim’s Burgers #8 on the corner of Indiana Street and Olympic Boulevard, Crystabell Ojeda, 43, picks up a burger and salad lunch, extra Thousand Island. She will deliver it to her husband Alex Andrade, also 43, working in the haze at a body shop up the street.
No choice but to keep working, Ojeda says. Even in the heat. Even in the toxic smoke.
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another, right?” she asks.
They are living in their car with their Pitbull Sky. Her grandmother, battling cancer, lies in bed in the smoke and chaos since the warehouse blaze erupted doors down from her La Puerta home on June 17.
“We don’t have money for a motel, we don’t have a choice,” Ojeda shrugs, saying out loud what faces thousands of residents and workers in Boyle Heights even before one section of the cold storage facility burst into flames eight days ago.
In this working-class neighborhood of Union Pacific in East Los Angeles, choice is a luxury.
It is reality underscored by a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute study published June 24, which found tens of thousands of residents and workers live in the smoke advisory zone established after the nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility erupted in flames on June 17.
The Los Angeles Fire Department declared the fire “knocked down” Thursday, but the section of the warehouse that burned remains a smoldering rubble, some of the food within its storage units burned, some exposed to the elements and already rotting, said Capt. Anthony Tubbs, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Frozen food that was stored in the section of the warehouse that didn’t burn is also spoiling, since power has been out in that area for eight days. It is up to the Los Angeles Department of Health to determine what will happen to the waste.
Cleaning all that up will be a new phase of the disaster for Boyle Heights residents and workers. Yolanda Olivares, chief operating officer of Via Care health center, said they are preparing to see patients suffering from the long-term health impacts of the fire and cleanup. The federally-recognized nonprofit offers free medical and dental primary care across seven nearby sites.
Their patients would likely come from the 31,700 or so workers the UCLA analysts counted in the rapid response analysis, about two-thirds, or 8 out of 10, are Latino.
It is a community that was already bearing a disproportionate share of environmental, economic and health burdens, according to study authors Silvia R. Gonzàlez, Julia Silver, Chhandara Pech and Arturo Vargas Bustamante.
“While the fire’s smoke has spread across Los Angeles, its most immediate and lasting impacts will be felt by those who live and work in the smoke advisory zone and surrounding areas,” university researchers concluded. “Addressing these compounding challenges requires an equitable disaster response that centers on the needs of both residents and workers, including access to health care, income support, and multilingual emergency resources.”
Policymakers and elected officials must draw on lessons learned from recent disasters, including the January 2025 wildfires, to prioritize coordinated, equitable relief that reaches residents and workers without delay, study authors added.
Noting the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles have historically been characterized by high rates of poverty, LPPI researchers examined the communities living and working within the smoke advisory zone, which includes much of Boyle Heights and portions of East Los Angeles.
These are the same areas contaminated with toxic dust from the Exide battery recycling plant in nearby Vernon that closed in 2015 after decades of exposing nearby communities to environmental hazards such as lead and arsenic soil contamination.
In a 2016 study, Manuel Pastor of the University of California, Santa Cruz found a disproportionate amount of toxic facilities are built around minority residential areas in the state and less evidence that minorities moved in later.
Already living hand to mouth before June 17, those most directly affected by the Lineage fire most likely cannot absorb the lost wages, health costs, or business interruptions the disaster brought.
The study found about half of resident workers in the smoke advisory zone earn $3,333 per month, below the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of “very low income” in Los Angeles County, that is about $4,046 a month for a single-person household. About 12% of residents earn $1,250 or less per month, even well below the “extremely low income” threshold of $2,429 a month for a single person.
Anyone at this low-income level cannot afford the added weight of smoke exposure, missed work, and potential loss of employment, researchers said.
“The fire is adding another layer of harm to communities already affected most by economic hardship, limited access to health care, and disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards,” said co-author Silver, a senior research analyst at UCLA. “There needs to be coordinated relief efforts that reach both residents and workers, including access to health care services, income support, multilingual emergency information, and resources for affected individuals.”
