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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration opened the city's Disaster Recovery Center on Tuesday at the UCLA Research Park, which was formerly known as the Westside Pavilion. "This is a one-stop shop," Bass said of the services offered for fire victims at the center.
Academics, builders, consultants and other analysts who reviewed L.A. Mayor Karen Bass' executive order to speed up rebuilds at The Los Angeles Times' request said Bass' move was an essential beginning to what will be an inevitably complicated process. "Directionally, it's exactly right," said Stuart Gabriel, director of UCLA's Ziman Center for Real Estate. "It is precisely the type of steps that you would expect the city to undertake."
"There are a number -- you know, if I would estimate, about a 10- to 15% increase of people coming in that already have sinus problems or asthma that are saying, I'm here because the smoke is actually aggravating my condition," said UCLA's Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson. (Also, UCLA's Dr. John Belperio was quoted by Time.)
These pollutants can be particularly dangerous for young children and pregnant people because they have higher respiratory rates, according to Rita Kachru, the chief of allergy and immunology at UCLA. This means that these groups are breathing faster -- so they inhale more pollutants per minute.
Last year, the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation published a study in the journal Science Advances that found an estimated total of more than 55,000 premature deaths in an 11-year span from inhaling fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, or soot, from wildfires.
The fires that have ravaged Los Angeles over the past week were larger and burned hotter than they would have in a world without planet-warming fossil fuel pollution, a new analysis suggests. Climate change could be blamed for around 25% of the fuel available for the fires, according to the rapid research from scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The report is clear in saying the fires likely still would have occurred in a world without climate pollution, but it concludes they would have been "somewhat smaller and less intense." (Also: ABC News.)
"To be clear, it looks very unlikely that we'll see strong north winds of anywhere near the magnitude that we did in the beginning of [last] week," said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist on a YouTube livestream on Friday. However, he does not think L.A. is out of the woods yet when it comes to fire risk. (Swain was also featured by The New Yorker and ABC News.)
Landslides already historically occur in California. But conditions are currently extreme enough to warrant concern for increased threat, Edith de Guzman, a water equity and adaptation policy cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told ABC News. (de Guzman was also quoted by The Washington Post.)
Since 2021, Tesla and other carmakers have been required to report all serious incidents involving autonomous vehicles or advanced driver-assistance technology to regulators at NHTSA under what's known as the Standing General Order on Crash Reporting. "That information has really given NHTSA an important window into what is happening on the road," said UCLA School of Law professor Ann Carlson, the former acting administrator and chief counsel at NHTSA, who signed the standing general order. (Carlson was also quoted by The New York Times about emissions laws.)
"We're finger-pointing away from the problem," says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. "We have really no lack of water. What we have is an infrastructure that is not made to fight cataclysmic fires, biblical-size fires." (UCLA's Greg Pierce was also quoted.)
The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute released a study on the impacts wildfires have on Latino communities. Their data showed Latino people are disproportionately employed in outdoor jobs such as agriculture, construction and landscaping, and have a higher exposure to wildfire smoke, which poses significant health risks.