The City of Long Beach regularly grapples with the realities of existing at the southern end of the Los Angeles River; namely stormwater runoff, trash and debris each rainy season. This summer, officials are facing a new problem: toxic materials in its waters following a warehouse fire in Boyle Heights.
The Lineage Warehouse fire, which started on June 17 and took firefighters a week to put out, enveloped the East Los Angeles community in black smoke and putrid odors. Over one month later, it is still impacting the county and its surrounding neighborhoods.
At nearly 500,000 square feet, the warehouse contained 85 million pounds of now-decaying plastic-wrapped food products, chemicals needed for refrigeration, thick foam and other materials found to be toxic in large amounts.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District said no significant levels of air toxic metals were seen in the following days, sparking confusion and frustration from the Boyle Heights community.
In Long Beach, officials said they have been slow to receive news on how the runoff from the firefighters’ water is impacting local oceans and surrounding streams. At Tuesday’s city council meeting, councilmembers unanimously moved to draft a letter to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board to issue a Cleanup and Abatement Order.
“It’s now been more than a month since the fire started and our health department just today received testing results back from the county,” Fourth District Councilmember Kristina Duggan said. “This incident highlights an important gap. Unlike sewage spills, oil spills, or even rainwater events, there’s no clear protocol requiring downstream communities to be notified when firefighting runoff from a major industrial incident may affect our public waterways.”
In the days after the fire, the City of Los Angeles declared a local state of emergency, as people reported seeing dead fish in the LA River and Dominguez Wetlands.
On June 24, Long Beach detected elevated bacteria levels, “likely associated with runoff from the decaying food,” Duggan said. The City issued a water quality advisory shortly after. One day later, Long Beach received a notification that fire-related runoff “may affect our water quality,” according to Duggan.
Duggan explained that water runoff from a firefighting situation doesn’t have to follow the same regulations as when there is stormwater runoff, but insisted that “emergency response can’t be delayed by permitting requirements.”
The cities are also requesting that the cleanup order, or any remediation plan, monitoring program or regulations, take into consideration the downstream impacts to Long Beach. This includes the Los Angeles River Estuary, Long Beach coastal waters and the Dominguez Gap Wetlands.
The City Council directed City Manager Tom Modica to send a letter to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the LA Regional Water Quality Control Board, Los Angeles County, the City of Los Angeles and any other appropriate agencies.
The City is requesting to be notified of fire runoff, industrial runoff, hazardous materials releases, chemical spills and any other incidents where pollutants or potentially hazardous materials enter storm drains, channels, rivers, wetlands, estuaries, bays or coastal waters. They will also include language requesting improved regulation protocols.
Though this item is specific to the Lineage warehouse fire, the incident follows a broad pattern that was prevalent during the Palisades fires in 2025. Efforts to quash that fire led to ash, heavy metals, chemicals and debris entering waterways.
“Protecting our coastline cannot fall on Long Beach alone,” Second District Councilmember Cindy Allen said. “This is a shared regional responsibility from the source of the pollution all the way to ultimately where it ends up.”
