For eight brutal days, residents of Boyle Heights watched smoke billow from a burning warehouse and prayed the flames would spare their homes.

There was no escaping the black pollution that choked the neighborhood then, and no reprieve now, even five weeks after the fire was extinguished. The smell of burning plastic has been replaced by something else: the pungent odor of rotting food, and everything that comes with it.

The inescapable stench – equal parts sour and cloying – has settled like a thick haze over the neighborhood, baked by the Southern California heat.

Boyle Heights locals say the stink is making them physically sick, and that swarms of flies and giant rats have followed the noxious odor into their neighborhood.

When it went up in flames in mid-June, the warehouse contained 88 million pounds of frozen food, some of which burned in the blaze and some liquified. That amount of waste would fill roughly 440,000 curbside trash bins. Lined up wheel-to-wheel, they would stretch more than 200 miles, roughly the distance between Washington, DC and New York City.

Now, cleanup crews are racing against the clock to remove what the fire left behind, including waste so toxic it needs to be sealed in hazmat containers. The City of Los Angeles has directed Lineage Logistics, the largest owner of cold-storage facilities in the world and operator of the repository, to clear the waste by August 13 — a timeline one company executive called “very aggressive” at a town hall last month.

When the wind shifts, the smells from the warehouse waft miles away, even weeks after the fire was extinguished.

But in Boyle Heights, the putrid scent of fermented food is a fetid constant. It lingers in the air and coats the mouth. 90% of residents in the predominantly Latino neighborhood said they noticed constant odors in a recently released county public health survey.

In an effort to stymie the foul smell, part of the facility is wrapped in plastic sheeting while large fans spray odor-control mist around the warehouse. The food waste is sprayed with bleach, deodorizer and water before it’s covered and hauled to a landfill in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles.

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