A fast-moving wildfire burned through a hillside community in San Bernardino on Monday afternoon, sending residents running and engulfing homes with black smoke and rippling, sky-high flames.
The Edgehill fire erupted in the 3300 block of Beverly Drive on Little Mountain about 2:40 p.m., according to San Bernardino County fire officials, who called for 10 additional engines immediately when they arrived, and reported at the time that the fire had already burned five acres.
Early reports said the fire grew to at least 100 acres. By about 6 p.m., county officials said that the forward progress of the fire had been stopped, and that the blaze was holding at 54 acres with 25% contained.
“At this point the fire is very much under control,” according to a statement late Monday evening from the San Bernardino Police Department, which has been working closely with county fire officials.
Arson investigators are still assessing the scene to determine how the fire started. One person was detained for a few hours but has since been released, according to the police.
Dramatic videos from the scene show at least three homes consumed by fire, with residents rushing to leave their burning properties amid blackened, smoke-filled skies. One video circulating on social media shows a man hurrying as quickly as possible while cradling a large turkey that he had presumably saved from the raging fire.
Homeowner Martin Schneider uses a pail to throw water on the burning ground behind his house in San Bernardino on Monday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Directly downwind of the burning homes, more than eight neighbors scrambled to help Martin and Sandra Schneider save their home from flying embers.
They could see the homes above them on the ridge completely aflame, and using whatever they could — garden hoses, rakes, buckets of water — they helped the Schneiders buy time while firefighters uphill called for additional backup.
“I’m grateful for the community coming together,” Sandra Schneider said. “They were true heroes until the Fire Department came.”
Temperatures in San Bernardino soared to more than 100 degrees on Monday. The National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for the area until 11 p.m. Tuesday, saying conditions would be dangerously hot, with the thermometer expected to reach 110 degrees.
Evacuation orders were issued to all residents south of Ridge Line Drive and north of Edgehill Road, west to and including Beverly Drive, and east to Circle Road. As of 9 p.m. Monday, authorities said the evacuation orders would remain in effect.
The Red Cross has set up an evacuation center and is providing overnight shelter at Cajon High School, at 1200 W. Hill Drive, for anyone affected by the fire.
A resident uses a garden hose to help save a house on West Edgehill Road in San Bernardino on Monday afternoon.
After decades of resistance, Carmel-by-the-Sea is about to address some of its residents’ biggest frustrations.
Quite literally.
The moneyed little town, where homes and businesses have no street addresses, soon will have numbers assigned to its buildings, forgoing a cherished local tradition after too many complaints about lost packages, trouble setting up utilities and banking accounts, and other problems.
The Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council approved establishing street addresses in a 3-2 vote earlier this month, with proponents citing public safety concerns and the need to abide by the state fire code, which requires buildings to be numbered.
“Do we need to wait for someone to die in order to decide that this is the right thing to do? It is the law,” said Councilmember Karen Ferlito, who voted in favor of addresses.
Rather than street numbers, residents in the town of 3,200 have long used directional descriptors: City Hall is on the east side of Monte Verde Street between Ocean and 7th avenues. And they give their homes whimsical names such as Sea Castle, Somewhere and Faux Chateau.
There is no home mail delivery. Locals pick up their parcels at the downtown post office, where, many say, serendipitous run-ins with neighbors are an essential part of the small-town charm.
For more than 100 years, residents fought to keep it that way, once threatening to secede from California if addresses were imposed. They argued that the lack of house numbers — along with other quirks, such as no streetlights or sidewalks in residential areas — added to the vaunted “village character.”
“We are losing this place, day by day and week by week, from people who want to modernize us, who want to take us to a new level, when we want to stay where we are,” Neal Kruse, co-chair of the Carmel Preservation Assn., said during the July 9 City Council meeting at which addresses were approved.
Carol Oaks stands in front of her home, which is named “Somewhere” and has no formal address. Carmel-by-the-Sea will soon number its homes and businesses.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The debate over street numbers has simmered for years and intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people began shopping online more frequently and struggled to get their packages delivered.
Some residents and tourists worry that if they have an accident or a medical issue, emergency responders will have trouble finding them. Others have had trouble receiving mail-order prescriptions and medical equipment.
“This is a life-and-death situation in my life and my family,” resident Deanna Dickman told the City Council. “I want a street address that people can find on GPS and get there, and my wife can get the medication she needs.”
Dickman said her wife needs a shot that comes through the mail and must be refrigerated. If she can’t get it delivered, she has to travel to an infusion center and get her medication every 30 days “so she can breathe,” Dickman said.
Dickman once had her own temperature-controlled medication “tossed over a fence a block away.” The property owner was not home, and it spoiled.
Resident Susan Bjerre said she once needed oxygen delivered to her house for someone who had just gotten out of the hospital. The delivery driver could not find the residence, so she said: “I will be in the street. I will wave you down.”
“This is going to sound really snarky, but I think people who oppose instituting an address system don’t realize how inconsiderate they are to everyone else,” Bjerre said.
Another speaker, Alice Cory, said she worried that implementing addresses in Carmel-by-the-Sea — long a haven for artists, writers and poets — “would just make us another town along the coast.”
In the one-square-mile town, “the police know where everybody is,” and fire officials get to people quickly because there are so few streets, she said.
“Let’s keep it that way, and let’s keep the sweetness of this little town, because people know Carmel for a reason,” she said.
Neal Kruse, center, with Karyl Hall and her dog, Bubbles, chat with a resident at the Carmel Preservation Assn. booth at a farmers market. Kruse and Hall worry street addresses will hurt the town’s character.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Emily Garay, a city administrative analyst, told the council that while local authorities might be familiar with Carmel-by-the-Sea’s unconventional navigational practices, other emergency responders — such as the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection or Monterey County’s contracted ambulance provider — might struggle to quickly figure out where people live.
The California Fire Code requires buildings to have and display addresses. But Carmel-by-the-Sea has not enforced the provision.
“I believe, as a professional firefighter for over 37 years [with] a lot of experience in emergency response, that if the question is, ‘Is it more advantageous to have building numbers identified?’ Yes, absolutely,” Andrew Miller, chief of the Monterey Fire Department, told the council.
Residents opposed to street addresses have said they fear that numbering houses would lead to home mail delivery — which, in turn, could trigger the closure of the Carmel-by-the-Sea post office.
In January, David Rupert, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service told The Times that the post office had “been serving the local community since 1889” and there were no plans to close it. (The lobby for the post office was red-tagged this spring after a septuagenarian crashed her red Tesla through the front windows.)
Garay said addresses would not trigger home delivery.
Before voting against addresses, Mayor Dave Potter said he was “concerned about the fact that we’re kind of losing our character of our community along the way here” and that it had become the nature of the community “to fight over little things.”
But Ferlito said she had received “piles of emails from residents” who wanted addresses and worried about being found in a crisis.
“If we’re saying we will lose our quaintness because we have an address, I think that’s a false narrative,” she said. “This is more than quaintness. This is life emergencies.”
A brush fire erupted Monday afternoon in the city of Corona, threatening dozens of homes, closing streets and prompting some evacuations, according to the Corona Fire Department.
The brush fire, dubbed the Serrano fire, broke out around 2:42 p.m. in the 600 block of Corona Avenue, not far from Serrano Drive, according to Corona fire spokesman Daniel Yonan.
Late afternoon sunlight seeps through the brush as firefighters fight the Serrano fire from the ground and air in Corona on Monday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
He said the fire started to move toward dozens of homes up on Mandevilla Way, prompting fire officials to call for two water helicopters and other reinforcements. Later in the afternoon, officials reported that the fire’s spread had been stopped and the blaze contained to less than 12 acres, although crews from 18 engines were on the scene and continuing to put out hot spots.
No official evacuation orders were issued, but law enforcement officers asked residents living along Mandevilla Way, Via Blairo and Tampico Circle to evacuate out of precaution. Those orders were to remain in place until 8 p.m. Monday.
Police also closed several major roads into the area, including Parkridge Avenue at Tesoro Way, Hidden Valley Parkway at Via Blairo and Corona Avenue at Gilmore Drive.
No homes had been lost and no injuries reported as of 5 p.m. Monday. The cause of the fire remains unknown and under investigation.
Fire officials plan to send more updates for residents on social media.
Residents of Mar Vista are certain that they are being watched.
And Jennifer Bedolla knows who it is: the pack of coyotes that she often catches lounging in her yard and who leave the carcasses of neighborhood pets around her home.
In previous years, the occasional coyote would pass through the area at dusk. But this year is different as the pack grows bolder, with coyotes trailing after people as they walk their dogs and lunging at pets and children.
“They’ve become more and more aggressive,” Bedolla said. “They’re just not afraid of humans. They’re just right on your back, running into you and not running away.”
The official response from the city of Los Angeles is that residents can clear brush from around their homes, bang pots and pans to scare away coyotes and overall coexist with the wild animals, according to an information campaign directed at the neighborhood.
Frustrated residents in the community just west of Culver City think L.A. officials do not appreciate their situation.
The usual methods don’t work for them, they say. Animal experts advise anyone who comes across a coyote to wave their arms, shout and make themselves appear as big as possible, but these coyotes are not skittish around their human neighbors.
Every day, among the hillsides the coyote yips and cries grow into a wild cacophony.
Bedolla said a coyote lunged at her 11-year-old son while he played soccer in his backyard as several other coyotes watched. She often carries her 9-year-old Maltese-poodle mix, Zola, when they go out for their weekly walk, because the coyotes seem to have claimed the neighborhood as their territory.
A number of pet dogs and cats have gone missing.
“I’ve cleaned so many neighborhood pets from my yard,” she said. “Just piles of fur and carcasses.”
Jennifer Bedolla stands on a top tier patio in her backyard, which has been inundated with very brazen coyotes in Mar Vista. Bedolla spotted 16 coyotes in her backyard recently.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
As hunters, coyotes are opportunists, experts say, their diet consisting of vermin, birds and, in suburban areas, human trash. They’re attracted to the scent of food on a person’s clothing and over the years have learned to live in close proximity to people.
For some residents, it’s a little too close for comfort.
But figuring out how they might get some relief — and who might help them — isn’t that easy.
One resident turned to the L.A. County agricultural commissioner’s Weights and Measures Bureau for help after a frightening encounter.
At around 11 p.m. on March 29, a person walking their dog in Mar Vista encountered a group of coyotes, said Chief Deputy Maximiliano Regis of the bureau.
“The coyote sort of stopped, looked at [the person] and then made some sort of screaming or yelp sounds,” Regis said.
The dog barked back, and the resident ran away, convinced they were about to be attacked. The person called Weights and Measures to investigate, and in early April an inspector found a mother coyote and four to five pups living in a nearby den.
The mother coyote was likely taking her pups out to hunt, Regis said. But the den is in Los Angeles city limits, and it’s up to the city to determine what to do next, according to Regis.
Los Angeles Animal Services coordinates with various agencies on wildlife within the city limits, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The city says the state agency manages the coyote population, but a spokesperson for Fish and Wildlife said the agency does not manage coyotes but provides information to local jurisdictions and the public on coyotes.
