LA's wildfires may have been devastating, but the spirit of cooperation among Angelenos in the aftermath has been pretty inspiring. Everyone across the city is willing to help their neighbors in need and lock hands in a spirit of—
Hundreds of San Gabriel Valley residents confronted state and federal officials during a heated community meeting Wednesday, asking how a local recreation area had become a processing site for hazardous waste from the Eaton fire without community input.
....Officials from the EPA and the California agencies that handle environmental protection and toxic substances control assured residents they were taking safety precautions, but were repeatedly interrupted by audience members who yelled, “We don’t want it!” and “Find another place!”
Heartwarming.
I see, unwilling to help their neighbors being rebuilding, apparently.
To be fair, you have to assume that these are working class Asian American families who presumably won’t squawk too much at becoming a toxic waste dump.
Are there any high-end white neighborhoods in LA that will become toxic waste dumps?
I think we can all guess the answer to that one.
Satisfied Trump voters pitching in?
EPA is not much longer for this world, maybe absorbed by Interior? By the time each of these gets litigated, the agencies will be long gone.
We all know the R side of the congressional table is going to roll over, they've been threatened with being primaried by an opponent personally backed by Musk's endless wallet.
No chance of an impeachment.
No chance of the 25th with his personal army freed.
Vance is politically even worse, but lacks the fan base.
Does SCOTUS intervene or does some surreal, out of left field, game changer event occur? What would David Lynch do?
A touch up job at the FBI,
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1ieo6xo/painting_over_core_values_at_the_fbi/
To be fair, you left out this part of the article:
And it's not easy to mitigate toxic dust from spreading in a high wind event.
But then again, these folks are living in an area that has a half-dozen open pit mines. What' a few more toxic dust releases? You won't even be able to tell the difference with all the background toxins.
What's a few more toxic dust releases, you may think? Ever hear of the straw that broke the camel's back?
So Kevin is volunteering to have the hazardous waste deposited in Irvine? Heartwarming.
Just try to imagine the logical endpoint of this sentiment. Just try, for once.
Irvine would be a good place for it since it's only temporary.
Not if you look at a map.
Now, if the fire had been in Limestone Canyon? Then sure, a processing site in Irvine makes some sense.
Nobody's "depositing" waste anywhere near these communities. There was some property there where potentially hazardous materials could be brought and sorted under controlled -- i.e. "safe" -- conditions so that they could then be shipped off to whatever facility can properly dispose of or recycle that waste. The poor EPA managers were trying to explain this to people, but kept getting shouted down by residents convinced that they were opening toxic waste burn pits next to the elementary school or whatever.
People need to learn to sit down, inform themselves, and make rational decisions, not run around and set their hair on fire based on what some crazy neighbor posted on Nextdoor.
What am I saying? This is America, so flammable hair spray and a match it is!
All true. So sort it in Irvine. They'll understand.
Ahh, the NIMBY rears their head, nevermind Irving is further away by almost twice as much.
Do it elsewhere, they say, take those refugees elsewhere.
Shows how dishonest you are.
The San Gabriel Valley is close to Pacific Palisades???
Honestly, what are you people thinking? Because "Irvine" sounds like "Irwindale" they must be right next door? Is that the thinking?
The thinking, if any/such as it is, is probably how Kevin lives in Irvine.
What hazardous waste is being 'deposited'?
It's being sorted and transferred between trucks as they collect it. It's not going to be there for long.
Do you complain when the utility trucks gather their during outages or storms?
It's dumb.
With donnie's "tariffs" on, among other things, Canadian lumber, taking effect, wait until rebuilding the burn areas starts. Should be interesting, and expensive.
On the other hand, will homes built with lots of "lumber" even be permitted anymore?
You have to build stick homes in CA because of earthquakes. The questions is what kinds of siding, cladding, insulation, etc. can be required to protect that exposed wood from catching fire.
+1
The point is the sticks aren't exposed.
