The Brief

You know the feeling…tossing and turning because it’s just too hot to sleep.

“We need to actually cool our bodies down to sleep,” said David Eisenman, professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA who studies the health impacts of extreme heat. "So if we can't cool our bodies down, our sleep becomes disturbed. That then has effects on our heart, on our immune system, on our psychology. Our inability to sleep is bad for our bodies and our minds.”

Eisenman said emerging research is showing hotter nights may even increase the risk of stroke, particularly in older adults.

“The idea here is that we think that persons are getting dehydrated at night because it's too warm in their homes. This increases the thickness of their blood and this leads to greater risk of blood clot formation and then strokes occur,” he said.

Eisenman added that research is also showing that the overnight temperature associated with the biggest risks is around 80 degrees, but the threshold will be different for different people, and can depend on other factors such as levels of humidity.

Some feel the nighttime heat more than others

Wealthier households can often protect themselves from this worsening trend because they live in better-insulated housing and can afford to run air conditioning for longer periods of time.

But lower-income communities largely home to people of color are disproportionately affected by both the urban heat island effect and climate change that's contributing to hotter nighttime temperatures. Historically redlined communities with fewer trees and more concrete and pollution are particularly at risk.

The risk of health impacts caused by disturbed sleep is particularly high for people without air conditioning (some 20% of homes in Los Angeles have no AC, for example).

Even for those who do have air conditioning, many with lower or fixed incomes can’t afford to run it long or at all. And as more people get pushed out of safe housing — largely due to unaffordable rent and housing costs — and onto the streets or into mobile homes that can’t sufficiently keep heat out, the health affects will only grow.

Eisenman said better public health messaging around the specific affects of nighttime heat is needed.

The cooling center at the Mid Valley Senior Center in Panorama City will have extended hours through the weekend.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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“We've seen a lot of good messaging around high temperatures and it always sort of assumes daytime temperatures….here's where you can go during the day if it's really hot,” Eisenman said. “We aren't dealing with the nighttime temperatures in any of our risk messaging that comes out of governments or public health departments, so this is really an important gap in our approach. We need to think about how can we provide resources for nighttimes.”

Longer-term solutions include increasing shade and cool roofs and pavement in the hottest neighborhoods, as well as access to energy-efficient cooling technology such as heat pumps. Cutting global carbon pollution is key to preventing the issue from getting worse.

What hotter nights say about climate change

The science is clear that greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere by human society are driving hotter and longer heat waves around the world, including here in the Southland.

And nights are warming nearly twice as fast as days.

That trend is hitting home in Southern California, not just because it’s summer and hotter temperatures are exacerbating the urban heat island effect, said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) San Diego office.

It’s largely human-caused climate change, he said.

“The heat waves are getting worse. The heat waves are containing a little bit more moisture. So that means your nighttime temperatures are also warmer,” Tardy said.

Warmer air holds more moisture, Tardy explained. As the climate crisis makes heat waves hotter and longer, additional moisture is sucked into the atmosphere. (That also dries out vegetation faster, raising the risk for more severe wildfire).

To make matters worse, more moisture in the atmosphere can also mean more humid weather — that’s what we’re seeing in the current heat wave, Tardy said. While that humidity can keep daytime temperatures lower, it makes nighttime temperatures higher, he added.

“It's kind of a lose-lose scenario because your daytime is not quite as hot, but your nighttime is equally or even slightly warmer,” Tardy said. “So we're going to be spending a lot of our time in the 80s and 90s in a lot of these inland locations, even more than what we just recently did [in the late June and early July heat waves].”

More humidity makes it even harder for our bodies to cool down, since sweating isn’t as effective, further exacerbating the risk of heat illness.

How far from normal are we? 

Tardy said here in the Southland, nighttime temperatures in the mountains and deserts have been 4 to 8 degrees above normal for this time of year — for example, Big Bear has seen nighttime temperatures 6 degrees above normal for July. Palm Springs has been 8 degrees above normal, with nighttime lows averaging 87 degrees, instead of the long-term average for this time of year of 79 degrees.

The coast is starting to see above-normal nighttime temperatures now too, as the effects of May gray and June gloom have burned off.

“The trend is that you're having these anomalies repeat,” Tardy said. “Now you're not always first place, you're not always second place, but it's just like looking at sports — if a team wins the division six out of 10 years, there's a definite trend.”

Six out of the last 10 years have ranked among the top 10 highest for average night temperatures in Palm Springs, for example, Tardy said.