Coyotes at Jennifer Bedolla’s home in Mar Vista. One expert says the coyotes’ behavior is linked to pupping season.
(Jennifer Bedolla)
“Wildlife officers will respond to attacks,” the Fish and Wildlife spokesperson said, “but it is up to local agencies to deal with coyotes in their communities.”
L.A. Animal Services did not respond to follow-up questions about the city’s response to the coyote population. But in a statement, the agency said it hosted an online community meeting with the office of City Councilmember Traci Park as well as Fish and Wildlife to educate residents about “deterrents and property maintenance.”
The agency also hosts its own monthly information sessions about “how to safely coexist with wildlife, as well as ways for people to keep their pets safe,” according to a statement from L.A. Animal Services.
In Mar Vista, there’s a feeling that that type of safety is out of reach.
Resident Jeanelle Arias said a coyote snapped at her 14-year-old dog, Blaine, a toy breed, in their backyard. The coyote scampered away after Arias’ other dog, 7-year-old Bart, barked and gave chase. But the coyote didn’t run away, according to Arias. It hopped on top of a planter to watch what would happen next.
“If it wasn’t for Bart, Blaine would have been attacked,” Arias said. “There have been so many pets that have disappeared.”
On June 4, a coyote trailed closely behind a man as he walked his dog around the neighborhood, according to footage captured on a Ring camera video.
Neighbors said the man eventually spotted the coyote and yelled to scare away his stalker.
Shelley Beringhele has lived in Mar Vista for the last 10 years, but her family has been in the neighborhood since her grandfather Val Ramos built his home in 1963.
Coyotes were never a concern for the community, Beringhele said, but now shadow humans and pets.
“I find it disturbing how bold the coyotes have become and how little the city is willing to do about the situation,” Beringhele said.
But Rebecca Dmytryk, co-owner with Humane Wildlife Control, sounded a hopeful note. She said the coyotes’ behavior is tied to pupping season. Coyotes want to convey to other canines in the neighborhood that they have pups and are territorial.
“They want to make sure that dogs understand, ‘Do not come over here, because our pups are close by,’” Dmytryk said.
Despite the animal carcasses, Dmytryk doesn’t believe that coyotes are hunting neighborhood dogs but looking at them as intruders.
The coyote pupping season stretches for a few months, from when coyotes give birth to when the pups become juveniles and leave their parents. The coyote activity should die down by autumn, Dmytryk said.
Mar Vista is not unique, Dmytryk said. Other parts of Southern California are also enduring the pupping season, including sections of South Central Los Angeles and Woodland Hills, where she recently responded to one call to get coyotes out of a crawl space under a home.
Dmytryk said she’d been contacted by one concerned Mar Vista resident and her business uses humane means of hazing coyotes. She provided the resident with information about how they can protect their home, similar to the advice provided by the city. Her methods include humane traps.
California does not allow coyote traps within 150 yards of a residence without written consent, but that has not stopped some cities. Torrance contracted a trapper in an effort to manage its coyote population, which includes killing coyotes. The result was a state investigation over possible violation of the trapping law.
Although Dmytryk advocates for humane measures, she does agree that the city of Los Angeles should take a more proactive approach to tracking coyotes and investigate why they’re active in one area. Residents in Mar Vista agree, although some say they’re unsure what that would involve. They just know that they are fed up.
Mar Vista resident Shari Dunn, on a recent night, picked up a neighbor who had just encountered a coyote as she was walking her husky puppy. The neighbor screamed and became distraught over the encounter.
“I drove her home, and she was bawling,” Dunn said. “The woman had just gotten home from work and was walking her dog. I guess you can’t do that anymore.”
The recent killing of a young black bear by a homeowner near Lake Tahoe has infuriated residents, including neighbors who dispute the man’s story.
The fatal shooting happened around 1:30 p.m. on Memorial Day in an unincorporated neighborhood of El Dorado County, about 2 miles south of Lake Tahoe Airport.
Steve Gonzalez, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the man told investigators he was in his living room with his dog when a bear entered the home.
“He tried getting up and scaring off the bear by yelling at it and waving his arm, but the bear was acting in a menacing fashion,” Gonzalez said. “So, he retrieved his rifle that was nearby and shot the bear twice.”
A California Fish and Wildlife warden investigated the shooting of the young bear, and no charges were filed.
(Bogdan Yamkovenko)
He said the wounded bear ran off and climbed up a tree — but fell to the ground because of its injuries.
“The man approached the bear, saw that it was suffering and humanely euthanized it,” Gonzalez said. The man was not injured.
Gonzalez said a Fish and Wildlife warden investigated the shooting, and no charges were filed.
But the killing of the young bear has angered some residents, including Ann Bryant, director of the Bear League, a nonprofit based in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
She said two members of the league were sent to the neighborhood to document what had occurred after receiving a call from a distraught neighbor who had witnessed the shooting.
Bryant said the team members learned from the neighbors that the bear was never completely inside the house and that the homeowner had previously shot another bear.
She said team members attempted to speak to the warden but were mostly ignored. The shooting happened, she noted, at a time of year when young bears are parting from their mothers and learning to live on their own.
When she learned that the warden concluded that the shooting was self-defense and sought no criminal charges, she was livid.
“They believe him rather than all the neighbors who saw it and who know him and who have heard his discussions about how he feels about bears and know about the other killing,” she said. “It’s disappointing the department of wildlife would just turn a blind eye.”
Gonzalez said he did not know whether the homeowner had been involved in other bear shootings.
A neighbor who witnessed the shooting, Bogdan Yamkovenko, 43, said the small bear had spent most of the day in the neighborhood. He said it was about 1:30 p.m. when he noticed the bear come down from a tree he was napping on.
At the time, Yamkovenko was standing in the rear upstairs deck of his home when he noticed the little bear standing by his neighbor’s back door. He said he tried to make noises using his barbecue grill but the bear did not react.
Shortly after, he saw the bear poke his head inside the neighbor’s home, suggesting that the door was left halfway open or opened all the way.
“He inched his way in, getting further and further inside, but he never went all the way in,” he said. “You always saw a part of the bear.”
He then saw the bear step back, turn around, run off and climb up the tree he had been napping on earlier.
“That’s when I heard the first shot,” he said.
Yamkovenko ran down to his neighbor’s house, hoping to get him to stop shooting. As he made his way around his neighbor’s house, he heard a second shot.
When Yamkovenko reached his neighbor, he told him to stop shooting and that the Fish and Wildlife Department would take care of the bear.
“He said: ‘Nah, I need to put it out of its misery.’”
Yamkovenko said all three gunshots he heard happened outside, but when the warden came to speak to him, he was told that the neighbor said he had fired four times.
The warden “told us something didn’t add up about the neighbor’s story because the neighbor kept saying there were four shots and that he shot the bear inside the house,” Yamkovenko said.
When he learned that the case was closed, Yamkovenko called the warden, furious. He said the warden has not returned his call.
Gonzalez said he had heard claims about the bear not being inside the house but defended the warden’s findings.
“He’s a trained officer, a state police officer and has taken an oath to uphold his duties,” Gonzalez said of the warden. “And you know, people who work for Fish and Wildlife are dedicated to preserving wildlife for future generations.
“I trust him. We trust him, we have a lot of confidence in him,” he added. “He went out there to personally investigate it and found what the homeowner was saying was true and decided there was no need to go further than this.”
Bryant said she will continue to look into the matter until there is justice for the bear.
The elderly man neighbors in Azusa knew as “Wick” seemed to some residents to be a busybody, but to others he acted like a guardian, taking note of every suspicious behavior in his street and keeping neighbors informed.
So it came as a surprise to many residents of this working-class neighborhood when Azusa police and SWAT officers blocked off streets near North Enid Avenue and Crescent Drive and arrested 81-year-old Prince King.
For about 10 years, police said in a statement, King terrorized the neighborhood by shooting metal ball bearings with a slingshot, breaking house windows, car windshields and nearly striking neighbors themselves. In his house, investigators say, they found ball bearings and a slingshot.
“I never thought he could be doing that,” said Neomi Reynoso, a 46-year-old neighbor.
The neighborhood was plagued for years by flying metal ball bearings that shattered windows and struck house walls, she said. Neighbors didn’t know who was shooting the ball bearings or for what reason, Reynosa said.
King was charged last week with seven counts of vandalism. He pleaded not guilty in court Tuesday.
Another neighbor, who asked not to be identified for safety reasons, said a ball bearing came crashing through two windows in his neighborhood about 9 years ago. He didn’t think much of it then, until he heard of similar incidents in the same area.
King didn’t come out of his home much, the neighbor said, except to mow his lawn or wash his car. Still, the man they knew as “Wick” waved to neighbors and seemed friendly. Once, he said, King saw that he was changing a flat tire on his car and offered to lend him his jack.
Neighbors said they didn’t know how King got he nickname “Wick,” but it was the name by which some of them knew him since they first moved to the neighborhood.
If King was behind the vandalism, the neighbor said, he’s not sure why he’d do it.
“We never had an argument or anything,” he said. “I still can’t believe someone that is 80 years old would do this.”
About three weeks ago, a piece from his front door panel was broken off, the neighbor said. He thought at first it was old wood, but then found a ball bearing on the ground outside.
Another time, he said, he was outside his door smoking a cigarette when he heard something whiz rapidly by his head. He put out his cigarette and went inside.
King, who has lived in the neighborhood for decades, also seemed to be informed about the comings and goings on the block. When a strange car would park on the block, the neighbor said, King would share details of the car.
Once, Reynoso said, King approached her and told her that someone late at night had tried to steal gasoline from her car.
“He knew everything, a lot of things that were happening around the block,” she said.
He sometimes came across as a busybody, she said, but many residents thought he was watching out for the neighborhood.
She was targeted by a ball bearing about eight or nine years ago, she said, but has no idea why.
King sometimes had disagreements with neighbors, she said. He didn’t like people parking on his side of the street, she said, and would sometimes block it with his cars or trash cans to keep others from parking there. But nothing seemed to escalate.
Neither King nor his defense attorney could be reached for comment.
During King’s court hearing Tuesday, a judge released him on his own recognizance, but he was ordered to stay at least 200 yards away from the homes of identified victims.
The next morning, another neighbor walked out to King’s house and placed a sign and a message on the front yard that seemed to be directed at him: “Stay away Wick.”
California’s population rose last year for the first time since 2020, according to new state data.
The state’s population increased by 0.17% — or more than 67,000 people — between Jan. 1, 2023, and Jan. 1, 2024, when California was home to 39,128,162 people, according to new population estimates released Tuesday by the California Department of Finance.
“The brief period of California’s population decline is over,” H.D. Palmer, a department spokesman, said in a phone interview. “We’re back, and we’re returning to a rate of steady, stable growth.”
