California cold-storage provider sues solar businesses over $1 billion rooftop fire 

Cold-storage REIT Lineage, Inc. has filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against commercial solar operator Altus Power, Inc., its project subsidiary Los Palos Street Operating, LLC, and maintenance contractor Pearce Services LLC, alleging operational negligence caused the June 17 fire that destroyed Lineage’s 46,451.52 m² facility in Boyle Heights.

The facility served as a central hub for temperature-controlled logistics, housing tens of millions of pounds of perishable food items including frozen meats, produce, and commercial grocery stock.

The lawsuit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, citing counts of negligence, negligent supervision, breach of contract, and state health and safety code violations. 

According to the complaint, the fire originated within the facility’s rooftop solar array, which spans an area equivalent to eight football fields, while crews from Pearce Services were conducting testing and work on the energized system.  

Lineage contends that the solar operator and contractor re-energized the array despite explicit, written instructions from Lineage on June 11 to keep the system off until critical safety and voltage checks were performed. 

“This lawsuit is about Altus and Pearce starting this fire and then being nowhere to be found when the community needed help,” Lineage President and chief executive officer Greg Lehmkuhl said in a statement. “The record is clear: this was a solar fire. Cold storage is not a risk to communities.”

Industry safety benchmarks cited by UL (Underwriters Laboratories) and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) place the risk of residential rooftop solar fires in the U.S. at roughly 0.1 fires per 1,000 systems per year, or about 0.01%.

The legal filing reveals a prior safety incident at the site in August 2024, when a smaller fire broke out in the same rooftop array. Following that event, Altus retained Pearce, a subsidiary of real estate brokerage firm CBRE, to reconfigure the system. 

However, internal inspection records cited in the complaint indicate that by May 2026, inspectors had identified over 200 PV connector failures across the array, including mismatched jumper connections and loose bolts in the specific quadrant where the June 17 fire began. 

The fire burned for eight days, triggering local emergency declarations and leaving nearly 85 million pounds of food inside the destroyed freezer before an intensive, two-month cleanup effort was completed on September 5.  

Lineage claims it spent over $100 million on direct site remediation, environmental cleanup, and neighborhood relief efforts, costs it now seeks to recover along with property losses and indemnification against pending class-action suits brought by local residents. 

Both Altus Power and Pearce Services have rejected the claims.

A spokesperson for Altus called the lawsuit “riddled with misinformation” and a “blatant attempt to deflect blame for their role in this matter, including any damage caused by the release of substances from the warehouse, not the solar panel.”  

Pearce Services stated that drawing early conclusions is premature while official cause-and-origin investigations remain ongoing. 

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has not yet issued its final investigative findings regarding the official cause of the blaze.