LA Squawk Box for Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Dangerous heat! Stinky food waste and pests at the Lineage warehouse! More broken water pipes! Out of control utility bills! Oh my.

What’s happening today?

Another heat warning this week — plus fire danger and dangerous surfs at the beach

Temperatures are supposed to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit above during yet another heat wave starting today, with the extreme heat warning expected to last until next Monday. Those hoping to escape the heat at the beach, though, will need to be on alert for the dangerous surf that the waning tropical storm, Elida, is expected to bring to our beaches. The LA Times takes some time to trace the contours of this heat wave, reporting that we should expect the heat to persist into the night. The heat wave is thought to be influenced by an ongoing marine heat wave, which actually isn’t related to the anticipated El Niño season, something that isn’t expected to start until the fall. The LA Times, citing the National Centers for Environmental Information, reports that the first half of the years was the hottest since 1895, for California. That’s been the case for other states as well, according to Zachary Labe, a scientist with the Climate Central, who points to human-caused climate change as what’s driving this continual hot weather.

Cannabis shop enforcement, women in the LAPD, and police response to federal immigration enforcement… are all on the Board of Police Commissioners’ agenda

The LA city police commission is meeting today, and should be hearing reports on any federal immigration enforcement actions. They’re also taking up some revisions to how LAPD responds to such incidences, including one that would clarify that police officers need to turn on their body cameras when responding to a potential immigration enforcement action, not just when there is a radio call, and try to get the supervising federal immigration official to identify themselves. An inspector general report that the police commission is taking up today also includes the results of a survey results that showed women, much more so than their male colleagues, felt like there was sexual harassment and gender discrimination happening in their workplace. The gap was pretty wide. They also disagreed significantly around how confident they were that that reports of sexual harassment are taken seriously. And the department points to scarce funding as a reason it’s been difficult to staff an enforcement unit that goes after “illegal” cannabis businesses, which is something that LA leaders have been asking about because they’re concerned that such unlicensed operations are hurting efforts to keep legal cannabis shops — a source of tax revenue — in business.

What just happened?

Lineage told not to stink up the place while removing the rotting food from their warehouse

The post-Lineage fire, fridge clean-out has been quite the headache for the neighborhood. As trucks filled with decomposing food rumble through Boyle Heights and unincorporated East Los Angeles streets, air quality regulators are demanding that the company makes sure that the unrefrigerated meat and seafood that have been rotting at the warehouse are loaded more gently into trucks, to avoid them crashing down and spraying the stink all over. They’re also calling for the decomposing food waste to be loaded closer to the building, and the company to be more mindful of the wind so as to cut the odor off from being carried by any wind tunnels, particularly down Indiana Street.

And of course, there are concerns about the pests that are being attracted to the rotting food, including rats and flies. There was an estimated 85 million pounds being stored at the warehouse when it caught fire June 17. So far the company has reported removing at least 1,500 tons of waste, most of rotting food. That translates to just under 3 million pounds of rotting food removed thus far, leaving behind still a huge mound of it.

The odor citations were issued by South Coast Air Quality Management District, and were from July 12 until July 18, for strong odors. They cite SQAQMD’s 402 rule, and the state’s health code, 41700, and each of the notices say its “for discharging such quantities of air contaminants to cause injury, detriment, nuisance or annoyance to a considerable number of persons.” The recommendations that SCAQMD made can be found in the last few pages of their July 17 letter, and includes a recommendation that the company makes sure to reduce the “drop height” between the loader bucket and the truck.

Meanwhile, LA City Council member Ysabel Jurado had set a deadline for Lineage executives to provide a corrective action report on the odors by Monday. While Jurado’s office says they got some updates, the response was incomplete. Lineage has basically asked for an extension to respond more fully by next week. She says residents deserve to know if the measures the company has been taking is doing any good.

According to Jurado’s office, the company shared at a community meeting on Monday that 1,630 tons of waste have been removed, 1,329 of it food wastes. That’s nearly 600 truckloads, they said. The company also said they were using physical barriers, disinfectants, deodorizers and air scrubbers. The company is also setting up bait traps for pests, but the contractor they brought in told them that’s ultimately not going to do much as long as the waste remains.

Also, Boyle Heights Beat’s Isaac Vargas dug into Chill Build’s role in the aftermath of the Lineage fire. Chill Build is the company that actually owns the warehouse that Lineage operates out of, and in their first statement issued since the fire, they pointed to Lineage as being “responsible for all aspects of maintaining and repairing the facility” and for “the recovery efforts, communicating with residents, and reporting progress directly to city and county regulators.” Vargas also reports that Chill Build was meeting with Building and Safety officials early on. Apparently though, they haven’t been communicating as much with the area’s City Council representative, Ysabel Jurado, who called on the company to be at the table as well. And Vargas talks to experts who say that the “tangle” of involved parties is typical of warehouse fires, making efforts to hold parties accountable a complicated matter.

A few more things…

After the big water main in West Hollywood broke — sending out what amounted to 17 million gallons of water — more water pipes burst last week in Venice. Meanwhile, work continues on fixing the West Hollywood trunk.

Renters whose utility bills are calculated using a formula, rather than on individual usage, say their bills are getting out of control. LA city’s housing Department last December recommended outlawing the practice by landlords, known as Ratio Utility Billing or RUBS for short, just for rent-controlled buildings, but tenants hit with such bills have been organizing around this say this ban needs to apply to buildings. Phoenix Tso just wrote about this at LA Public Press.

These days, the refrain that LA is broken is repeated often, and it refers to the poor condition of our streets and public areas. But Angelenos, including public officials, do care deeply about our public infrastructure — we’re just not getting much opportunity to take stock and look at the big picture, according to Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place, who writes in a new piece that the latest charter reform ballot measure in November to deal with how LA handles our public infrastructure project is part of a long history of public officials pointing out how LA’s fragmented way of doing our public infrastructure projects leads to us reacting to short-term emergencies. To avoid that constant cycle of playing catch-up, she writes, the city should be stepping back to see what needs to be done and carrying out a thought-through, prioritized plan: “It meant understanding what the city owned, assessing its condition, weighing competing priorities across departments and council districts, and connecting those decisions to long-term budgets and operations. Setting that direction ultimately belongs to the Mayor, but no Mayor can do it alone. It requires the operational capacity to make and carry out those decisions over time. For decades, Los Angeles had not built that citywide capacity.” Meaney also voices an unexpected benefit of having a well-cared-for public space, and it’s that offers a feeling of freedom. “I’ve always loved the everyday public realm: Sidewalks, parks, libraries, bus stops, street trees, and neighborhood streets are where life happens,” Meaney writes. “Long before I knew anything about Capital Infrastructure Programs or city budgets, I loved the feeling of moving through a city and the freedom that came with it. Over time, I came to understand that freedom isn’t accidental. It depends on thousands of decisions about how we design, build, fund, and care for the places we share.”