That resumption of growth, Palmer said, was driven by a number of factors: Deaths, which rose during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen nearly to pre-pandemic levels. Restrictive foreign immigration policies imposed during the Trump administration have been loosened under President Biden. Domestic migration patterns between states also have changed, boosting the state’s population.
In 2021, as the pandemic raged, more than 319,000 people died in California and fewer than 420,000 were born, the data show. Last year, about 281,000 died in the state, while nearly 399,000 were born.
And while California saw a net loss of nearly 3,900 people to international immigration in 2020 — when many countries’ borders were closed due to the pandemic — the state saw a net gain of more than 114,000 international immigrants last year, according to state data. That’s close to pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, California notched a net increase of about 119,000 international immigrants.
Shifting domestic migration trends — which were the subject of the much-ballyhooed “California exodus” during the pandemic, when remote workers moved to other states where they could live for a fraction of the cost of cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco — also played a key role.
In 2021, about 692,000 people left California for other states, while fewer than 337,000 moved into the Golden State from other states.
Last year, about 414,000 people moved here from other states, while more than 505,000 left for other states. That means California saw a net loss of about 264,500 fewer people to other states last year than in 2021, according to the new state data.
Los Angeles and Orange counties grew last year, though not by much; the former saw a population rise of just 0.05% — or nearly 4,800 people — while the latter notched up 0.31% — or nearly 9,800 people.
For both jurisdictions, that’s a reversal from 2022, when L.A. County saw a net loss of nearly 42,200 residents and Orange County lost about 17,000 residents. The city of Los Angeles saw its population rise 0.3% last year, the data show.
California also saw a net increase of about 116,000 housing units — including single-family homes, multi-family dwellings and accessory dwelling units, or ADUs — in 2023. Palmer described that growth as an “encouraging” sign amid the state’s housing crisis.
That rise, which is a relative drop in the bucket compared with the state’s more than 14.8 million housing units, was led by the city of Los Angeles, which saw a gain of more than 21,000 housing units, followed by an increase of about 5,700 units in San Diego, according to the state data.
While California’s resumption of population growth is a boon for boosters who reject the storyline of the state’s decline, there is no indication that the Golden State will be returning to the massive boom in residents it underwent generations ago.
“For the foreseeable future, we’re looking at steady, more predictable growth that’s slower than those go-go years of the 1970s and 1980s,” Palmer said. “Obviously, there are things that we can’t forecast that could have an impact on our population. For instance, another pandemic.”
The Los Angeles County medical examiner on Friday identified a woman whose body was discovered inside a trash bin this week in Sunland.
The woman was identified as 32-year-old Heather Hass. A cause of death has not been disclosed.
Her body was discovered Tuesday morning in the 8500 block of Wentworth Street after officers responded to a call from a resident, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Upon arrival, the officers discovered the body inside the trash bin.
Helicopter video from KTLA-TV at the time of the discovery showed police investigating near a closed black bin at a curb in the neighborhood.
William Elliot, a Sunland resident, told KNBC-TV that someone dumped the trash bin onto his property. He said he moved the bin to the street without knowing what was inside it but called police when something seemed off.
“It smells bad and it was zip-tied and very suspicious that the serial number was scratched off of it,” Elliot told the station.
More than 150 years ago, a San Francisco whaler noticed something about killer whales that scientists may be about to formally recognize — at least in name.
Charles Melville Scammon submitted a manuscript to the Smithsonian in 1869 describing two species of killer whales inhabiting West Coast waters.
Now a new paper published in Royal Society Open Science uses genetic, behavioral, morphological and acoustic data to argue that the orcas in the North Pacific known as residents and transients are different enough to be distinct species. They propose using the same scientific names Scammon is believed to have coined in the 19th century.
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Killer whales, found in all oceans, are currently considered one global species. The new proposed species would mark the first split of the ferocious apex predators, which, if approved, could have significant conservation and scientific implications — in addition to furthering a decades-long quest to properly classify the whales.
The two proposed species may look indistinguishable to the untrained eye, but there are subtle differences in their fins and markings — and many more unseen ones. They don’t speak the same “language” or nosh on the same food. And they have no interest in hanging out with one another, despite often dwelling in the same waters. Most significantly, researchers say, their DNA shows clear distinction.
Transients — also called Bigg’s killer whales — hunt seals and other marine mammals in small packs in expansive waters stretching from Southern California to the Arctic Circle. And they’re not very chatty while they sneak up on prey — they need to maintain stealth. They sport pointy, triangle-shaped dorsal fins with a solid white “saddle patch” behind it.
Residents, meanwhile, stick to fish — primarily Chinook salmon. They love to gab and hang out with the family. In fact, most offspring stay with their mothers their entire lives. Because fish don’t hear very well, they’re free to chatter as they chow down. Residents hew closer to coastlines, from Central California to southeast Alaska, where salmon congregate. Their fins tend to curve back toward the tail and intrusions of black sometimes extend into their saddle patches.
A third type of killer whale roams the Pacific, but less is known about it; these offshore whales live farther out and prey on sharks and other large fish. A recent study found evidence of another, previously unknown group in the open ocean.
Taxonomy, the scientific discipline of naming and classifying animals, is how we break down critters into species. It’s an intellectual exercise that has real-world consequences.
“We’re facing a global conservation crisis, losing species that we don’t even know exist,” said Phillip Morin, the new study’s lead author and a marine mammal geneticist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
If you think of killer whales as one species — a big pie — then killing some of them off here might not be a cause for concern, Morin said. But if you start parsing out species and subspecies — slices of the pie — then it’s suddenly possible to lose a unique, irreplaceable group.
A portion of the fish-eating resident killer whales — known as Southern Residents — is already listed as endangered in the U.S. and Canada. Salmon depletion from overfishing and habitat destruction has starved them, and only about 75 are left now. But if they’re designated as part of a species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature will assess them (and transients) separately.
Study co-author Thomas Jefferson, a marine mammal biologist, also with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, believes the residents would probably be categorized on the conservation union’s Red List as threatened or endangered, possibly even critically endangered.
About 20 years ago, when Morin first began his foray into the world of marine mammal genetics, he said there was agreement that the taxonomy of cetaceans — which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — was “really poor.”
Classification of land animals is often done by measuring bones, but water dwellers are hard to collect and store. Researchers don’t have extensive collections of whale skulls in museums from around the world, and it isn’t necessarily ethical to acquire them. They needed other tools — such as better genetics, drone recordings and satellite tagging — which didn’t exist yet.
“The genetics has now finally come to the point where we can do this on a broad scale and get the kind of resolution and information that we didn’t have,” Morin said.
Over two decades, researchers went from analyzing thousands to billions of base pairs of DNA from individual killer whales.The enhanced detail has allowed scientists to “look back through time,” Morin said, and answer questions about which killer whale populations are closely related — or not — and when differences emerged.
Based on their genetic analyses, Morin and his team estimate that transients diverged from other orcas between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, while residents began to split off about 100,000 years ago.
Only a small tissue sample is needed to analyze killer whale DNA to tell a big genetic story.
“We can actually go out with a crossbow and collect a little teeny bit of tissue from a living whale — just shoot a little dart at it and collect a little bit of skin,” Jefferson said.
Of course, scientists in the 19th century dedicated to describing and categorizing whales didn’t have access to this cutting-edge technology.
Virtually nothing was known about marine mammals of the West Coast of North America in the mid-1800s, when Charles Melville Scammon, the whaler, began meticulously documenting and measuring cetaceans, Jefferson said. (Scammon bears no relation to Herman Melville, author of whale-centric “Moby Dick.”)
When Scammon’s paper from 1869 describing a variety of cetaceans of the West Coast, including orcas, made it to the Smithsonian, he had “every reason to believe that his article would be well received,” according to “Beyond the Lagoon,” a biography of the seaman. He knew things no other zoologist did because of his proximity to the whales and keen eye.
In a paper penned three years later, Scammon paints a vivid picture of killer whales, from their “beautifully smooth and glossy skin” to their “somewhat military aspect,” even including drawings. He recounts a gruesome attack, seen in “Lower California,” by a trio of killer whales on a gray whale and her baby.
The orcas assaulted the pair for at least an hour, eventually killing the younger whale while exhausting the mother. “As soon as their prize had settled to the bottom, the trio band descended, bringing up large pieces of flesh in their mouths, which they devoured after coming to the surface,” Scammon wrote. “While gorging themselves in this wise, the old whale made her escape, leaving a track of gory water behind.”
What Scammon didn’t know was that his earlier manuscript would fall into the hands of Edward Drinker Cope, a naturalist who had a reputation for being overly ambitious and warring with colleagues for credit.
Cope, secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, slapped his own introduction on the paper with descriptions and Latin names of the orcas inhabiting the Northern Pacific.
Because of rules governing the scientific naming of animals, Cope would forever be credited with the names believed to have been chosen by Scammon. Nevermind that Cope probably never saw a living killer whale.
The paper also misidentified Scammon and gave him little credit. When the whaler saw it, he was furious, according to the biography.
“It‘s a really, really strange and very weird and dramatic episode in the history of marine mammal biology, how these names came about,” Jefferson said.
Many of Scammon’s observations turned out to be erroneous. Often he logged differences between male and female killer whales rather than differences between species, said Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for NOAA. But his inquiry set the stage for more rigorous research to come.
Morin and his research team propose using the same Latin names from more than a century ago for the species they identified in their recent study.
The researchers call transients Orcinus rectipinnus, noting that, in Latin, “recti means right or upright, and pinna means fin, feather, or wing, most likely referring to the tall erect dorsal fin of males.”
Residents, meanwhile, are labeled Orcinus ater. Ater means black or dark, according to the study, “which probably refers to the largely black color of this species.”
All killer whales are currently classified as Orcinus orca, a macabre nod to their vicious reputation. Some say Orcinus means “of the kingdom of the dead,” a reference to Orcus, a Roman god of the underworld.
There are also common, or informal names, to consider.
The researchers suggest sticking with “Bigg’s” for transients, honoring Michael Bigg, the father of modern-day orca research.
The team plans to consult tribes who have a connection to the resident whales, including the Lummi Nation and Tulalip tribes of the Northwest, before settling on a common name, according to Milstein.
“They decided not to try to rush it to match the paper, but to take the time to make sure it is done in a way that everyone understands and believes in,” Milstein said.
John Durban, an associate professor with Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and co-author of the new study, said he supports using the name “Blackfish,” which is used by some tribes in the Pacific Northwest.
Complex rules govern the discipline of taxonomy, and typically a specimen must be designated as a reference point when it’s first named.
However, the original specimens studied by Scammon were destroyed or disappeared. According to Jefferson, one at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was wiped out by the historic 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire. Another, believed to have been in Scammon’s personal possession, can’t be found.
So the researchers found stand-ins at the Smithsonian.
Whether the broader community of marine mammal biologists will accept the researchers’ findings — and adopt Scammon’s and Cope’s names — will soon be determined.
The proposal is slated to go before a committee from the Society for Marine Mammalogy, which will vote in a few months on whether to greenlight designation of the species. Jefferson and another author of the new study sit on the committee and will recuse themselves from the vote.
