Industrial’s Fire Problem: Warehouses Are Bigger, Colder, Harder To Save

Back-to-back blazes in Los Angeles and Chicago have highlighted how today’s  bigger, more technologically advanced warehouses, especially those outfitted for cold storage, are at greater risk for fire.

Developers are racing to build larger, more centralized facilities that pack in more goods and are increasingly operated by robotic workers rather than human ones. That shift is producing a new class of higher‑risk industrial buildings that can turn a single spark into a multimillion‑dollar mess.

“It is getting to be a bigger issue because literally the size of the buildings is part of the problem,” said Susan Phillips, a Pitzer College professor who has studied warehouses and their environmental hazards. 

A fire that broke out at a 500K SF cold storage facility on June 17 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles burned for more than a week, spewing toxins into the air as coolant inside the facility burned and prompting emergency declarations by state and local officials.

Less than a week later, a fire sprung up at a similar facility in Chicago and was extinguished more quickly but was followed by a blaze at an under-construction warehouse near the Bronzeville neighborhood on July 5.

Data around warehouse fires remains decentralized, but existing sources highlight an increase in more serious incidents in recent years. A 2024 blaze in suburban Detroit sent flaming combustibles skyward and launched debris a mile away, with a canister flung from the property striking and killing a 19-year-old man. 

Another fire that year in Los Angeles County at a warehouse storing goods for the oil and gas industry shot yellow smoke into the sky. A 2022 blaze that leveled a Walmart facility in Plainfield, Indiana, was the size of 20 football fields and took more than 350 firefighters to contain.

Roughly 1,544 warehouse fires occurred every year between 2020 and 2024, which resulted in an average of two deaths and 17 injuries annually, according to a February report from the National Fire Protection Association that excluded cold storage facilities.

Going back to the 1980s, there are actually fewer warehouse fires today, but they tend to be larger and costlier, with damage averaging $200M per year. 

The size of the average warehouse in America has mushroomed in recent years. The median warehouse in 2022 was 25% bigger than it was in 2012, according to CBRE. That number was driven up in part by the behemoth facilities built by Amazon as it began its steady expansion of distribution facilities in 2020.

Distribution companies have ramped up their use of robotics and other high-tech equipment in their warehouses.

These additions improve efficiency in the warehouses but also mean they're filled with high-powered equipment that can include flammable lithium-ion batteries or potentially hazardous wiring. Cold storage facilities, needed for e-commerce companies' push into grocery delivery, use coolants that can act as accelerants. 

The largest industrial facilities in the U.S. are generally owned by manufacturing companies like Boeing and Tesla, but warehouses used by distributors such as Walmart or Amazon can reach 3M SF to 4M SF.

“Consumers now expect vast, fast-cycling selection and, if ordering online, speedy delivery,” said Lisa DeNight, head of North American industrial research at Newmark. “To store that much variety economically, warehouses have grown larger, taller and more efficiently designed for high throughput, supported by sophisticated and expensive inventory management systems.”

There’s also economic incentive for larger warehouses, DeNight said. Bigger, taller, denser buildings amortize increasingly expensive land over more revenue-generating square footage, especially in infill markets where land is scarce.

These bigger, fuller buildings mean more fuel and less air flow, making flames harder to quench, according to an August 2025 report by Zurich Insurance Group.

The report found that a “too-tall, too dense” approach to commercial warehouse storage has led to increased risks. 

The causes of the recent fires are still unknown in an official capacity, though Boyle Heights authorities believe rooftop solar panels sparked the fire there. But firefighters were unable to enter the building at first because of heavy-duty rack shelving, and burning chemicals inside created a health hazard for surrounding neighborhoods. 

Cold storage fires can burn for weeks because of their heavily insulated walls and ceilings, a Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesperson told NPR.

Cold storage has seen a surge in new facilities in the last five years, including those positioned closer to urban areas to help speed the cold chain and food delivery, with modern facilities built with up to 80-foot clear heights and automated to require minimum human intervention.  

Bisnow reached out to a dozen cold storage owners and operators and building safety experts for this story, but none responded by press time. Lineage Logistics, which operates the Boyle Heights facility, declined to comment.

In anticipation of a July 9 community meeting, Lineage put out a statement, saying it would focus on finishing demolition and cleanup as quickly as possible.

This isn't the first time a Lineage-linked cold storage warehouse has burned. A warehouse the company operated in Finley, Washington, caught fire in 2024, and Lineage signage can be seen on the exterior of one of the Chicago sites that burned late last month. After the Finley fire, Lineage made a net gain of $107M from insurance reimbursements.

There is about 5.9M SF of new cold storage product in the construction pipeline, according to a recent Newmark report. 

While these warehouses are storing perfectly legal consumer products and foods, there are also significant amounts of materials and chemicals, especially in the packaging and many consumer products, that can become toxic when burned, Phillips said.   

Other materials simply act as accelerants, like oil-laden pallets of frozen french fries. Another June fire at a Medline Industries warehouse in Tracy, California, ignited a massive cache of medical supplies and destroyed a 925K SF warehouse. The cause remains under investigation.

The issue of fire safety of large warehouses isn’t likely to go away as their popularity persists.

These larger facilities have seen increased leasing activity by data centers, manufacturing and third-party logistics providers. Leasing for 500K SF sites jumped 31% year-over-year in 2025, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

But despite calls for more oversight in the wake of warehouse fires, attempts to regulate fire safety at these warehouses haven't produced much in the way of proposed legislation or policy.

Insurance companies, fire departments and industry associations have produced specialized guides for warehouse fire mitigation and suppression, but relying on firefighting methods may not be enough.

“Unfortunately, this trend is creating scenarios that set the stage for larger, more destructive fires that exceed the abilities of even the most experienced firefighters,” the Zurich report says.