Los Angeles is struggling under a thick, hazardous haze.
In the wake of the Boyle Heights warehouse fire, residents have been breathing in smoke, soot and other airborne debris — and new data suggests the pollution reached levels even worse than those recorded during the January 2025 LA wildfires.
Three days after the blaze began last month, an air monitor at Eastman Avenue Elementary School recorded PM 2.5 levels of 755 micrograms, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
For comparison, Pasadena was considered to be in dangerous territory when fine-particle pollution reached 650 micrograms after the Eaton fire in 2025.
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What remains unclear is exactly what residents inhaled after flames tore through the 490,000-square-foot Lineage warehouse on South Los Palos Street. What is clear, however, is that many people began feeling the effects.
Emergency room visits among people living within 10 miles of the enormous fire more than tripled in the days that followed, compared with the previous two weeks, the LA Times reported.
Michael Jerrett, an environmental health professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, cautioned that the smoke should not be mistaken for ordinary fire haze. Instead, he described it as a potentially harmful mix of toxic substances.
“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.