Even today, Scammon has to contend with detractors.
Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist with Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, isn’t “entirely happy” with the names put forth.
The names were conceived “before science, by and large, especially biological science, had any rigor,” Pitman said. “And then the descriptions that [Scammon] puts with those names are just so vague. I’m kind of doubtful that those names will stand.”
Names aside, he expects most marine mammalogists will be on board with the proposed species; many have suspected species-level differences among the well-studied whales of the Pacific Northwest. He said the case for splitting off the mammal-eating transients is particularly strong.
The newly identified species are believed to be harbingers of more to come.
Pitman, who has studied killer whales in Antarctica for over 10 years, said there’s a similar divide between mammal- and fish-eating killer whales in those waters.
There are five identified types, and Pitman thinks at least one will turn out to be a different species. Some look dramatically different.
“And it’ll probably be easier now that somebody’s already made the first step in saying, ‘There’s more than one species out there.’”
Airbnbs and other short-term rentals in unincorporated areas will be restricted to hosts who are renting out their primary residence, under a proposal that gained preliminary approval from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
Officials say the rentals have proliferated across the county’s unincorporated areas, sometimes leaving a trail of raucous parties and trash-strewn streets.
The proposed ordinance, five years in the making, would prohibit hosts from listing second homes, guesthouses, accessory dwelling units or investment properties in unincorporated L.A. County.
The supervisors, who unanimously passed the ordinance on Tuesday, must vote on it one more time, likely early next month, before it becomes law.
Under the proposed ordinance, hosts in unincorporated areas — home to roughly 1 million residents — would have to register with the county and pay an annual fee of $914. A property could be rented for no more than 30 consecutive days at a time. And so-called “corporate hosts,” who rent out multiple properties, would have to pull their listings.
“It takes them right out of the game,” said Randy Renick, head of Better Neighbors LA, which pushes for regulations on short-term rentals.
Better Neighbors LA says the ordinance would return desperately needed housing to the market. The group has estimated that there are more than 2,600 houses available for short-term rental in unincorporated county areas.
The ordinance was supported by several tenant advocacy groups and public officials, who argued that short-term rentals were displacing long-term residents and replacing them with unruly tourists. Some residents have told news outlets that their street has been turned into a “de facto hotel.”
“All around the County, residents must suddenly deal with commercial enterprises in the middle of their neighborhoods, bringing in rowdy parties, parking difficulties, high volumes of trash, loud noise, and guests that have no stake in safeguarding the community,” a coalition of city officials wrote in a joint letter.
Some hosts — as well as the rental platforms they use — have opposed the proposed ordinance, arguing that it is an “attack” on mom-and-pop landlords, disincentivizes tourists from visiting and cuts off a much-needed income stream.
At a county board meeting last month, Airbnb host Ellen Snortland said she felt she was being unfairly lumped with corporate landlords. She said she is in her 70s and uses Airbnb to stave off foreclosure.
“Do you think people like us Airbnb hosts do it to get rich?” she said. “We do it for survival.”
Vrbo, an online platform for vacation rentals, said it believes the county’s regulations would harm both tourists and the families that want to host them.
The proposal “severely limits the options available to traveling families visiting the area and economic opportunity for residents who own, manage, and service these accommodations,” a spokesperson for the Expedia Group, which oversees Vrbo, wrote in a statement.
The county’s crackdown comes more than five years after the city of Los Angeles passed its own short term rental restrictions, which barred Angelenos from renting out second homes on platforms such as Airbnb. The county’s version would bring unincorporated areas roughly in line with the city.
Maria Patiño Gutierrez, director of policy with the tenant rights group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, said residents will sometimes report illegal vacation rentals in their neighborhoods, only to discover that the homes are actually in unincorporated L.A. County and, therefore, completely legal.
“The housing crisis is in all of L.A. County,” she said.
Some supporters of the ordinance hope there will be one significant difference from L.A. city: enforcement with teeth.
Researchers have found that hosts in L.A. regularly flout the city’s rules, with little consequence. A studyfrom 2022 found that nearly half the short-term rentals in the city were illegal.
Renick with Better Neighbors LA said he believes the county will do a better job of enforcement, though he said details on how that will be done are “thin.”
“We’re confident, given what the various supervisors have told us, that the county’s going to take enforcement seriously,” he said.
Nichole Alcaraz,operations chief with the county’s treasurer and tax collector, which spearheaded the ordinance, said they’re still hammering out the penalties for hosts that don’t comply. She said there will be more details in the coming month.
“We do know there’s going to be an enforcement arm. We do have some general ideas about how that’s going to work,” she said. “But the amount [of the penalty] may change.”
The ordinance would go into effect six months after the final vote and would include all property owners in unincorporated L.A. County with the exception of those along the coast. Residents in unincorporated coastal areas — including Marina del Rey, Catalina Island and the Santa Monica Mountains — will need to wait for the California Coastal Commission to consider the ordinance.
The church on Oildale Drive and Minner Avenue has stood on the corner since 1954, built after an earthquake damaged the Oildale Church of Christ’s building. Since then, the church has passed through a variety of denominations and congregations until it was abandoned in 2021.
But the Kern County Housing Authority saw another life for the church building, in an often-overlooked area of the county. Oildale, an unincorporated town north of Bakersfield, borders the Kern River Oil Field, one of the largest active oil fields in California. The town was founded in the early 1900s as workers flooded into the area to work the oil rigs. It’s where musicians Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were raised and shaped.
Today, the barren hills of the Kern River Oil Field are still peppered with working rigs. But Oildale, population 36,000, has largely stagnated. Nearly a third of its residents live in poverty, and community leaders grapple with high rates of opioid addiction, dilapidated housing and commercial vacancies. The church is nestled in a quiet neighborhood of modest homes with overgrown yards and bleached white fences.
The housing authority, a county agency charged with creating affordable housing opportunities, saw potential in the building’s graceful touches and sturdy walls. Its Sunday school classrooms could become studio and one-bedroom units for former foster youth still struggling to get their footing. The chapel, with its stained glass window, soft-lit chandeliers and walls adorned with hand-written Bible verses, could be converted into a community room. So, over the course of two years, the church was given a second life.
Isabel Medina is both on-site manager and a resident at Project Cornerstone. Like other young residents, she is a former foster care ward who struggled to find stable employment and housing after aging out of the system.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s been an anchor for the neighborhood for a number of years and went through different phrases, and is now in a completely different phase,” said Stephen M. Pelz, executive director of the housing authority. “Oftentimes when you get vacant buildings that aren’t sold right away, they end up having issues or vandalism, or catching fire. It was nice to be able to preserve the building.”
With funding from Project Homekey, the state’s multibillion-dollar effort to convert dilapidated motels and commercial properties into supportive housing, and in partnership with Covenant Community Services, the authority purchased the church from Shekinah Ministries in 2022 for $1.5 million. After extensive renovation, the site reopened in January as the Project Cornerstone housing complex.
Today, the hallways smell faintly of fresh paint, and all 19 air-conditioned units are occupied by young residents also getting a fresh start.
About a mile away in a commercial strip, the housing authority is attempting another novel do-over: converting a former doctor’s office — that also had a stint as a tattoo parlor — into 15 units of housing. The project is in a tumbledown section of Oildale, situated between an optical lens store and aquatic pet shop. The storefront being converted had been vacant for years.
“It was really just awful, an eyesore for the whole community,” said Randy Martin, chief executive of Covenant Community Services, a nonprofit community group that will manage the two locations.
The housing authority purchased the storefront for $510,000 in 2022. As renovations began, Martin said, the group dealt with drug addicts breaking in, stealing appliances and starting fires behind the building.
Still, the project is moving forward. Each unit will have a doorbell and space for a bed and kitchen. The plan includes a front patio where residents can relax and socialize.
Housing at the church complex is open to young people, 18 to 25, who have aged out of the foster care system, along with their spouses and children. The converted doctor’s office is reserved for former foster youths ages 18 to 21. Tenants pay rent as they are able, on a sliding-fee scale, and utilities are covered.
Pelz said the subsidies and upkeep will be covered by a mix of rental income and state and local funding for rental assistance.
Al’Lyn Cline, a former foster youth, lives in a small but tidy apartment at Project Cornerstone. It marks the first time in years that he has had his own bathroom.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
When he moved into the converted church on Oildale Drive, Al’Lyn Cline, 22, was the only person living there for about two weeks. After months of construction, the church began to “settle,” and at night he would hear the creaking of the pipes and floorboards.
Cline, a Texas native, bounced around foster homes as a child. Before coming to the church, he stayed at a sober-living home with 12 other men. They shared one refrigerator, cramped bathrooms and limited parking space.
At the church, Cline has a studio that came furnished with a microwave, stove and fridge. He has his own bathroom for the first time in years. His room — a space that used to hold cassette recordings of weekly sermons — is on the second floor and has a skylight that allows a flood of natural light.
Al’Lyn Cline stores his boots in a neat line in his apartment.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s really just profound, and it has a uniqueness of its own,” Cline said of the setup.
Cline, who is Christian, feels connected to the church in a religious sense as well. He tries to be respectful of the building, knowing its history as a place of worship.
Randy Martin is chief executive of Covenant Community Services, a community group managing Project Cornerstone.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Project Cornerstone is one in a spate of recent efforts Kern County has undertaken to create affordable supportive housing options for homeless people and those at risk of being homeless. Those working with foster youths know all too well that housing instability is a danger they face as they age out of the system.
The county’s 2023 point-in-time count found 1,948 people lacked permanent housing, according to the Bakersfield-Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative. About 48% of the population was sheltered, a figure that’s been trending upward as the county has expanded emergency shelters and transitional housing initiatives. About 120 of the homeless counted were people younger than 24.
Martin, with Covenant Community Services, said the housing project is “stemming the tide of homelessness for foster youth.” Residents are assigned case managers and mentors to help them find educational and employment opportunities, and can learn job skills at the organization’s coffee shop.
Isabel Medina, left, watches as her daughter runs toward program manager Samantha Imhoof Tran. Rosalinda celebrated her second birthday at Project Cornerstone, with a party in the old chapel.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Isabel Medina, 23, is both on-site manager and a resident at the Project Cornerstone complex. At 13, she was removed from an abusive home and put in foster care. For years, she moved among foster families before aging out of the system at 18. She has struggled to maintain a stable job, working in the fields, at a mall, at Goodwill. She was homeless twice, and slept in her car for four months. At 21, she became pregnant with her daughter, Rosalinda.
With the help of a program manager at Covenant Community Services, Samantha Imhoof Tran, Medina was made on-site manager at Project Cornerstone.
Rosalinda celebrated her second birthday there in December, with a party in the old chapel. A stained glass image depicting a shepherd lit up the room. The two-year-old with a quick smile and high laugh ran up and down the stairs, and they danced on the stage, Medina said.
“It definitely can be spooky, especially at night when I have to check all the doors and make sure everything’s secured,” Medina said. “But when you fill this room up, it’s very hopeful and magical at the same time.”