“Whenever you have anomalies, you don't want them to be showing up year after year or month after month,” he said. “Part of how we look at climate change is what's driving the overnight temperatures. It's not just urban heat island, it's also a planet or atmosphere that potentially has more moisture. And the reason why it has more moisture is because it's overall the air mass is warmer. So warmer air will hold more moisture.”

Head Start centers in Southern California say they’re operating as usual despite the Trump administration proposing a vast overhaul to the early education program.

The administration last week proposed stripping many of Head Start’s regulations, saying it would provide more local flexibility. Advocates fear it could gut many of the features of the program, which goes beyond early education services.

For now, providers and advocates say parents should continue to enroll their children.

“Head Start programs will remain open. We will continue to offer services as currently designed. And that won't change until all of this is ultimately resolved,” said Luis Bautista, executive director of early learning at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which serves around 7,000 children in Head Start through local organizations.

The proposed rule will now undergo a 60-day public comment period.

“We want to make sure that everyone is involved in raising their voice and providing feedback,” Bautista said.

After the public comment period closes, the federal government is expected to analyze the comments before moving forward.

Bautista and others said it’s possible that if some changes go through, there could be litigation that also puts off implementation.

 ”A lot of times I think people feel because something is proposed, it will just happen, but that is not the case,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

“They do have to take public feedback into consideration, and it is documented as part of the process,” Lee said.

The proposed rule marks the latest effort by the Trump administration to reshape the federally-funded program. Previously, the administration tried to eliminate funding for Head Start in an early draft budget before restoring the money.

The administration also tried to ban undocumented children from attending, an effort that's been tied up in court.

The city of Long Beach has proposed cutting library hours and laying off librarians to help balance its budget. In response, educators, the local library foundation and union leaders are pushing back, saying the city can’t afford to lose a vital service for kids and families.

Under the budget proposal, five of the city’s 12 libraries — Bay Shore, Burnett, El Dorado, Harte and Michelle Obama — would drop from six days of service back to five, losing their Monday hours just a few years after those hours were added. (The city’s other libraries were already closed on Mondays, and all are closed Sundays.)

On an average Monday, those branches see a total of more than 1,000 visitors, according to city data.

“In a city the size of Long Beach, and with our population, we could be seeing a 2027 where there are no libraries open on Monday. I think that’s pretty crazy,” said Kristen Hernandez with the Long Beach Public Library Foundation. The nonprofit, which raises money for the local library system, is gathering signatures on a petition protesting the cuts. As of Friday, it had more than 1,800 signatures.

Changes to the city library system are a sliver of the cuts unveiled last week by Long Beach City Manager Tom Modica as part of a citywide winnowing in programs and services to close next year’s expected $58 million deficit.

Beyond cuts to programs and facility hours, Modica proposed laying off more than 260 city workers and cutting more than 200 additional vacant positions — about 4% of the city’s roughly 6,000-person workforce.

The proposed library cuts

Local libraries would lose 14 positions, 11 of them currently filled, including five library clerks, four library assistants, a vacant general librarian position at the Billie Jean King Main Library, and a mental health associate who serves as the library’s teen specialist. The plan also cuts funding for library pages who stock books and funding for security services, as well as nearly all print and digital newspaper subscriptions.

The combined cuts would save the department a little more than $1.4 million.

Elizabeth Cespuglio, a librarian at Billie Jean King Library, said that the library assistants at risk of being cut are responsible for planning and running workshops and programs at the branches, pulling materials, tracking which books and genres are most in demand and staffing the information desk. Clerks handle check-outs, check-ins and library cards, while pages keep the shelves organized.

Perhaps most at risk, Cespuglio said, is the library’s mental health associate, Jasmin Flores, who spends her days building rapport with teens in need. Losing that specialist, she said, leaves her “quite fearful” for the patrons and staff alike, since the library’s other social worker focuses on unhoused adults and doesn’t have the time and energy to build the same relationships with youth.

Each day, Flores is the calming face for more than a dozen kids. Many of them are in and out of homelessness; some have been in juvenile detention. Others are LGBTQIA and struggle to find friends; others struggle to find food. She’s already told some that she may not be showing up anymore. It’s a difficult conversation, she said, having to console others for the loss of her job.

“It honestly breaks my heart that I probably will not be in that position anymore,” she said.

