Investigation fails to find cause of massive Boyle Heights fire – Los Angeles Times

Investigation fails to find cause of massive Boyle Heights fire  Los Angeles Times

A months-long investigation into a fire at a cold-storage warehouse that saturated Boyle Heights in smoke and rotten air for weeks was started by an "electrical event" of unknown origin, the Los Angeles Fire Department concluded. LAFD has said the blaze originated on the roof, and officials with Lineage, the company that operated the warehouse, has alleged it was started by solar panels operated by a third-party company that was performing testing June 17. But according to the department's investigative report obtained by The Times on Tuesday, arson investigators could only say the fire started on the roof, "at or adjacent to a section of solar panels," where an electrical event occurred.

The department ultimately could not rule out the solar panels on the roof, the equipment connected to them or the work being done at the time as potential causes for the fire. The fire started somewhere in the "Grid 2" section of the 12,400-panel array, the report said, but the cause of the underlying electrical event is a mystery. For Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, the investigation's conclusion was unsatisfactory. “Determining what caused the Lineage fire matters — not only for accountability, but to help ensure a disaster like this does not happen again," she said in a statement. "But LAFD’s finding that