Watch: "Smells really bad" – Residents endure rotting food stench after warehouse fire
On any typical day, Alexis Sicairos and his girlfriend have a line of patrons waiting to order a banana buzz latte or a cloud matcha at their Los Angeles coffee stand. But now, the street corner where they sit is largely empty.
The reason is clear the second you walk into the neighbourhood: it stinks.
On 17 June, a fire destroyed a large cold-storage warehouse in the area, leaving behind some 85 million lb (39 million kg) of rotting food, including beef, pork, poultry and seafood.
Nearly two months later, residents of Boyle Heights say the clean-up has taken a lot longer than expected and they've grown frustrated with the pungent odour hovering over the area.
"It smells really bad, like really bad… to the point that you want to throw up," says Mesha, a 37-year-old security guard stationed outside a marijuana dispensary.
She likens the smell to that of a dead body.
Lineage, the company that operated the warehouse, said that as of Monday about 80% of the food waste had been removed. But city officials said this week that the company's response had "fallen short" and that they have issued public health and safety violation notices.
Workers have been trying to clean up the rotting food for months
"It's been tough," Sicairos, 30, says. After shutting down his coffee stand for two weeks because of the fire, Brew Sting has reopened – but the demand hasn't been the same.
He says flies have been swarming relentlessly over the past weeks, since the food that was stored in the warehouse began rotting.
The warehouse workers that would previously line up to buy coffee haven't been showing up over the past two months.
"Due to the fire, obviously most of them aren't here," Sicairos says. "So we lost those customers, but we also lost customers that don't want to be around the smell, the smoke, the flies. It's understandable. But we have to keep paying our bills, so we're still here."
Rotting food at the warehouse has attracted rats and flies
One cannot walk through the area, which is mostly a warehouse district surrounded by homes, without swatting away countless flies, both big and small, including black, blue and green ones.