For three decades, Jamie Nelson has considered Ojai her personal paradise. It’s where she raised her children and cherishes the springtime, when the air smells like jasmine and orange blossoms.
“Lots of times, I’ve said, ‘God, I think Heaven probably smells like this,’” Nelson said of this artsy tourist town of 7,500 people.
Now, Nelson, a 74-year-old grandmother who has heart problems and bad knees and leans heavily on a cane, is homeless. She lives in a tent outside the historic Ojai City Hall, where a growing encampment filled with older people has vexed a community known for spiritual retreats, chakra-aligning crystals and organic farms.
“I was scared to death of coming here,” said Nelson, who moved to City Hall in November. “I was so afraid, because I’m older. And I got here and the people are just — they’re very precious. They are very good and very intelligent, and just had things happen.”
Thirty people live on the wooded eight-acre campus. Half are older than 55, and eight are older than 65. And — despite some locals’ assertions that they are refugees from bigger cities like Ventura and Santa Barbara — most are longtime Ojai residents, said Rick Raine, the city’s new homeless services coordinator.
“They say, ‘You’re bringing in people!’ No, people have always been here,” said Raine, who was Nelson’s neighbor years ago.
Rick Raine, Ojai’s homeless services coordinator, created a community room at the City Hall encampment where residents can find fresh coffee and conversation.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
The affordable housing shortage is nothing new in Ojai, but the issue received increased attention last year after a septuagenarian member of the City Council was priced out of her rented house, declared herself homeless and was investigated by a grand jury for no longer living within her council district.
In this 4.4-square-mile city, homelessness used to be more spread out, with people sleeping in their cars or bundled in blankets in the open-air shopping arcade. Now, the crisis is harder to ignore because it is concentrated at the City Hall encampment, which has become a flashpoint as the city pours money and resources into making the setup more livable.
Local politicians and law enforcement officials say they cannot move the encampment because of decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Ojai has no dedicated homeless shelter, and — in cases from Boise, Idaho, and Grants Pass, Ore. — the court determined it was unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment for cities to criminalize camping in public spaces when there are not enough shelter beds.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last month to review the lower court’s decision in the Oregon case and to decide whether cities can enforce camping bans. A ruling is expected this summer.
Melissa Balding is among the homeless residents at Ojai’s City Hall encampment who are trying to keep the property tidy.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
For now, the lower court rulings “really bind us with what we can do,” Ojai Police Chief Trina Newman said. Officers, she said, have responded to reports of theft, loud music, drinking and homeless people trespassing on neighbors’ property.
“We have individuals that have their share of difficulties: Addiction. Mental health problems. When you get a certain amount of people in a small area, there’s going to be problems,” she said.
“But our hands are tied.”
William Holden has encouraged homeless people in Ojai to shelter at the City Hall encampment. “It’s not a new problem,” he says of homelessness. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Ojai’s City Hall is an architectural gem and point of local pride. Originally a family home, later gifted to the city, it was built in 1907 as a Craftsman-style house and later remodeled to fit in with the Mission Revival architecture that Ojai became known for.
Today, scores of tents spread out just beyond the building’s stately arches and wide patios. Many of the campers try to keep the property tidy, picking up trash and cutting the grass with a manual push mower. Some keep tchotchkes — small statues, faux flowers — outside their tents to make the place feel more homey.
Over the last year, the number of people living at the encampment exploded, from about five people to 30.
At a City Council meeting in September, William Holden, a resident of Ojai for 23 years, pushed his elderly chihuahua, Fievel Mouskawitz, in a pink stroller up to the microphone.
“I did this,” Holden, 61, said of the encampment, where he now lives.
“I invited these people who were sleeping in their cars, these people that were under the bridge, to come back here, because I’ve heard the police are not making us move like they do when you’re in an unregistered motor vehicle or sleeping where you’re not supposed to be sleeping.”
“It’s not a new problem,” he added. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
City officials confirmed that word of mouth helped grow the camp, which sits on environmentally sensitive oak woodland grounds that slope down to a creek. The ground is soft, muddy and, in some portions, at risk of a landslide if it gets too saturated, Raine said.
This fall, the City Council allocated $200,000 to deal with the crisis, and Raine was hired to be the city’s first homeless services coordinator. He opened a break room at the encampment where he brews a fresh pot of Folgers coffee every morning. He keeps blankets, coats, boots and extra food on hand — for the people and their pets.
The city added portable toilets, and, in late January, Raine and a slew of volunteers built eight sturdy wilderness tents in the parking lot, off the muddy ground. Raine said he chose eight of the older, more vulnerable campers — including Nelson — for the 8-by-10-foot tents, each of which sits on a fire-treated platform and includes a storage shed.
Four more tents will go up in the coming weeks.
Homeless services coordinator Rick Raine is working with volunteers to erect wilderness tents to shelter the most vulnerable campers in Ojai’s sanctioned homeless camp.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Overall, the town has been supportive of the city’s efforts, said Mayor Betsy Stix. “We’re a loving, caring community, and I think that — it’s so personal,” she said, adding that some municipal employees have a high school classmate living at the camp.
Last month, the city applied for $12.4 million in state grant funding to build tiny homes and provide case management and security. City leaders have promised to relocate the encampment once the money and expansion plans are in place.
But furious neighbors don’t believe them.
“We understand that city staff has stated that the neighbors are fully on board with this plan. That could not be further from the truth,” read a letter sent last month to the City Council and city manager that was signed by 47 people who live near City Hall.
One neighbor, a 73-year-old woman who has owned her house for 39 years, told The Times that the city made no effort to talk to nearby residents.
The woman, who did not give her name because she feared being harassed by people in the encampment, said she worried about fires, with people cooking under the trees and some using propane heaters in their tents. She said she also worried about vulnerable senior citizens living among other campers “who are real bullies.”
Jerry O’Dell returns to his tent, right, at a homeless encampment at Ojai’s City Hall.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Another neighbor — a 43-year-old single mother of three who also declined to give her name — said a man from the camp lunged at her 12-year-old daughter as she rode a skateboard and that her children “do not feel safe.”
“We feel like our neighborhood has been taken over,” she said. “It’s completely changed the vibe here. There’s a port-a-potty right on the corner that doesn’t give the homeless people any privacy. It doesn’t feel like a compassionate solution for them or for us.”
During Ventura County’s point-in-time census in January 2023, Ojai recorded 44 unhoused people. That’s a 42% increase from five years prior — but a steep decline from the 82 people counted in 2007, when the annual survey began. In all of Ventura County last year, there were 2,441 homeless people, the highest number since the count began.
The sharp rise, as in so many places in California, has coincided with skyrocketing housing costs.
The average home price in Ventura County was $834,180 in December 2023, up 38% from December 2018, according to Zillow. The median rent was $2,373 in December 2023, up nearly 23% from 2018, according to data from the real estate firm Apartment List.
In Ojai, the housing shortage has been compounded by strict slow-growth laws, which — along with a ban on chain stores — were intended to maintain the small-town charm. Before an apartment complex opened in 2019, the city had gone for more than a decade without building any multifamily housing.
In December, the City Council approved a 50-unit development that will be Ojai’s first entirely affordable housing project in 30 years. This month, the council tightened a ban on short-term vacation rentals, arguing they are driving up housing costs.
“We natives have worked and volunteered hundreds of hours to keep our town small,” said Councilwoman Suza Francina, a yoga teacher who has lived in Ojai for 67 years. “The irony is that now we’re so desirable and internationally known that people want to invest. The new wave of people, they come here and can afford second and even third homes.”
Longtime residents, she said, are being priced out — including herself.
Ojai City Councilwoman Suza Francina, second from right, nearly lost her seat last year after she was priced out of her rental housing and temporarily moved into a garage room at a friend’s home outside her district.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
In late 2021, Francina, 74, lost the two-bedroom house she had leased for eight years when an investor purchased it, she said. Francina had been paying $1,650 a monthin rent. She later saw it listed for $4,000 a month.
Francina, a former mayor, had spent more than a decade on the City Council. To keep her seat, she had to stay within her district, a roughly two-square-mile portion of south Ojai.
Francina could not find an affordable rental that would accept her two small dogs, Benny and Honey. While she searched, she moved, rent-free, into a small room with no kitchen above a friend’s garage that was in Ojai but not in her district. Francina put most of her belongings in storage and said she was homeless, arguing that people who are couch-surfing fit the description.
She was investigated by the Ventura County Grand Jury, which, in a report last May, said her seat was legally vacant since she did not find housing in her district within 30 days. But she was not removed from office.
Late last summer, Francina rented a bedroom in a house in her district for $950 a month plus utilities, along with a $300-per-month storage unit. The situation, she said, “broadened my whole perspective on how hard it is if you don’t have a home base, and how quickly it affects your mental health, how you can go downhill very quickly.”
Kristen Wingate, who grew up in Ojai, became homeless while recovering from a neck surgery.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Kristen Wingate, who was born in Ojai and has spent most of her life here, also lost her rental house. But unlike Francina, she wound up in the City Hall encampment.
Wingate, 52, has degenerative disc disease. Two years ago, after a neck fusion surgery, she went on state disability. But the money ran out after a year, she said, and she was not medically cleared to go back to her job at a local hardware store. She said her application to receive Social Security disability benefits was denied, a decision she is appealing.
While she was recovering, she said, the owner of her rental house, which was split into three units, sold it. Tenants had to leave.
Wingate lived in her Toyota Camry for a while and, in August, moved into a tent at City Hall with Roscoe, her 50-pound pug and Boston terrier mix. The size of the camp broke her heart, she said, and “everything is just too expensive here” in this town she grew up in. A friend she has known since she was 6 also lives at the encampment.
Kristen Wingate tends to her dog, Roscoe, outside her tent in Ojai.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Wingate’s brown tent sits near a wooden gazebo with chipped white paint. Her sister got married there decades ago. Now, there are tents on either side.
Nelson lives nearby in one of the new white tents, beneath an enormous eucalyptus tree, with her 3-year-old chihuahua mix, Mae Mae.
Bespectacled, with shoulder-length gray hair and a quick laugh, Nelson said she lost her husband to pancreatic cancer six years ago. She ran out of money, moved out of her house, then out of a hotel. She moved to City Hall just before Thanksgiving.
She is stoic, a trait from her south Texas upbringing. Asked if the last few years had been tough, she downplayed her situation: “A little tough, yeah. But the people here always made it better. And being in Ojai just made it all better.”
She hopes the city is able to build tiny homes for people in the encampment. For now, she waits.
On a recent Tuesday night, at a City Council meeting inside City Hall, a discussion about giving grant money to local artists dragged on for more than an hour. Then protesters — including one soaked in faux blood who collapsed and performed the motions of dying — called for a cease-fire in Gaza, half a world away.
Just outside, temperatures dipped into the 40s. In her tent, Nelson piled on blankets, held her dog close and went to sleep.
Times staff writer Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.