Boyle Heights workers were employed mostly in health care and social assistance, followed by retail trade and accommodation and food services. About 6% of them worked in transportation and warehousing, the industries most directly tied to the fire.
“The smoke zone is also a worker zone,” said researcher Bustamante, director of faculty research at the institute. “The impacts do not stop at the neighborhood boundary. Thousands of workers commute into Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles for jobs, which means this emergency reaches families across the region. An equitable response must account for both residents and workers.”
L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis, and Los Angeles County board chair, deployed her staff, community partners and volunteers to go door to door in the early days after the fire, distributing air filters and personal protective equipment, as well as holding resource fairs and distribution events. Her office has delivered more than 5,000 air purifiers, 54,000 masks, 3,000 food boxes and 1,000 cases of water to residents.
“At my direction, the county also supported operations at the 24/7 smoke respite shelter at City Terrace Park, in partnership with the Red Cross,” Solis said in a statement, noting since demand as declined, the shelter will close at noon on Saturday, June 27.
“As recovery efforts continue, I remain committed to ensuring residents receive both immiedate assistance and long-term support,” Solis concluded, adding she will continue to work with local, state and federal partners to “fully understand what happened, assess the impacts on our communities, and ensure that all responsible parties are held fully accountable for the fire and its consequences.”
Solis said residents can get essential supplies ay ongoing distribution events and that the County Department of Health Services mobile unit was deployed multiple times this week at City Terrace Park. Solis also invited Via Care health center to go to the neighborhood and offer free basic medical and dental care, including breathing treatments, health screenings and referrals.
The Department of Consumer and Business Affairs is also walking the affected neighborhoods and investigating reports of fraud, scams and price gouging. Residents can call the department’s consumer protection hotline at (800) 593-8222.
Similar to the Eaton fire response, Solis said she will coordinate a one-stop recovery event in one location. Workers and businesses can contact the Department of Economic Opportunity and the Office of Small Business at 4716 E. Cesar Chavez Ave., or call (844) 432-4900.
All that information is welcome news to Martin Ramirez, 49, co-owner of N&M Auto Repair on Union Pacific Avenue. He said his crew has come back every day since the fire began in hopes of getting back to work.
Ramirez, who has owned the body and repair hop for 11 years, drives in from Lancaster daily checking on his guard dog.
“We’re still not working. Today I came and a white car blocked our gate. I am frustrated,” Ramirez said.
Aside from losing potential customers and delaying repairs for orders he has, Ramirez said the day of the fire, four cars parked around his business that his crew were working on were towed away by police to make way for emergency vehicles.
“I saw they were going to tow, and I asked if I could move the cars because we have the keys,” he said. He only had time to move one vehicle before a police officer told him he had to leave the area.
“Then now they are trying to charge me because they impounded the cars,” he said, adding a representative from Mayor Karen Bass has since called him to say the cars will be returned to him at no charge.
Expenses are still piling up, though, as Ramirez frets about paying wages for his six employees and where he will get money for the monthly loan payments he makes on the shop.
“I don’t know when I can reopen, but I feel a little bit better since Mayor Bass helped,” Ramirez said. “Still every day I am closed I am not making any money.”
UCLA analysts said they will next examine the impacts of the Lineage Logistics fire, including communities outside the advisory zone that have experienced poor air quality.
Inside Jim’s Burgers, in the neighborhood 60 years, owner Manuel Orozco frets about losing 50% of his business since the fire.
Longtime employee Antonia Dominguez rushes to the windows when wind-driven smoke barrels down Indiana Avenue, obscuring the city traffic enforcement car blocking the road, and the uniformed officer in the bright yellow vest standing beside it. He waves cheerfully from within the opaque haze.
Dominguez, with a quick glance at the burger joint’s empty dining area, goes back to work.