Flores’ main worry is that some of them will stop showing up. “We’ve built that rapport, and it hasn’t been easy to build,” she said. “It’s taken a while to get there, and I just hate to see all that go to waste.”

Librarians say they’re already stretched thin

The real problem, Cespuglio said, is that libraries are losing funding even as they’re increasingly in demand — more than 2,800 patrons visit daily across Long Beach’s 12 branches, an 8% rise since last year. The number of programs offered has increased by 50% in the past year, with more than 1,000 adult participants.

Annually, city libraries have continually climbed in foot traffic since the onset of the pandemic, though averages are still lower than in 2018 and 2019.

Branches have been understaffed for more than a decade, Cespuglio said, at least since the last time the city announced library layoffs in 2012.

“There’s still an expectation on the system for us to be doing all of these things and continue the same level of service as we’ve done,” she said. “Cutting those hours, or those Mondays, not only does it impact the public’s access to the library all over the city, but it has these other ramifications in the rest of the five days that the rest of us are working.”

The looming cuts have created an “undercurrent of anxiety” among staff who still don’t know which of them may lose their jobs, according to Cespuglio. Her own position is not at risk, but her partner’s is, and she said the possibility of losing half her household income is real. She said that rent in Long Beach has outpaced her pay raises for the 12 years she’s lived and worked in the city.

The bigger budget picture

The library cuts are part of a far larger fiscal reckoning for Long Beach.

The proposed layoffs stretch across more than a dozen departments and offices, hitting fire, police, homeless services, parks and libraries alike, as the city grapples with rising personnel costs, mounting legal payouts, the loss of federal grants and a local economic slowdown that has weighed on tax revenue.

City officials have said the strategy of previous years — pulling from cash reserves to delay layoffs — is no longer sustainable; the city drained tens of millions of dollars from its reserves, including its emergency fund, just to close out the current fiscal year.

Sashi Muralidharan, a labor representative with the city’s largest union, IAM Local 1930, said they will “fight for every job,” even as labor negotiations — which coincide with the budget talks — are looking grim.

Eighty percent of the positions proposed to be cut are represented by IAM, including 209 filled positions.

“Anything that does result in a layoff, we will be bargaining over those impacts to make sure that we lessen the negative impacts,” Muralidharan said.

At a Long Beach City Council meeting this week, nurses, union shop stewards, library staff and other city workers turned out to protest the cuts, arguing they would bring greater ramifications to the public’s quality of life and further enervate its remaining staff, pushing them to look for work elsewhere.

Nate Kim, a city nurse and negotiator with IAM Local 1930, told the council that while his own position had been renewed, many of his colleagues had not been so fortunate. “Many have been laid off already,” he added. Emily Quest, a resident who uses the library’s free craftspace, begged council members through tears not to cut the hours or the staff who run it.

Mayor Rex Richardson has proposed restoring 70 of the positions slated for elimination and said the city remains on track for its first structural budget surplus by 2028, even as another deficit, projected at $27.3 million, looms for the following year.

The City Council is expected to hold public hearings on the budget through the summer before a final vote in late September. You can find a schedule of hearings to attend here or fill out an online survey to share your priorities with the City Council, which must debate and pass the budget by Oct. 1.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Two months after an oil spill shut down streets in East Los Angeles and disrupted businesses along the Cesar E. Chavez Avenue corridor, many owners are still waiting for reimbursement.

The May spill forced street closures after crews punctured an underground pipeline, sending more than 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto nearby streets and into storm drains. Along the commercial corridor, owners of restaurants, barbershops and bike shops had to cancel appointments, delay deliveries or close their doors for a week as cleanup crews worked in the area.

What the spill cost businesses

In the days following the spill, a survey of nearly 50 businesses near the intersection of East Cesar E. Chavez and Eastern avenues found a 70% to 75% loss in revenue, according to Kelly LoBianco, director of the LA County Department of Economic Opportunity.

“You know how the barbershop gets on a Friday. … We lost a lot of business that week,” said Barber Avila, owner of Brooklyn Lab Barbershop. Avila preferred not to share his first name for this story.

For the past month, Avila has been working with LA County and pipeline operator Pacific Pipeline System (PPS) to submit documents – including tax records, sales reports and expenses – to show how the spill affected his business and file a claim for reimbursement.

Avila said his claim was approved this week and he is now awaiting payment.

Reimbursement has been slow

Many other businesses are seeking reimbursement from PPS, but the process has been slow, LoBianco said.