For sure, there was plenty of computer modeling available to indicate the Southland was in for a severe — and potentially dangerous — soaking. But based on their expertise, forecasters at the National Weather Service in Oxnard correctly anticipated that even the machine-calculated, eye-popping rain totals were probably an underprediction.
When it comes to such a serious storm event, getting the forecast as close to correct as possible isn’t just a matter of pride. Forecasters go to great lengths to assess a storm’s strength so they can accurately inform the public about the dangers it may pose.
“We don’t want to cry wolf and say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get record amounts of rain, catastrophic flooding,’ and then you get about half what you think. And people are like, ‘That was no big deal,’” said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. “And then they’ll tune us out. We don’t want that to happen.”
In this case, “We went a little bit above some of the models and, you know, we were right,” Sirard said.
A person walks under an umbrella at L.A. Live in Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Sirard said the first indications of a potentially significant rain event emerged about 10 to 12 days ahead of the storm’s actual arrival early this month.
To get an idea of a storm’s possible strength, forecasters look at data generated by supercomputers that produce “ensemble forecasts” made from a series of model runs based on slightly tweaked initial conditions, Sirard said.
But the forecast is quite uncertain that far out.
Say you’re trying to map out a forecast 10 days from now, when it looks like a storm is brewing. Half of the model runs might suggest 5 inches of rain will fall over a three-day period, but the other half could suggest less precipitation — sometimes significantly so.
Data like that might be too noisy to say anything with a great degree of confidence.
But as the storm draws closer, those models will start to align a bit more, giving forecasters a better idea of what to reasonably expect.
“And so that would increase our confidence levels,” Sirard said. “Once you get in that seven-day window … if these ensemble models are still showing, say, 60% hypothetically, 5 or more inches in a three-day period — already, our antennas are up. And it’s like, ‘OK, we got a potential for something significant coming in.’”
As forecasters get even closer to the storm’s arrival, they can employ higher-resolution, shorter-range forecast models.
Mud and debris flow from hills caused by heavy rain covered part of a parked car and knocked down the garage door of a home in the 10400 block of West Quito Lane in Los Angeles.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
At a certain point, there was enough confidence for forecasters to post an attention-grabbing warning on social media on Feb. 1, three days before the storm’s arrival: “We are expecting a major storm with dangerous, even life-threatening impacts!”
In subsequent days, local law enforcement and elected officials — from the city of Los Angeles to Santa Barbara County — held media briefings about the dire forecasts that included National Weather Service meteorologists.
Such coordination between meteorologists and politicians hasn’t always happened. Unforgettably, although the National Weather Service office in Monterey issued a flood watch three days before a significant storm landed on Dec. 31, 2022, San Francisco officials were caught unprepared by a record deluge that flooded swaths of low-lying parts of the city and left residents and business owners furious.
There have also been memorable misses. Fourteen years ago, an unexpectedly powerful, slow-moving rainstorm unleashed a torrent of mud that inundated more than 40 homes in La Cañada Flintridge, a far cry from an initial forecast of a light to moderate rainstorm.
The models for the storm earlier this month did adjust in the days leading up to the event. Initial projections about three to five days ahead of the storm suggested Santa Barbara and Ventura counties would get hit the hardest. But as it drew closer, there were growing indications that Los Angeles County would bear the brunt, said Ryan Kittell, another meteorologist in the weather service’s Oxnard office.
That ended up being the case.
The weather service also made late adjustments to what the computer models were showing. Over a four-day period, models said to expect 8 to 10 inches of rain in the San Gabriel Mountains and 4 to 5 inches of rain in downtown L.A.
Meteorologists thought the computer models were underpredicting the projected rainfall totals, so they added a couple of inches to that forecast, Sirard said.
Their instincts proved correct. The weather service’s final forecast was for 8 to 14 inches of rain in the mountains and foothills through Feb. 6. And that was very accurate — the highest rainfall amount recorded in the San Gabriel Mountains over that period was 13.86 inches.
“A lot of us have been here for 25 years. So we know the weather patterns of what can cause the maximum amount of rainfall here,” Sirard said. “You get the high amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, you get the strong jetstream aloft nearby, you have the strong southeast to south low-level flow — all that moisture throughout the atmosphere, from the ground to 20,000 feet or more — all gets squeezed up into the mountains.”
In some areas, the storm proved to be a rainmaker more prolific than even experienced meteorologists had anticipated.
Before the storm began, the weather service had forecast 6.37 inches of rain would fall over a four-day period in downtown Los Angeles. Some people might’ve been hard-pressed to believe such an astonishing amount: On average, downtown gets 14.25 inches of rain in an entire year.
For the four-day period ending at 9 p.m. Feb. 6, 8.66 inches of rain fell on downtown L.A.
Still, the range of the forecast totals helped accurately guide the kinds of warnings that needed to be issued. Once forecast totals in lower-lying cities reach “5, 6, 7, 8 inches, the impacts are pretty much the same” in terms of flooding and landslide risk, Kittell said.
That messaging helped fuel substantial storm preparedness, so officials and residents were not caught completely off guard when land began sliding in a number of hillside communities across L.A. County, including north of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Westwood, as well as in Baldwin Hills and Hacienda Heights.
Pre-storm warnings also let residents know to stock and stack sandbags. And officials readied response teams like swift-water rescue crews that were needed across Southern California.
The agricultural community of El Centro in Imperial County had a rude midnight awakening: the force of a magnitude 4.8 earthquake and a lengthy series of aftershocks.
The earthquake struck around 12:36 a.m. Tuesday 2 miles northwest of El Centro, in an area just off the Salton Sea that has active faults, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Elizabeth Cochran.
The earthquake was followed by a magnitude 4.5 aftershock. In the 12 hours after that, more than 180 aftershocks of lower magnitude were recorded.
If the shaking wasn’t enough, some residents were roused by the alarm their phone received from the ShakeAlert app, which initially estimated that the temblor was stronger than it proved to be. “Pretty terrible to be woken up at midnight with a loud alert telling you to take [cover] (in multiple languages) for something we didn’t even feel,” @MattInformed said on X.com (formerly known as Twitter).
This sort of seismic tumult isn’t an uncommon occurrence in this region, however.
“In this particular area where [the earth’s] crust itself is hotter than average, we get these pretty active sequences where we see lots and lots of aftershocks,” Cochran said. When an earthquake sequence happens, she said, most of the aftershocks are at least one magnitude unit smaller than the first shake.
Residents close to the epicenter would have felt moderate shaking that “can be pretty frightening for folks who are close by,” Cochran said.
Nevertheless, little or no damage is expected from that level of shaking. No damage or injuries were reported in the hours after the quakes started.
During the last earthquake sequence in the area, in 2021, the main shock was a magnitude 5 temblor, Cochran said.
With another day of rain drenching soggy Southern California, multiple evacuation warnings and orders are in effect Tuesday for residents in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and San Bernardino counties.
An evacuation order, which carries the force of law, is a command to leave the area right away because of an immediate threat to life. An evacuation warning is an alert about a potential threat to life or property, and leaving the area is voluntary.
Los Angeles County
Authorities issued evacuation orders for the following areas with burn scars from past wildfires that increased the risk of mud and debris flows, urging residents to gather family members, pets and medications and leave immediately.
Santa Maria Road north of Topanga Canyon Boulevard
Soledad Canyon Road east of Agua Dulce Canyon Road
Culver City issued an evacuation warning to residents in the Upper Crest neighborhood Monday evening. The warning will be in effect until the end of Tuesday and extends to residents on the following streets:
Cranks Road (Tellefson Road to St James Drive)
Tellefson Road (Cranks Road to Stubbs Lane )
Ranch Road (Tellefson Road to Cranks Road)
Stubbs Lane (in its entirety)
Lugo Way (in its entirety)
Youngworth Road (Ranch Road to Flaxton Street)
Flaxton Street (Youngworth Road to Drakewood Ave)
Drakewood Avenue (Ranch Road to Northgate Street)
Bernardo Road (Tellefson Road to the end)
The Los Angeles County Dept. of Public Works issued a mudflow alert for homes in the burn scar of the 2020 Ranch 2 Fire. Emergency officials issued an evacuation warning to four homes in the Mountain Cove community, which will be in effect through Tuesday morning.
Other areas with burn scars received evacuation warnings, instructing residents to leave now if they need extra time to evacuate or have animals that need shelter. The warnings, which are in effect through at least 6 p.m. Tuesday, include:
The Juniper Hills and Valyermo areas hit by the Bobcat fire
The Lake Hughes and King Canyon areas hit by the Lake fire, particularly the 20000 block of Pine Canyon Road, the 18000 block of Ellstree Drive, the 46000 block of Kings Canyon Road, the 18000 block of Newvale Drive and the 43000 block of Lake Hughes Road
All of Topanga Zone 4 in the northeastern part of the canyon not under an evacuation order
In the city of Duarte, along Mel Canyon Road between Fish Canyon Road and Brookridge Road
According to L.A. County officials, shelters are available in two places: ONEgeneration at 18255 Victory Blvd. in Reseda and Marie Kerr Park at 39700 30th St. West in Palmdale. For animal sheltering, the county directs people to the Agoura Animal Care Shelter at 29525 Agoura Road in Agoura Hills and the Castaic Animal Care Center at 31044 Charlie Canyon Road in Castaic.
Ventura County
An evacuation warning is in effect for:
The unincorporated region around Ojai, Matilija Canyon, North Fork and Camino Cielo. There is no access to the area due to the storm damage, according to emergency officials.
Orange County
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department issued evacuation warnings for the following areas:
Irvine Lake
Black Star and Baker Canyon
Silverado Canyon
Williams Canyon
Modjeska Canyon
Live Oak and North Trabuco Canyon
Trabuco, Rose, Holy Jim Canyon
For more information, call 211. Residents who need shelter are encouraged to make arrangements with relatives or friends, or by calling the American Red Cross at (855) 891-7325.
San Bernardino County
Evacuation warnings have been issued for three communities in the mountains: Seven Oaks, Angelus Oaks, Barton Flats and Forest Falls. The county also warned of potential flooding in and downstream of burn scars in Oak Glen, Yucaipa and Mountain Home Village.
Residents in those communities who need a shelter for their small animals can take them to the Devore Animal Shelter at 19777 Shelter Way in San Bernardino. For help, call San Bernardino Animal Care at (800) 472-5609.
Road closures
A list of road closures as of Tuesday morning included:
Near Dodger Stadium just north of downtown Los Angeles, the connector between the southbound 5 Freeway and the southbound 110 Freeway was closed indefinitely by multiple mudslides. So was the onramp from Riverside Drive to the southbound 5.
Near Lake Los Angeles, 110th Street East from Avenue K to Avenue I because of flooding.
In South Los Angeles, the westbound 60 Freeway connector to the westbound 10 Freeway was closed indefinitely because of an accident.
In the Santa Monica Mountains, State Route 27 is closed from Topanga Canyon School Road to Robinson Road indefinitely by overflowing waters from Topanga Creek. Also, mudslides closed a portion of Hillside Drive east of Summit Road.
