Warehouses expose Californians to costly, toxic disasters

By Susan Phillips, especially for CalMatters

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The automation, operation and sheer size of today’s warehouses increase the risk of fire. Half a dozen recent warehouse fires show that warehouse fires can no longer be considered a fault in the system. They are a feature.

And 2025 analysis from insurance company Zurich describes how trends in “too dense, too high” storage have increased the risk of warehouse fire. Imagine 1 million square feet under one roofpiled high with TVs, kayaks, electronics, batteries, hand sanitizer, vapes, toys, clothes, suitcases, all stuffed together, wrapped in plastic, and stored on floor-to-ceiling pallets.

When a mega warehouse burns, it’s like a whole neighborhood goes up in flames.

Megawarehouses larger than 1 million square feet are popular in part because they make the transition to automation more cost-effective. Automation facilitates top-down ordering in addition to minimizing the need for human workers. Increased fuel density, larger areas to cover, more complex electrical systems and fewer views of the floor made warehouses a recipe for fire disaster.

Large fires require multi-agency cooperation, hundreds of firefighters, and days or weeks of containment. Just look at the cold storage fire in Boyle Heights last week, which suffocated the air in Los Angeles. Fires can cause supply chain problems, financial losses in the millions, clouds of acrid smoke, soil and water contamination, and massive piles of toxic waste.

And 2020 fire in redlands leveled a concrete slope the size of a city block and took a week to put out. That fire covered nearby neighborhoods in smoke, ash and noxious fumes, creating the equivalent of two football fields of debris.

The cleanup after the fire led to a backroom deal to dump thousands wreckage trucks to the San Bernardino neighborhood of Verdemont, where high winds scattered concrete dust and dislodged rocks that smashed into windows, people, cars and pets.

This went on for years until the debris was removed with the help of thousands of truck trips.

In December 2021 a three-alarm fire in the industrial center, Carson was fueled by pallets of beauty products. Toxins entering the Dominguez Canal created a foul-smelling, organic die-off that caused headaches, sore throats, burning eyes and nausea for months.

After logging more than 4,700 odor complaints, the regional air quality regulator issued five citations to the warehouse’s complex chain of participants, including cosmetics brands, wholesalers and Prologis, one of the world’s largest warehouse companies.

At Kimberly-Clark’s Ontario warehouse in April, a viral video showed an employee allegedly setting fire to some of the warehouse’s 1 billion rolls of toilet paper, saying: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live on.” Warehouse fires include higher rates of arson by exploited employees who can start fires, disrupt electrical systems and disable mandatory sprinkler systems.

As an industry, warehouse work depends on low wage temporary work patternshostility to collective bargaining, rapid employee turnover and high levels of worker disability.

Lineage cold storage in Boyle Heights in recent days burning for more than a week like associated persons transferred responsibility. Global chilled food distributor Lineage Logistics leases the building from Chill Build, LLC, a joint venture of Barber Partners and Bain Capital. Lineage, in turn, leases the roof to Los Palos Street Operating, LLC, which is a division of Altus Power, whose solar equipment may have failed during maintenance.

Community members and citywide residents affected by toxic air from layers of insulating foam and plastics — and millions of pounds of burning or rotting frozen food — they deserve to know who is responsible. It is also important to understand how global capital covers local damages.

They have monumental buildings monumental consequences. Community members on the front lines they’ve known this for years. Now we all taste it.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.