Outrage as owner of burned LA warehouse that left behind millions of pounds of rotting food misses cleanup deadline

Forget the deadline.The bugs are already here.Residents living around the burned-out Lineage Logistics warehouse in Boyle Heights say they are being left to stew in the stench of millions of pounds of rotting food, deal with a surge of pests and wonder what chemicals may have been released, while the multibillion-dollar company says it needs more time to clean up its mess.Lineage was supposed to clear the food waste from the warehouse by 5 p.m.

Friday under a deadline set by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.It won’t.The company now says it expects to finish removing all the food by Aug.27, arguing that it is only 37 days into a 45-day cleanup period.

Lineage said Wednesday that 93% of the bulk food waste is already gone.That math may satisfy the company.It isn’t doing much for the people living next door.“I’ve got flies the size of Subarus at my house.

Never seen these before in 25 years,” one person who lives nearby wrote online.At a Thursday night community meeting, residents made clear they aren’t interested in another promise to call a hotline or wait a little longer.“Our soil, our air, our water, everything has been contaminated,” one resident said.Boyle Heights resident Laura Garza accused Lineage representatives of selectively answering questions while residents are left without basic information about their own safety.“They picked and chose what questions they were going to answer.And then, it was the same answer.

You can call these phone numbers,” Garza told ABC 7.Then came the question that cuts straight to the heart of residents’ anger:“Lineage has a number you can call if you want an air conditioner.But what’s the number you call if you want to know what chemicals you were exposed to, and why they haven’t cleaned it up yet?”Lineage says it has about 400 workers a day tackling the cleanup and is spending roughly $100 million on the effort.But Bass says a company with billions of dollars in resources should have been able to ...