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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, visitEric Rector covers his face as he runs down a hill from flames racing through the Topanga Canyon area east of Malibu on Nov. 3, 1993, when the last major fire struck the area. A lot of vegetation has built up since then.
Looking out across the Santa Monica Mountains, you can see small communities tucked in between dense chaparral that hasn’t burned in 30 plus years. Meaning, there’s a whole lot energy ready to fuel fires that roll through. “We know that fire history tells us on a high risk day, if we don’t suppress a fire within the first 10 minutes, it has a high probability of extending to the Pacific,” Smith said.Smith estimates that it'd take one of these worst case scenario fires about four hours to sweep westward, from the San Fernando Valley to the Pacific Ocean, destroying communities along the way. Just as we saw during the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which made its way 17 miles across L.A.
Back your car into your driveway and have your go bag in the car, ready to leave at a moment’s notice In addition to obscuring the true health risks of pollution and swerving away from tighter control on local polluters, the rule threatens the potency of the Clean Air Act, experts argue, at a time when the climate crisis is posing an unprecedented challenge to the health of millions of Americans."Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret" is a collaboration of The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian. Molly Peterson is a reporter for The California Newsroom.
Meeting air-quality standards matters a lot to industry and politicians. Violations can add up to stricter, more costly and potentially unpopular pollution controls. The EPA also pointed to “mitigation plans,” in which air districts that have experienced repeated exceptional events must create plans for educating and notifying the public about the pollution risk, as well as “steps to identify, study, and implement mitigating measures” like limiting use of wood-burning stoves and wetting down unpaved roads before dust storms.
Wildfire smoke is a dirty and complicated polluter. Limaye, of the NRDC, called it a “toxic soup of air pollution.” It carries soot and ash, regulated as particulate pollution, as well as hydrocarbons and other gases that, cooked in sunlight, help form ground-level ozone. It’s a growing concern for public health, both near the source and thousands of miles away. Smoke, especially from a long-burning fire, can travel long distances and linger at dangerous levels for weeks at a time.
During one fire in 2021, a thick plume of smoke covered the sun in the town of Grass Valley. “We couldn’t see past down the driveway,” said Dr. Alinea Stevens, the medical director at the Chapa-De Indian Health clinic in town. The surge of asthma and other health problems from smoke can be overlooked when it happens in a rural community, she said: “I think it’s maybe a way that we don’t put enough attention into fixing something that can be fixed.”
Alinea Stevens, the medical director at the Chapa-De Indian Health Clinic, on Oct. 4, 2023 in Grass Valley, California. During a fire in 2021, a thick plume of smoke covered the sun in Grass Valley.In 2017, Maitreyi Siruguri and her husband woke in the night to a sky lit unnaturally orange. They left their Santa Rosa home with their young children in the early hours of the morning; the fire that eventually swirled through went on to kill 22 people and destroy more than 5,600 structures.
Wara, of Stanford’s Woods Institute, argues that such an inheritance requires investment. Rather than trying to protect the status quo, he said, governments could make a new cost-benefit analysis. “It’s hard for the general public to know. The next time I see bad air quality, I will be looking for how that’s getting recorded,” Siruguri said. “It is concerning that these decisions are made behind the scenes, almost.”
Nevertheless, the EPA has asked the South Coast Air Quality Management District to write up plans to mitigate the effects of wildfire and fireworks exceptional events; those plans are due next year.Airborne dust is becoming a bigger problem in Southern California, partly because of development and partly because of weather conditions.
A new investigation from The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian found that local regulators are turning to the exceptional events rule for wildfires more and more often to reach air-quality goals — goals that are harder to meet as the climate crisis gets worse. In the spring of 1998, air-quality managers in his home state found themselves in a tough spot. A wildfire on Mexico’s drought-stricken Yucatán peninsula had sent acrid smoke north, and around that time Oklahoma City exceeded its pollution limits. If the soot and ozone stayed on the books, they’d have to tighten controls on known local polluters. Instead, they argued to the EPA that the pollution shouldn’t count because it came from a wildfire, and so was “natural” and “uncontrollable”.
Local air officials often spend months, using publicly funded atmospheric modeling and meteorological data, to create hundreds of pages documenting why pollution exceedances shouldn’t count – sometimes with the help of industry-funded consultants. Businesses and industry representatives lobbied local air regulators before an event was even considered, as happened in Kentucky, and worked together with them to file exceptional event requests, as happened in Louisiana.
In response to questions, a spokesperson for the EPA, Khanya Brann, said the agency “takes our decisions related to exceptional events seriously. We recognize that even when pollution is not something that an air agency can control, people still are breathing the polluted air.” When the Clean Air Act was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, it focused on pollution from soot-spewing smokestacks and freeways full of cars with tailpipes.
“This is a big problem,” said Leonard of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center. “And you’re not only actively ignoring it, you’re actively trying to get out of doing something about it.”Fires. Mudslides. Heat waves. What questions do you need answered as you prepare for the effects of the climate emergency?Suzanne Somers poses at a ceremony honoring her with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Jan. 24, 2003 in Hollywood. Somers has died at the age of 76.
Somers said she was fired from that job when she asked to be paid equally with her male costars. In a virtual appearance of the game showhosted by LAist in 2020, Somers said it was a hard time in her life, but one that led to her later success.God, I couldn't get a job anywhere," Somers said."I got fired because I wanted to be paid commensurate with the men and my contract was up . At that timet hey didn't like the idea that we women should be paid commensurate with the men.
“Our goal is just to see less wildlife poisoned and sickened by these products,” Vanai said. “So we really think this bill will go a long way to reducing that problem.”Diphacinone is the most common"first-generation" rat poison to be found within non-target wildlife. In the 2023 report, the Department of Pesticide Regulation said there was a significant increase in the number of animals exposed to the chemical.
Raptors Are the Solution encourages people to report violators of the new ban, effective in January, to the CA Department of Pesticide Regulation or your local The lawsuit filed by Trader Joe's against Trader Joe included this tweet to support its claim that the cryptocurrency exchange modeled their brand story after the supermarket.The exchange lets users buy and sell cryptocurrency without the involvement of a bank or other third parties.Liu offered an explanation in his 2022 response to a World Intellectual Property Organization complaint filed by the supermarket — an explanation the suit filed in California dismisses.
The organization has been calling on rescue officers from across the country to assist with finding lost and dead pets since August. But so far, Garcia and his fellow rescue officers have mostly come across dead animals. Once these animals are found, the team scans the microchips and provide Maui Humane with tracking numbers to notify the pet owners.
Jesus says there are only about a couple thousands growing in the Inyo Montains and they play an important role for bugs. "When the Desert Protective Act passed in 1994, The conglomerate Mesa was released from wilderness consideration. The has to permit their activities up there," Anderson said.
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