A massive fire at a cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, burned into its fourth day on Sunday, with firefighters battling renewed flare-ups as Mayor Karen Bass issued a local emergency declaration to support response efforts.
The fire was first reported Wednesday afternoon at the 500,000-square-foot Lineage Big Bear facility at 1400 S. Los Palos Street, a building used to store frozen food. At around 5:10 p.m. Sunday, aerial footage showed another flare-up on the roof, with a massive plume of smoke extending into the air as the fire appeared to be burning down an exterior wall and onto a lower roof.
L.A. Fire Chief Jamie Moore described the building's construction as part of what makes the fire so difficult to fight.
"The best way to describe this is like a giant cooler," Moore said. He added that the structure was built with corrugated steel walls filled with dense foam insulation and reinforced interior steel panels.
The building also used ammonia in its refrigeration system, which may have fueled the fire in its early hours. Moore offered a simpler analogy at a news conference Saturday afternoon.
"Imagine your refrigerator having a fire. And so, you have the shell of the outside and the shell on the inside," he said. "What protects everything from the weather, or whatever the temperature is on the outside, is the rubber. ... If you can imagine, that's exactly what's happening here."
The foam insulation continues to burn slowly once ignited, complicating efforts to extinguish the blaze. Crews have relied on continuous helicopter water drops since the start of the incident to keep the structure cooled. Officials have also used large aerial ladder pipes, directing thousands of gallons of water per minute onto the building.
Moore said he expanded the aerial response over the weekend.
"We stepped up our game. I reached out to the county and we started using contract helicopters," he said. "Our contract helicopters ... drop about 3,000 gallons of water at one time. On top of that, we're able to incorporate blaze tamer gel, which is a fire retardant gel, which is gonna help encapsulate the smoke ... and smother the fire."
With an estimated 85 million pounds of frozen food still inside the facility, access for firefighters remains extremely limited. Moore said crews have controlled the fire to roughly half of the building. The unaffected half contains food that has begun to thaw, since the refrigeration system had to be shut off and the ammonia removed. He said the internal temperature of the building remains around 45 degrees because of the insulation.