In Covina, Covina Hills Road from Rancho Del Monico Road to Rancho La Carlota Road was closed because of flooding.
In Palmdale, East Palmdale Boulevard was closed at 87th Street East.
In the Lancaster community of Roosevelt, Avenue I was closed from 60th Street East to 70th Street East because of flooding. In the community of Quartz Hill, 45th Street West was closed from Avenue K to Avenue K-8 because of pavement failure.
In Sylmar, the westbound 210 Freeway onramp was closed indefinitely because of weather conditions.
In Southeast Antelope Valley, Mt. Emma Road was closed from Cheseboro Road to 87th Street East because of storm activity.
In Castaic, Lake Hughes Road was closed from Pine Canyon Road to Dry Gulch and from Lake Hughes Road to Three Points Road by mud slides.
In the San Gabriel Mountains, the Angeles Crest Highway was closed in two stretches: from Mount Wilson Road to just west of Upper Big Tujunga River, and from the State Route 39 junction to Big Pines Highway. Also, State Route 39 was closed from the Angeles Crest Highway south to two miles north of Crystal Lake Road.
South of Seal Beach, Pacific Coast Highway was closed indefinitely from Warner Avenue to Seapoint Street because of flood control.
In downtown Ventura, one of the three southbound lanes of the 101 Freeway near California Street is closed indefinitely by flooding.
In and out of Ojai, State Route 33 is closed indefinitely in both directions from Fairview Road to the Ozema Fire Station by mudslides. A video of the area showed chunks of mud and rocks splayed across the road.
Also in Ojai, McNell Road from Reeves Road to Grand Avenue and Camino Cielo from State Route 33 to the end.
In North Star Ranch, the ramps connecting the 15 Freeway to Main Street were closed for emergency work.
North of Silverwood Lake, State Route 173 was closed from State Route 138 to Lake Arrowhead Road for emergency work.
In South Fontana, the eastbound 10 Freeway offramp at Citrus Street was closed due to emergency work.
Sandbags
If you need sandbags to protect your home or property, the Los Angeles County Fire Department makes empty sandbags available free to residents at all of its stations, with free sand to fill them at selected locations. To find sandbags and sand near you, go to the county Public Works website or check out this list from the Fire Department.
In Orange County, sand and sandbags are available from certain fire stations, the county yard and some city public works departments. A list with links is on the Orange County Fire Authority’s website.
In Ventura County, two dozen fire stations offer free sandbags for residents, although you’ll have to fill them yourself. The Ventura County Fire Department website has a list of participating stations. The Ventura County Public Works Department also offers a list of retailers that sell sandbags, along with instructions for how to fill and handle sandbags safely.
In San Bernardino County, residents can obtain free, empty sandbags at fire stations across the county, although only some of those stations also offer sand. To find a station near you, consult the list on the San Bernardino Fire Protection District website.
A large and dangerous storm system continued its push through Southern California on Monday, bringing life-threatening flooding, damaging winds and record rainfall — with no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Rainfall totals were continuing to pile up, including 10.28 inches in the Topanga area, 9.84 inches around Bel-Air and 5.3 inches in downtown Los Angeles — with much more on the way, according to Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“There’s still a lot of rain to come,” he said. “There’s a lot of rain left.”
The plume of moisture was expected to linger over the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area through Monday night, followed by on-and-off rain Tuesday and possibly even some showers Wednesday, Kittell said.
“It’s definitely declining starting Wednesday,” he said, but “it’s not until after Friday that we get the all-clear.”
The atmospheric river also smashed several daily rainfall records on Sunday. Downtown Los Angeles received 4.1 inches of rain — breaking the record of 2.55 inches set on Feb. 4, 1927. It was the area’s 10th wettest day since records began in 1877. Santa Barbara Airport broke a daily record with 2.39 inches of rain on Sunday, as did Los Angeles International Airport with 1.76 inches, and Long Beach Airport with 1.5 inches.
The storm packed a wallop across the state, including flooding, water rescues and damaging winds in the San Francisco Bay Area and down the Central Coast. More than half a million people remained without power statewide Monday morning.
But all eyes were on Southern California on Monday, where urgent flash flood warnings remained in effect for portions of San Bernardino, Ventura and Los Angeles.
Some of the worst effects were expected Monday and Tuesday in portions of Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding” was possible as the storm continued its crawl toward the state’s southern border, the National Weather Service said.
The San Bernardino Mountains could see up to 8 inches of additional rainfall through Tuesday evening, while the mountains of San Diego and Riverside counties could see an additional 4 inches, the NWS said.
“Storms can change quickly, but let me be clear: This storm is a serious weather event,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said during a news conference Sunday. “This has the potential to be a historic storm — severe winds, thunderstorms, and even brief tornadoes.”
Indeed, many Angelenos awakened Monday to a soggy, muddy mess, including dozens of road closures and delays due to flooding and debris, according to the California Department of Transportation, California Highway Patrol and other agencies.
Multiple vehicles were submerged Monday on Piuma Road near Calabasas, and another vehicle was submerged on Balkins Drive in Agoura Hills, according to Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials. Minor debris flows had occurred in Agoura Hills, including one on Cornell Road and one on Eagletown Street. A 10-foot boulder was reported on northbound Malibu Canyon Road about 2 miles north of Pacific Coast Highway.
Some on-ramps and southbound lanes along the 5 Freeway were closed from Burbank to Los Feliz, as was a portion of State Route 23 near Banning Dam in Thousand Oaks, CalTrans said. State Route 33 was closed in both directions between Ojai and Lockwood Valley Road due to mudslides. A video of the area showed chunks of mud and rocks splayed across the road.
Mud was also flowing across the Hollywood Hills, damaging homes and forcing residents to flee. At least two homes were damaged as debris flowed down Lockridge Road near Fryman Canyon in Studio City on Sunday night, and an additional nine homes were evacuated from the area out of concern about additional soil instability. Firefighters evacuated residents from three homes on Boris Drive in Tarzana due to flowing debris.
In Long Beach, 19 people were rescued Sunday from the rocks of the breakwater after the mast of a 40-foot boat they were on broke in high winds.
Officials urged Angelenos to stay home if possible. Those who must drive were advised to do so with caution, and to avoid deep water.
However, schools remained open in the Los Angeles area Monday, except for Vinedale Preparatory Academy in Sun Valley, which was affected by mandatory evacuation orders, and Topanga Elementary Charter School in Topanga. Both schools were affected by potentially dangerous hillside conditions. Students and staff at both schools were directed to other campuses for the day.
The storm also delivered powerful winds Sunday, including gusts up to 83 mph in the San Gabriel Mountains; 58 mph in Newhall Pass and 45 mph in the western San Fernando Valley.
By Monday, the strong gusts associated with the storm had abated into light southeasterly winds.
But slow, steady rain would continue to pour, Kittell said.
“It’s just a tremendous amount of rain in the last 24 hours,” he added.
A dangerous, intense storm will move into Southern California this weekend, bringing the potential for widespread flooding, mudslides and debris flows.
Officials are urging caution during the most treacherous periods of the storm Sunday and Monday.
The National Weather Service says flooding from the atmospheric river could be “life-threatening.”
“This will probably be categorized as our biggest storm this winter so far,” said Emily Montanez, associate director with the L.A. County Office of Emergency Management. “Take your individual precautions, but also if people are able to telework and get those plans in place so that we’ve got an easier commute Monday morning, that’s what we’re really encouraging.”
The forecast
Weather officials are expecting 3 to 6 inches of rain across Southern California, particularly in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, which are expected to see some of the worst flooding.
“L.A. could see somewhere from a third to half of the average annual precipitation from this single storm coming up,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA. “It looks like it may rain continuously in L.A. County from around Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning. … It may not be extremely intense the whole time, but it will be a pretty long-duration rain event.”
In addition to rain, “high surf, large battering waves” could contribute to coastal flooding, according to Ryan Kittell, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard. And if the pounding waves aren’t enough, “potentially deadly rip currents” should keep everyone out of the water.
The storm’s effects will be felt statewide, with forecasts showing more than 3 inches of rain possible from the Mexico border to the Bay Area from Sunday through Tuesday — well over the average for the entire month in many areas.
Timeline
Saturday: Rain will begin in the evening in Northern California, primarily along the coastal Bay Area, before heading south.
Sunday: Heavy rainfall is expected to begin in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, moving into Ventura and Los Angeles countiesby late in the day. Strong bands of sustained rainfall will create widespread flood threats.
Monday: The storm is expected to continue, bringing added danger from sustained rainfall on already saturated ground. The highest risk of flooding will be Sunday night through Monday evening.
The heaviest rain will come in areas east and south of Los Angeles County, with up to 4 inches predictedin the Inland Empire and Orange County, and closer to 2 or 4 in San Diego County, according to Adam Roser, a National Weather Service meteorologist in San Diego.
Tuesday to Wednesday: Lighter rain is in the forecast.
Conditions:
Danger zones
Officials say residents should expect street flooding and mudslides in vulnerable areas.
Some evacuations and road closures are expected.
Thunderstorms and heavy rain bands could bring flash flooding.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services has deployed personnel and resources to many areas in the path of the storm, including more than 550 firefighters and 19 swift-water rescue teams in 19 counties, officials said. Two million sandbags have been pre-positioned across the state.
“As we look ahead to the next few days, we encourage all Californians to take steps now to prepare for incoming weather,” agency spokeswoman Alicia de la Garza said in a video posted on X.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday that “California has more than 8,300 boots on the ground as we prepare for this next set of serious storms.” He cautioned all in the storm’s path — especially those in Southern California — to prepare now and follow the guidance of local government officials and first responders.
Santa Barbara County: Officials are urging residents to stay away from rivers, creeks, flood-prone low-lying areas and wildfire burn scars, which can turn into dangerous mud and debris flows during heavy rains. Beaches, bluffs and harbor areas may see coastal flooding and erosion, and residents and visitors are being advised to stay away.
Los Angeles County: Officials are keeping a close eye on the Palos Verdes peninsula, which saw devastating land movement last summer and a mudslide Thursday, as well as Long Beach and areas along the San Gabriel Mountains, Montanez said.
“We’re always keeping an eye on that area, especially with recent burn scars like in Duarte, with the Fish fire,” Montanez said. “In burn scar areas, within three years post-fire, there’s always a chance for mud and debris flow.”
The county’s Public Works Department is working to clear storm drains and flood control channels in preparation for an influx of water, she said. The agency is expected to issue phased warnings for areas in the path of the storm. That may include potential evacuation notices in Duarte, Azusa, the Santa Clarita Valley and other at-risk areas.
She added that the county is positioning Sheriff’s Department officials in case door-to-door evacuation notices are warranted, as well as fire and emergency response personnel. The county is also readying an outreach team for unhoused populations, she said.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass urged residents to monitor the storm and be mindful of extreme weather warnings.
“We know the severe impact that weather can have on our communities, and we are making sure Los Angeles is prepared on behalf of our residents, including the unhoused Angelenos living on our streets, to get through this storm,” she said.
