QAA Podcast - What Are They Burning in Boyle Heights? (Premium 346) Sample

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

On June 17th the LA skyline was disturbed by a cloud of thick smoke emanating from a cold storage warehouse fire in Boyle Heights. This resulted in a Fallout 76 style rat infestation, biblical swarms of flies, and the putrid stench of rotting meat filling every home in the surrounding area. After a brief overview of the fire, Liv begins this episode with a few references to the hit show Chernobyl and then follows up with a few more references to the hit show Chernobyl before taking a look at the city’s lackluster response to the fire and the cleanup operation that ensued. Later, Jake discusses a few of the conspiracies that have emerged in the wake of the fires. So, dear listener, grab your Stimpacks and Radaway and prepare for another QAA classic. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Hearing this, well done, you found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 346. What are they burning in Boyle Heights? As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky. Louv Agar. Julian Fields. And Travis View. If you live in Los Angeles and you go outside at all,

you may have noticed a large billowing smoke cloud looming across the city in June of this year, from around the 17th to the 25th. Yeah. L.A. is a very flammable location. So this fire, while possibly orksome for a few days, probably wasn't too out of the ordinary. But maybe not. I don't know.

I mean, it's pretty bad even for us. But yeah, we are used to everything being on fire. You're right. Yeah. When people are texting each other with screenshots of air quality, you know, in being like, stay out or watch out or here's what's with me, you know. Then, you know, you know, you know things are pretty bad. When the government starts covering things up, that's when you know things. Yeah.

Yeah. Being from a very plammable location as well, I can sympathize. Although, again, like, usually with Vancouver, it's like something's burning way out in the wilderness, like in a location people barely live. So the idea of something like burning very close to you, like in a suburb is kind of horrifying. Yeah. If you look at videos of this fire, it is absolutely insane.

It's O-L-E-D smoke. And it is literally going over neighborhood houses and apartment buildings that are across the street. This whole state is essentially an O-L-E-D-TV showing like the Christmas fire. But it may have been... Sorry, we fucked up your flow. Sorry. Damn it.

God damn it. Once again, sorry, Liv. You can just start wherever and people can forgive us, hopefully. It was probably much worse if you resided in the specific neighborhood that the fire was emanating from, Boyle Heights. If so, you've likely been subject to an ongoing series of natural disasters and crises that any religious person would rightfully assume only could have been caused by the wrath of God.

Disease, swarms of flies, a toxic stench, a plague of rats, many more. What separated this from a regular old climate crisis-driven wildfire is its point of origin. An 11-acre-wide frozen food warehouse, whose refrigeration capability is quickly disintegrated in the flames. Fortunately, as a recording, approximately 1,500 tons of food waste

has already been removed from the facility. Unfortunately, about 42,000 tons of rotting food waste, waste remains, meaning that in about a month of work, the city has removed approximately 3.5% of the rotted food, now polluting one of L.A.'s historic Mexican-American neighborhoods. Residents are furious to the city's horribly slow response times, and lack of compensation from the company running the facility named lineage, who likely started this mess in the first place. Yet, of course, this would not be a QAA episode without baking, and many pilled residents of L.A. have devised elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the fire, which will be covered later in a segment by Jake.

So join us as we dive into the story that feels metaphorically apt for the current state of American society and the ridiculous bakes that have ensued because of it. Yeah, I'm about to put a fucking sandwich board on and like get out. Like if I was living in Boyle Heights, like forget it. You would have already lost me to like the street throng. Yeah. No, it's genuinely horrifying. It is just American society is just to there's no, this is a cliche at this point to say because it's so obvious. But there's only the driver's here right now.