As of Tuesday, 19 businesses had filed claims. Only one had been approved, while three others were close to approval, LoBianco said. She did not have details on the amount reimbursed.

Veronica Ramos, co-owner of Ramos Industries, a commercial and residential glass and aluminum contractor, said she was reimbursed by PPS a week after submitting a claim. The spill caused contracted jobs to be canceled and deliveries to be rescheduled for a fee because trucks could not access the shop.

Ramos said her business had a bookkeeper who was able to quickly gather the required documents but she worries her neighbors may struggle to provide the needed records for a claim.

A PPS spokesperson said claims are still being accepted and processed. A third-party claims administrator has been helping businesses with the filing process in English and Spanish, the company said.

“We understand how important a timely resolution is for those affected and remain committed to working through each claim as efficiently as possible,” PPS said.

Cleanup could stretch into 2027

What lies ahead are months of soil testing and excavation to remove contaminated soil from the site of the spill, which county officials say could continue into January 2027. Neither Avila nor Ramos knew about the remaining work and worried about how additional street closures could affect their business again.

“It’s good to keep it in mind,” Ramos said.

Was your business affected by the oil spill?

Anyone who believes they were impacted by the oil spill can still contact the PPS claims line at 1-877-817-5465 to be connected to a third-party administrator who can guide them through the process in English and Spanish, PPS said. There is currently no deadline to submit a claim.

The Department of Economic Opportunity’s Office of Small Business (OSB) is continuing to provide guidance on claim preparation, documentation requirements, and submission for affected businesses. To book a one-on-one appointment, businesses can:

• Call OSB at (844) 432-4900,
• Visit OSB’s East LA Entrepreneurship Center located at 4716 E. Cesar E. Chavez Ave., or; 
• Email osb@opportunity.lacounty.gov. 

All impacted businesses seeking assistance should indicate that their request is related to the East LA oil spill.

How to avoid scams:

Rafael Carbajal, director of the LA County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) said bad actors may prey upon communities during environmental disasters like the oil spill including contractors and legal services providers.

Carbajal said the DCBA office is helping residents verify contractors, legal services providers and is providing information on their website on how to recognize scams.

Residents who have concerns or questions can call the DCBA hotline at (800) 593-8222.

Composer Charles-Henri Avelange has wanted to find a way to honor firefighters with music since the 9/11 attacks.

Last month, that longtime dream started to take shape when over 85 orchestral musicians working in Hollywood gathered at a Sony Pictures Studio soundstage to record the “Fireman's Prayer.”

The poem, written by Alvin William “Smokey” Linn, was inspired by an apartment fire in 1958 in which three children died. It’s something every firefighter learns to recite.

Not long after moving to the U.S., Avelange found the Fireman’s Prayer inscribed on the wall of a firehouse in 2006 — and began singing a melody.

Avelange asked the firefighters whether the piece was already set to music. “Because to me, this is not just a prayer, it's an anthem,” he said.

Twenty-four hours later, he had written the first draft of the anthem.

Charles-Henri Avelange.

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Slava Pedan

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Courtesy The Fireman's Prayer project

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A $100,000 vision, and no idea how to pull it off 

Avelange’s vision was to have 200 to 250 musicians, including a children's choir, full adult choir, full orchestra and a 56-piece drum and bagpipe corps for the recording, which costs nearly $100,000. All proceeds from the song would go to firefighters.

 “Everybody who knows me eventually always heard about the Fireman's Prayer,” he said. “I have no idea how or when it will get done.”

Composer Charles-Henri Avelange has set the poem, The Fireman's Prayer, to music.

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Slava Pedan

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The Fireman's Prayer project

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Then the January 2025  fires hit Los Angeles. Avelange and his wife found themselves just blocks from a Palisades Fire evacuation zone. They could see the firefighters protecting homes on their street.

“My wife, Jennifer … looked at me and she said, ‘Well, if this is not a sign, Charles, this thing is needed. It is really time.’”

Thanks to private donations, Avelange recorded with the Los Angeles Children’s Choir and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in May. He is still fundraising to record  the Pipes and Drums of California Professional Firefighters performing.

Last month, he was joined by Grammy-winning conductor Grant Gershon and many of Hollywood’s best musicians — some are survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires — to record the orchestral portion of an anthem he had heard only as digital samples for nearly 20 years.

Joining them in the audience were members of the firefighting community.

 “When I heard them playing, it sounded exactly the way it's supposed to and actually even better,” he said. “It was quite a magical moment.”