After the horrific Oct. 17 crash on Pacific Coast Highway that killed four Pepperdine students, the Malibu community pleaded with its City Council to do more to stop speeding drivers whose recklessness often ends in injuries and fatalities.
The city’s latest effort to improve safety on the scenic but perilous 21-mile stretch of PCH is to add a dedicated task force to patrol the roadway over the next year and a half.
In January, the City Council approved a contract with the California Highway Patrol to establish the three-officer unit to patrol Pacific Coast Highway within city limits. The contract will expire in June 2025.
Deadly crashes have plagued Malibu for decades. A Times analysis after the October crash found there were 170 deaths and serious injuries to drivers, passengers, cyclists and pedestrians between 2011 and 2023.
PCH is a state highway, so it falls under Caltrans jurisdiction, which limits the changes the city can make to the roadway. But in the last three months, Caltrans has begun construction on a new traffic signal synchronization project that allows the agency to remotely control traffic signals on the highway, synchronize their timing and adjust them to lower traffic speeds and reduce congestion.
In November, the Malibu City Council declared a local emergency, which allowed the city manager to quickly approve a short-term contract with the CHP to immediately bolster patrols. Those patrols are ending this month, just as the longer-term task force kicks in.
There are still projects in the pipeline. A $4.2-million Caltrans contract approved by the state in December will allow the agency to establish speed feedback signs and speed limit markings on pavement, replace safety corridor signs and enhance striping on curves.
The California Highway Patrol stopped patrolling PCH in Malibu in 1991 when the city incorporated, and Malibu contracted for law enforcement with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Now, the additional patrols are welcomed by city officials and law enforcement at a time when many in the community feel at their wits’ end.
“We’re always happy to have more enforcement, especially when we have people dying on our streets,” said Jennifer Seetoo, captain of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu/Lost Hills station.
Seetoo told The Times on Tuesday that she believes the “three E’s, and that is enforcement, education and engineering,” are needed to make the highway safe.
The new CHP task force is an essential aspect of enforcement, Seetoo said, but she wants speed cameras, too.
In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a speed camera pilot program, but Malibu wasn’t among the cities where cameras would be installed. State Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) and Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks), however, are working on legislation to get the cameras in Malibu, Seetoo said.
Meanwhile, traffic safety on PCH continues to be top of mind for residents and top of the agenda for council members.
At the most recent City Council meeting, residents who spoke said spreading awareness is vital in protecting the neighborhood.
“If this is a war on recklessness,” said one commenter, “we need to be targeting hearts and minds.”
Some suggested posting signs: “This place is worth going slow,” “Slow down, you’re already here,” “Locals can tell you’re a tourist by your speeding.”
Only Caltrans-approved signs can be attached to power poles, however. Councilmember Paul Grisanti suggested that businesses and homeowners along the highway allow large signs to be posted on their buildings to snag people’s attention.
Another commenter proposed that four volunteer motorists put signs on the backs of their cars emphasizing the speed limit and then drive side by side on each side of the highway.
The community’s passion on the topic is evident.
And, Seetoo told The Times, residents are cautiously optimistic.
After the death of 13-year-old Emily Shane — who was struck by a speeding driver as she walked along PCH in 2010 — “the community rallied and wanted change,” Seetoo said. “And nothing happened, and I feel like this is the first time that things are actually happening.”
Times staff writer Terry Castleman contributed to this report.
In a matter of minutes Monday morning, communities across southeastern San Diego were transformed into disaster zones: Families fled their homes in chest-deep floodwaters; vehicles were swept downstream as roads became rivers; residents cried for help from their rooftops.
A deluge of rainfall from what city officials are calling a “thousand-year storm” forced hundreds of rescues, flooded an untold number of homes and businesses and caused millions of dollars in estimated damage. The floodwaters had mostly receded by Tuesday afternoon, revealing the devastating aftermath of California’s latest climate emergency — and leaving hundreds without housing and transportation, and with ruined valuables and personal belongings.
“The damage and the impact was absolutely devastating,” San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said at a Tuesday news conference. “Entire lives changed in just a few minutes.”
“The amount of water that we saw yesterday would have overwhelmed any city drainage system,” he said. “This dumping of rainwater is unprecedented in most San Diegans’ lifetimes. None of us alive have seen anything quite like this.”
More than 4 inches of rain fell in several areas in and around San Diego on Monday — much of it in just a few hours — a historic rainfall event, according to Elizabeth Adams, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego. The airport recorded 2.73 inches, more than its typical total for the entire month of January.
“That is not only the wettest January day on record, but it’s the fourth-wettest day of any calendar day” for San Diego, Adams said. Many areas saw rainfall rates well above three-quarters of an inch per hour. Over half an inch per hour can easily cause dangerous flash flooding.
“It’s a ton,” Adams said. “Pretty much anywhere in the country that receives 3 to 4 inches in a three- to four-hour time period is going to see flooding.”
Parts of San Diego were completely inundated.
The city’s southeastern neighborhoods, including Southcrest, Mountain View, Encanto, Logan Heights and San Ysidro, saw some of the worst damage.
Gloria said city and county leaders are focused on recovery. Both the city and county declared a local emergency. The mayor estimated, conservatively, that the storm caused $6 million in damage, but officials say assessments are far from complete.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday proclaimed a state of emergency for San Diego and Ventura counties, both of which have been walloped by wet winter storms. At the end of December, torrential downpours in and around Oxnard caused similar damage. During that event, Oxnard saw rainfall rates of 3 inches an hour, one of the heaviest downpours ever recorded in the area.
Homeowner Maria Ramirez walks through her flood-damaged home in San Diego.
(Denis Poroy / Associated Press)
The worry now is that the number of people displaced in San Diego could continue to grow in the coming days. Though no official figure was provided Tuesday, city leaders said they estimated hundreds had been forced from their homes, at least temporarily.
“What was generally assumed to be the impact yesterday … was probably an underestimate,” said San Diego City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, whose district includes some of the communities that saw the worst of the flooding. He said he visited many of those residents early Tuesday, touring a whole apartment complex that took on water, likely displacing dozens of families.
The American Red Cross is operating two emergency shelters at Lincoln High School and Bostonia Recreation Center. As of Tuesday, the nonprofit said 18 households — more than 50 people — had registered to stay. But with so many people probably still returning home after fleeing, Elo-Rivera said he expected those numbers to rise. City and county officials are asking residents to fill out a voluntary survey about flood damage.
“I think it’s going to take a little bit more time to realize the extent of the damage,” Elo-Rivera said.
On Monday afternoon, Manuel Deleon was unexpectedly called back to the office during his shift driving a tow truck — only to find the office flooded. Roaring water had swept away his personal vehicle.
“The water was out of control,” said Deleon, 47. “My car slipped with the mud and went right into [a nearby] ditch and it was just fully submerged.”
Deleon, whose 2007 BMW was one of dozens of cars carried away in the flash floods, said he wasn’t sure how he’d get to work in the coming days. He attempted to clean the soggy and caked-in mud from the interior, but that was a lost cause.
“This rain took everybody by surprise,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
San Diego Fire Chief Colin Stowell said his crews made at least 150 rescues Monday, in addition to 30 animal rescues.
“We literally saw over 100 rescues in the Southcrest neighborhood alone,” Stowell said.
“Luckily we saw very few injuries and no fatalities,“ Stowell said, calling that feat “remarkable” given the extent of the emergency.
More than 1,000 people remained without power Tuesday, after widespread outages Monday, according to the San Diego Gas & Electric outage map.
Although much of San Diego was under a flood watch all day Monday, city officials said they were not prepared for the extent — and speed — of what came down.
“Nobody anticipated the severity of the storm,” Gloria said. “We got a lot more rain than [what was predicted] in a much shorter amount of time.”
He said he planned to meet with the National Weather Service to discuss the disparity between forecasts and what occurred but emphasized that his teams were currently focused on recovery.
Adams said the circumstances Monday ended up being a perfect storm for rare, heavy rainfall in San Diego: extreme atmospheric moisture and a storm path over its downtown — which forecasters warned residents about as soon as possible, she said.
Just after 8 a.m. Monday, the agency issued a flash flood warning for a stretch of coastal communities just south of Orange County, including Oceanside, Carlsbad and Vista. Soon after, a larger stretch of southwestern California was placed under a flash flood warning.
Marlene Sanchez-Barriento salvages items behind her San Diego home, which was damaged by flooding.
(Denis Poroy / Associated Press)
“We used pretty intense warnings,” Adams said. “We tried to really heighten the message … [that] this is a really dangerous situation that doesn’t happen in San Diego proper that often.”
The day before the storm, the National Weather Service’s forecast discussion warned that the ground, already saturated from storms over the weekend, could heighten flood concerns. But forecasters said it was still hard to predict how much rain would fall, and where.
By Monday morning, Adams said the situation developed rapidly, with that intense atmospheric moisture — what she called 250% to 350% of normal — and the direct storm path aligning.
That “really lead to torrential rainfall across the county, but especially focused on downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods,” Adams said.
City officials said these extreme circumstances are likely to become a new normal requiring more preparation, coordination and investment.
“This is called climate change. It is real, it is happening,” Gloria said, “and we experienced it yesterday in San Diego.”
Officials agreed that the city’s outdated stormwater drainage system, for which $2 billion of necessary work hasn’t been budgeted, didn’t help.
Elo-Rivera said he would like to see those much-needed funds allocated, and in an equitable way — noting that many of the communities affected most were working-class, with a majority of Latino and Black residents.
These communities “have long been under-invested in and divested in and ignored by the city,” he said. “Public investment in climate resiliency is incredibly important … [especially] prioritizing the communities that have been left behind and are most likely to be devastated by events like yesterday.”
Fearing possible mudslides, officials issued an evacuation warning for some Topanga Canyon residents ahead of heavy rainfall expected late Sunday into Monday.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department alerted residents living in a zone along Santa Maria Road just north of Topanga Canyon Boulevard to be prepared to leave their homes as the wettest weather from a trio of recent storms rolls into Southern California.
According to the National Weather Service, from 1 to 2 inches of rain is expected to drench Topanga Canyon throughout Monday, with thunderstorms possible for the area.
Southern California has “had a series of storms since Friday,” said David Gomberg, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “This one that is coming in overnight and into tomorrow will be the strongest of the series.”
No flood watches were in effect for Los Angeles County as of Sunday evening.
“There’s still possibilities for some locally heavy rates because we have thunderstorms in the forecast,” Gomberg added. “But we’re not looking for a widespread heavy rain event.”
The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for San Diego County on Monday.
For affected Topanga Canyon residents, the evacuation warning goes into effect at 9 p.m. Sunday and extends through 6 a.m. Tuesday.
Officials encouraged residents to monitor local weather while gathering loved ones, pets and supplies.
Last January, a mudslide and a tumbling boulder forced the closure of a section of Topanga Canyon Boulevard after heavy rainfall.
Residents can visit L.A. County’s website to learn if they are in areas that may be affected by mudslide evacuations.
