Guest Commentary written by

Susan A. Phillips

Susan Phillips

Susan A. Phillips is a professor of environmental analysis and director of the Robert Redford Conservancy at Pitzer College.

Automation, exploitation and the sheer size of today’s warehouses are magnifying fire risk. A half-dozen recent warehouse fires demonstrate that warehouse fires can no longer be considered a bug in the system. They are a feature.

A 2025 analysis by the insurance company Zurich describes how “too dense, too tall” storage trends have increased warehouse fire hazards. Imagine 1 million square feet under one roof, piled high with TVs, kayaks, electronics, batteries, hand sanitizer, vapes, toys, clothing, suitcases, all nested together, wrapped in plastic, and stored on pallets floor to ceiling.

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

Mega-warehouses larger than 1 million square feet are popular in part because they make the transition to automation more cost-effective. Automation facilitates top-to-bottom stacking in addition to minimizing the need for human workers. Increased fuel density, larger areas to cover, more complex electrical systems and fewer eyes on the floor have made warehouses a recipe for incendiary disaster.

Big box conflagrations require multi-agency collaboration, hundreds of firefighters and days or weeks before containment. Just look at the cold-storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights this past week, which choked the air across Los Angeles. Fires can cause supply chain issues, financial losses in the millions, plumes of acrid smoke, soil and water contamination, and massive piles of toxic debris.

A 2020 fire in Redlands leveled a concrete tilt-up the size of a city block and took a week to extinguish. That fire blanketed nearby neighborhoods with smoke, ash and noxious fumes, creating the equivalent of two football fields of debris.

Post-fire clean up resulted in a backroom deal to dump thousands of truckloads of rubble next to the San Bernardino neighborhood of Verdemont, where high winds dispersed concrete dust and dislodged pebbles that pelted windows, people, cars and pets.

This lasted for years until the rubble was removed using thousands of truck trips.

In December 2021, a three-alarm fire at the Carson Industrial Center was fueled by pallets of beauty products. Toxins entering the Dominguez Channel created a malodorous, organic die-off that cause headaches, sore throats, burning eyes and nausea for months.

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

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

An aerial view shows smoke rising from a damaged warehouse roof as firefighters continue to battle a large industrial fire. The surrounding neighborhood stretches toward the downtown Los Angeles skyline in the distance, partially obscured by haze drifting across the scene.
An aerial view of the smoldering storage facility in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 22, 2026. Authorities declared a state of emergency as the fire intensified, prompting evacuations in the surrounding area. The fire started on June 17, 2026. Photo by Ted Soqui for CalMatters

As an industry, warehouse work is dependent on temp labor models with low wages, hostility toward collective bargaining, rapid employee turnover and high rates of worker disability.

In recent days, the Lineage cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights burned for more than a week as the associated parties shifted responsibility. Global cold storage food distributor Lineage Logistics leases the building from Chill Build, LLC, which is 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 malfunctioned during maintenance.

Community members and residents city-wide impacted by toxic air from layers of insulated foam and plastics — and millions of pounds of burning or rotting frozen food — deserve to know who is responsible. It’s also important to understand how global capital underwrites local harm. 

Monumental buildings have monumental consequences. Frontline community members have known that for years. Now we are all getting a taste of it.