Like it's no one's running it. No. No. Everything is running absolutely. wild and there's yeah nobody really knows what to do we're like this is a self-driving car right right yeah as it's like four feet past the cliff like wily coyote style money don't worry it's about to turn around you guys live in l.a how is your experience with the firebend well you look at your phone and you look at the sky and it says bad stuff in both and so you you know you read the sky as we have always done and you find out from your phone that like even basic measurements of air quality

are telling you it's basically unsafe to be outside and to not be indoors with like some sort of way of purifying the air and you stay home you never leave your house anymore and you sink into a kind of bizarre depression outside of time and space and you start drifting off and before you know it you're playing balatro anyway sorry i've gotten a little lost or in my case like you you start like moving backwards, like in video games and start, like, developing a retro game obsession, like giving yourself more reasons to stay inside and to, and to sort of, like, devolve yourself. This feels like it's like the Resident Evil smog or something. Yeah.

Staying in the, like, video game category, I've been trying to find a game. And it's really hard when you just, like, don't feel good anyways. And I tried Forza Horizon. and I, when I saw the mechanic of rewinding that you can do, so it's like, okay, let's rewind to the last point where the car still looked like it was on a decent trajectory. And I was like, why don't I have that for my life? Why don't I have that for my fucking life?

Because there were a few moments that I could have renegotiated. I think that they made an Adam Sandler movie about that. Yeah. Right. Fuck. I think so bad they're an Adam Sandler movie. plot. And like one that's sad for some reason? Yeah, hey, there's an Adam Sandler

movie. It's an Adam Sandler movie and it's not just not funny, it's also really sad. Yeah, it's like one of the three is one of the two sad ones. Boiling up in Boyle Heights. The entire story of the Boyle Heights fire really reads like a series of worst case scenario events. A Rube Goldberg

machine of continuous tragedy initially put into motion by a mysterious ignition in a cold storage warehouse facility on June 17th. The more research I've done into it, the more it feels like the Chernobyl of meat storage facility fires, which while certainly being less bad than the Chernobyl of nuclear reactors, it's certainly not a good

thing for something to be. Given these similarities, I've decided to cover this story by providing a brief, month-long timeline of the fire in its fallout. Yes, perfect. Picture me today as your frozen meat version of fictional HBO Chernobyl series show, character, Valeri Lagasov.

Okay, wow. For your Chernobyl heads out there. Somebody just watched Chernobyl and realized it was one of the best TV shows about it. It's like my fourth time watching it. It's so good. It's so good. It's so good.

It's so depressing. Are you depressed right now? It feels good to watch when you're feeling down. I know. Yeah, I watched it. I'm like, thank God that I live in a capitalist society that would deal poorly with public health emergencies. Yeah.

The cause of the initial fire remains unclear. Given how long the facility burned and how large the fire was, it's likely going to be far more difficult than normal for any investigation to ever find a definitive cause. As you've heard before, this fire was very intense, happening across 11 acres of storage facility, lasting for worth a whole week in a densely populated urban area. This is obviously quite unusual. Perfect material to bake around, if you love conspiracy theories, though, but is mainly a product of its location. Cold storage warehouses, such as this one, have heavily insulated walls to keep all the cool

temperature inside. Unfortunately, this insulation also does a very good job of keeping the very hot temperatures in. This is the first of actually many different reasons why the foam insulating this building would prove to be a nightmare for fire crews, but I'll get to those as we come. When firefighters arrived at the initial scene on the first day, the image they saw was billows of smoke emanating from the roof of a massive windowless square facility. Though initial attempts at aggressively treating the roof fire were quickly thwarted, as an ammonium gas leak forced firefighters off of the roof just 15 minutes after the operation began.

With the well-insulated walls of the building protecting most of the fire, innoxious gases preventing a safe approach onto the facility, the LAFD, Los Angeles Fire Department, took what they called an unconventional approach. Though not typically deployed in structure fires due to safety concerns, L-AFD helicopters performed water drops to knock down the bulk of the flames. Again, just very Chernobyl imagery. I promise I'm not shoehorning it in here. There was a video somebody posted on TikTok of a helicopter, like one of the water helicopters, disappearing into the mist, like out of the Stephen King novel. It was crazy. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries,

go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie. 10 episodes of perverts with Julian Live, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of trickle down

with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners.

Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think. Out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.