Burning throats and persistent headaches: What life is like in Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by a weeklong warehouse fire | CNN

When Ethan Salter got home from a recording session last Wednesday, he thought the warehouse fire that started burning that day a mere block from his Boyle Heights home was already out. He couldn’t really smell anything and didn’t see much ash. “It seemed totally fine,” he said of the first day of the fire. But, the next morning, the 23-year-old musician felt “awful.” “My lungs felt heavy, my chest was just closing up,” Salter said. It was then he decided he needed to leave his Los Angeles neighborhood. “My immediate instinct was ‘I’m going to pack everything and get out of here as soon as I can, because this is very dangerous,’” he recalled. The Boyle Heights community has been left reeling since the persistent blaze at the privately owned cold-storage warehouse broke out June 17, sending smoke throughout the Southland and residents seeking refuge indoors as efforts continue to extinguish it. In a Monday press briefing, Derek Chapman, deputy fire chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he expects the department “will continue to make progress on this fire and get to its conclusion in the next few days.” In the meantime, residents of the Los A