The neighbor of a friend had a glowing ember slightly bigger than a softball in her front yard, she is at least 5 miles downwind from the nearest fire.(wind gusts were measured then at 95 to 100 mph)
Due to the wind and turbulence, firefighting helicopters and aircraft were grounded, basically crippling an effective firefighting effort.
Rebuilding should be a bit more complicated than redoing the house, especially with global warming going on.
Climate change has been cancelled by the Trumpies.
Those little three-monkey statuettes come to mind.
Steel frames are just as earthquake resistant as wood frames, although significantly more expensive.
I don't think this is a story about bitchy residents who refuse to come together after a tragedy. In fact, if you want to hear about people coming together to help those affected in neighboring communities, there are plenty of them.
Instead, this appears to be a story about how government agencies have done a poor job working with local communities in the early recovery stages after the fires. The communities of Duarte and Asuza were not in the burn areas. They are more than 20 miles away from Altadena, but they are next to Irwindale, where the EPA has been dumping toxic waste from the burn site without notifying the residents. Maybe if toxic waste were being dumped next door to you, you'd want to be at least notified about it too.
What's driving the EPA to act this way? As the article explains:
In other words, this is how the feds work under Trump.
I know from behind the Orange Curtain, everything north looks like the land of "Angelenos." But that term usually implies residents of the City of Los Angeles. The people in the L.A. Times story live in Duarte and Asuza , about 20 and 25 miles from Los Angeles. Yeah, we're all in the same county, and all part of Southern California, but if you ask those residents, they're more likely to identify their larger community as the San Gabriel Valley than say they are Angelenos. (Irvine, ftr, is 40 miles from downtown L.A., and I suspect you might get a heated response if you call the people there Angelenos.)
Again, if you read the story, nobody is talking about "dumping" waste in these communities. It's about a facility they've set up to sort potentially harmful materials from the burn areas so that they can then be shipped to various sites for permanent containment, disposal, etc. That's not risk-free of course, and these people have every right to know what's being done and how risk is going to be mitigated, but nobody's opening a toxic waste dump in Irwindale, the beloved home of original Sriracha sauce.
+1
(The chili sauce company has been blamed for gassing out its neighbors more than a few times, too.)
The sorting sites are kinda ugly, but they're not permanent. They drag out the walls and trees and melded cars and sort them into piles of different mixtures so they can keep the dusty wall parts away from the tree parts; put the clean bricks back to work as building materials while getting all the plastics sealed up where they won't melt in the rain.
And why can’t that be done in a rich white neighborhood near Pacific Palisades?
I understand the Irwindale park is not a permanent site for the toxic waste. If the word "dump" is what triggered you, I should have said transported to and unloaded, I guess.
My point stands. The fed authorities decided to use the Irwindale facility without consultation with local lawmakers or residents, and it appears they failed to communicate clearly, if at all, what they were doing.
This TV story provides good context. Hazardous material is going to be brought to a site near homes and hiking trails. People who live their have legitimate questions, in my opinion.
https://abc7.com/post/duarte-residents-town-hall-express-opposition-location-eaton-fires-debris-processing-site/15849469/
"where the EPA has been dumping toxic waste from the burn site without notifying the residents. " thank you for admitting you are lying scum.
Also, many of the fires were in Los Angeles county, not the city of Los Angeles.
Not just scum but lying scum? I hear that's the worst kind. Sounds bad.
You mean despite all we were hearing about preparations in Sacramento to 'resist' Trump, California officials were not prepared to resist this? Inconceivable!
Resist what?
It's not California officials. It's federal employees.
It was 6 days ago this post and a number of comments took So Cal residents to task for their failure to let federal agencies clean up toxic materials from the fires without asking questions. As more is known, it looks like those concerns of residents were well-founded. The fed agents under Trump were acting with undue haste. And I think a good lesson would be to learn the facts and shut up or direct your ire at Trump's government.
Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-06/la-wildfire-toxic-cleanup-pushes-a-breakneck-pace-to-meet-trump-deadline