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LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network. For the latest national news from NPR and our live radio broadcast, visitan exclusive look behind the scenes of the scandal — host Antonia Cereijido talks to councilmembers Nithya Raman and Eunisses Hernandez about the fallout from the leaked tapes.She says the leak of the tapes — which included racist and derogatory comments from fellow councilmembers — has made her more wary.
More and more communities have been transitioning their family assistance centers into long-term operations. Over the last decade, the Department of Justice has met the demand by awarding millions of dollars in grants to about 20 communities that want to provide ongoing legal aid, victim's advocacy and mental health counseling to survivors.
That’s why there’s so much emphasis on offering stress-reduction activities such as yoga, Buddhist chanting, beading, cooking or journaling.We have heard a lot of individuals that don't feel comfortable going out,” Loc said. “These are signs that they're affected by . Hopefully coming through to the center, they could learn coping skills to be more comfortable with the new norm.
The center has worked with more than 10,000 people so far — survivors, first responders, their families — but estimates there are still many other people experiencing trauma who haven’t used their services. Winkler said that’s why the Vegas center is staying open for “essentially forever” — to be there for those people who need more time.
Benson Lee, a kung fu master, teaches self-defense moves to Maria Liang, the former owner of the Star Dance Ballroom Studio at the Monterey Park Resiliency Center.Liang, switching to Mandarin, said she tried the class because the world doesn’t feel safe and she wanted to learn better awareness and ways to protect herself.Liang had been handed a calendar of activities the night before when she attended a private event for survivors held at the community center.
Josie Huang reports on the intersection of being Asian and American and the impact of those growing communities in Southern California.In Southeast L.A., community members have organized against the stench of dead animals and other environmental problems for years. The fight for reforms, many told us, can feel neverending.
Two decades later, Hernandez Nimatuj now lives a few miles away in Walnut Park and says the smell still vexes them. Occasionally, it seeps into their home, but it’s been less intense in recent months.Community members in Southeast L.A. have long complained about putrid odors — smells air regulators have tied to a handful of nearby rendering companies, which recycle expired meat from grocery stores and dead animal carcasses from farms into other products.
Hernandez Nimatuj hopped on a tour for the first time in the summer of 2000. Through this experience, they learned that the stench of decaying animals came from rendering companies in and near the city of Vernon. And those bubbles at Park Avenue Elementary? That wasThe tour inspired Hernandez Nimatuj to become an environmental justice activist.
In 2009, East Yard members distributed door hangers throughout the area, much like the type you might see during an election campaign.you can look up details here, East Yard’s community organizer and special projects coordinator, lives in unincorporated East L.A. He said the rendering odors have repeatedly driven him and his daughters inside the house, robbing them of their right to enjoy the outdoors.
When the stench comes, said Bojorquez, “I go, knocking on neighbors’ . ‘Alright, guys, I smell it! Let’s all report it.’” Cities like Vernon that are almost entirely industrial, he said, are focused on generating the maximum amount of revenue, sometimes at the expense of those residents. “People build this infrastructure, they build these companies, they profit from it. But the people that are paying the biggest part of the bill are the people that live around those places,” he said. “We’re the ones breathing the air, it’s our children playing in the lead-contaminated dirt.”Residents of Southeast L.A., as well as Boyle Heights and East L.A, have dealt with rendering plant odors for decades — all this on top of a slew of other environmental issues.
The district attorney enacted a sweeping set of reforms when he took office. They resulted in a dramatic reduction in theinvolved in shootings and other uses of force, filing charges against 15 officers over three years. The previous two DA’s filed charges against two officers over nearly 20 years. L.A. County staff now have 90 days to report back with recommendations “to curtail the selling, leasing, or renting of Recreational Vehicles and oversized vessels in the public right-of-way.”
On alert days, “smoke’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s there when you’re going to bed at night,” said Michelle King, the assistant director of the Louisville metro air pollution control district. But these exceptional events are no longer exceptional, and the requests to obscure them from air-quality records are more common, according to an investigation from the Guardian, The California Newsroom and MuckRock. Without reform, the exceptional events rule is likely to become a regularly used tool, one that experts warn may divert resources or distract from addressing the growing problem of wildfire smoke.
A warming climate has helped to set the stage for wildfires to burn hotter and bigger. “Stopping them or making them less severe is going to be very hard and going to involve intervention on a scale that we’re just currently not prepared or able to do,” said the environmental scientist Marshall Burke, one of the leaders of Stanford’s work.
Dave Jefferis hands a flag he rescued from burning to his neighbor, Jim Marchio. Both stayed behind to defend their homes from the River Fire Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.“There’s going to be much more pressure on regulatory agencies to take advantage of exceptional events,” added Carb’s Benjamin.
“Just because they scrub that out of the record doesn’t mean that smoke isn’t in their lungs,” he said. Similarly, the Western Governors’ Association has argued for greater state flexibility, complaining both that “the rule is resource intensive, costly, and place a significant burden on strained state resources,” and that regulators are slow to act on it. The nonpartisan association suggested to lawmakers that rules should permit more complicated multistate exceptions.The EPA, for its part, maintains it is following the law.
Though the EPA strips exceptional events-related data from regulatory use, epidemiologists and health experts continue to analyze air quality using unmodified data,. In its annual State of the Air report, the American Lung Association has always included pollution exceedances that exceptional events would leave out, said Will Barrett, a clean-air expert for the group.
EPA spokesperson Brann wrote that the agency “supports efforts by agencies across the federal government — including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior, as well as interagency forums such as the Wildland Fire Leadership Council — to implement and further develop strategies to reduce wildfire risk, and to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.
Massive fires in Northern California in August 2018 blew smoke into many states across the country, captured here over 36-hour period.“States who have tried to keep these things separate — to keep climate change and exposure to local air pollution as two distinct things — I don’t think they’re going to be able to maintain that indefinitely,” he said.
Smoke, he said, “made a permanent and lasting impact” on his psyche and life path. Now 26 years old and a grassroots climate activist, he points out that “in crisis, people look to authority for answers."“We were thinking like the impacts of climate change were distant,” Mir said. “But now, it’s quite literally the air that I breathe.
“It wasn't the takeaway we wanted to see,” Bass told LAist. “But it was important to clarify what that barrier was and how we can go about it.” In a statement to LAist, McDonough’s office said they’ll continue to focus on ensuring unhoused veterans can get housing.During Tuesday’s meeting, Bass said, McDonough did offer one possible solution to get some unhoused veterans into housing.
“The HUD secretary notified us that we were in danger of actually losing money that had been awarded by HUD to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars,” Bass said.Bass’ concern is that Congress could claw back any funding cities have that hasn’t been designated for specific uses.City officials invited McDonough to come tour more VA facilities in L.A., including a medical center in the San Fernando Valley that he hasn’t yet visited, Bass said.
Major climate-focused laws passed in 2021 and 2022, like the Inflation Reduction Act, have put the country on a solid theoretical pathway toward hitting that goal, says aThe two dozen engineers, scientists, medical specialists, and policy experts who authored the report developed a series of recommendations for how to take that theoretical pathway into concrete actions.
"The transition is not only technical but social, and political, and institutional," says Romero-Lankao.
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