The Brief

The day after the fire broke out in Tustin, some students at Heritage Elementary were given plastic bags to collect and bring home charred pieces of the historic hangar that had floated onto school property, according to several parents.

One parent, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect her family's privacy, told LAist that on Nov. 8 her fifth-grade daughter brought home a Ziploc bag with a small piece of black debris from the fire.

Her daughter told her she had picked it up with her bare hands. The parent said "the teacher was fully aware."

That same day, air quality authorities reported that debris from the fire contained up to 37% asbestos. The school sits less than a mile from the 7-acre hangar that was destroyed by flames.

The parent said she immediately threw the bag with the fire debris away. The material her daughter had collected, she said, was "paper-light" and easily breakable. Asbestos is most dangerous when the individual fibers are released into the air and can be inhaled and get trapped in the lungs.

A second parent posted a photo on social media of a plastic bag full of large black and gray pieces of debris, according to a screenshot shared with LAist by another parent of a Heritage student. The parent who posted the photo wrote in the post that their son had brought the bag home from Heritage.

In response to an interview request, Heritage principal Courtney Smith referred LAist to district communications officer Rina Lucchese. Lucchese and other Tustin Unified officials have not responded to repeated requests for an interview.

Tustin Unified board member Allyson Muñiz Damikolas told LAist she didn’t have a response to reports from parents about the incident and added that district leaders responded to public health warnings and "reacted to the information as soon as we received it."

The fire debris incident is one of what parents describe as several missteps taken by Tustin Unified School District during its early response to the fire. And this week, as hundreds of students return to Heritage and Legacy Magnet Academy — the two schools closest to the fire that had been closed for testing and cleaning — private test results in adjacent neighborhoods are raising new concerns about toxic fallout from the fire. The findings are heightening concerns among some parents about whether the newly reopened schools are truly safe from potentially toxic fire debris.

The historic hangar in Tustin caught fire in the early hours of Nov. 7. The massive World War II-era wooden hangar was built to house military blimps based in Southern California.

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Jae C. Hong

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What happened at Heritage Elementary after the fire

Classes continued as normal at Heritage for two days after the fire began.

A photo shared with LAist by a parent shows Heritage students sitting on the blacktop on campus. It was taken at 8 a.m. on Nov. 8, according to the metadata. Meanwhile, Heritage principal Courtney Smith told parents in emails reviewed by LAist that were sent on Nov. 7 and Nov. 8 that students would remain indoors during recess and lunch. The email on Nov. 8, stated that school leaders continued "to minimize student and staff time outdoors."

In the same Nov. 8 email, she told parents that "the minimal debris that has been found on campus has been safely removed by our custodial staff."

Later that evening, Tustin Unified officials announced that all school campuses would be closed following testing by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) that found asbestos in fire debris.

In the days after the fire broke out, asbestos-laden debris was detected at Tustin schools as far away as Hicks Canyon Elementary, which is about three miles from the burn site, and at Tustin High School, which is two miles from the site, according to the county's initial report of the incident to state authorities.

Most schools in the district were reopened by Nov. 15 after receiving clearance from the district-contracted asbestos consultant. Students at Heritage and Legacy were dispersed at schools across the district by grade level until this week.

Tustin school board member Jonathan Abelove, whose district includes Heritage and Legacy, did not respond to an email request for comment. LAist was unable to reach him at several listed phone numbers.

For one parent, regrets and worries

The parent whose daughter brought home fire debris said she regrets sending her two children to Heritage on the two days after the fire broke out. "That's eating us alive to this day," she told LAist in a phone interview.

She said she and her daughter developed a bad cough a week after the fire broke out. The family ended up leaving their Tustin home for a week to stay in Newport Beach in order to limit their exposure to potential toxins while the fire was still heavily burning.

The fire was finally declared extinguished by Orange County fire officials on Dec. 1.

"The saddest part," the parent told LAist, is how distraught her fifth-grader became when she found out that she had been exposed to a potentially dangerous material, asbestos. "She was asking, 'Am I going to get cancer?'" the parent added.

Cranes were needed to safely lower the entrance doors to the hanger, which remained after the rest of the structure went up in flames.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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What did school officials know?

It's unclear whether school officials were initially aware of the likelihood of asbestos and other chemicals present in the massive blimp hangar that burned to the ground. But some parents said the district should have erred on the side of caution considering the circumstances.

Building fires are generally more toxic than wildfires because of the widespread, and often unknown, presence of toxic materials in homes and businesses. The hangar was widely touted as one of the largest wooden structures in the world — 180-ft. tall, three football fields long and one football field wide.

It was built in 1942, when asbestos and lead paint were widely used in construction.

Documents on the city of Tustin's website note the extensive use of asbestos-containing materials and lead paint in the building's construction.

According to a 2000 report commissioned by the Navy, asbestos was present in roofing materials, wall panels, pipe insulation and floor tiles. Some of this asbestos was "friable," meaning it breaks or crumbles easily and therefore poses a greater risk of being inhaled, which can cause long-term health consequences.

A 2020 report from the Orange County Grand Jury also noted that hazardous materials, including "asbestos, lead, biological contaminants, and groundwater contaminates," had been identified in the hangar's nearly identical twin hangar, which also sits on the 84-acre former military base in Tustin.

According to Chris Dunne, a Navy spokesperson, samples of treated wood from the hangar had been analyzed in the past and found to contain "detectable concentrations of aluminum, arsenic, boron, barium, calcium, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, nickel, phosphorus, lead, silicon, and zinc."

Dunne told LAist the Navy had not communicated directly with the school district about potential public health concerns after the fire broke out. "The city of Tustin is the lead agency for cleanup efforts, interagency coordination, and public communication," Dunne wrote in an email.

Tustin Mayor Austin Lumbard, who has three children at Heritage, told LAist that he didn't know "in an official capacity" that there was asbestos and other toxins in the hangar building until he was alerted to the test results by the South Coast Air Quality Management District on Nov. 8. Still, "we all knew there was something in there," he said.

"I think the community that lives out here was aware that these were constructed in the ‘40s and that there was material used in that construction that potentially is not used now," Lumbard said.

The mayor also said people had wandered onto the property for years. In 2019 firefighters had to rescue a teenager who had climbed onto the roof of the hangar.

Asked whether he was concerned about the school district's initial handling of the fire response, Lumbard said: "I know the school district is taking this very seriously and they're leaning on and relying on information that they're getting from the Navy and from the Orange County Health Care Agency."

Regina Chinsio-Kwong, who heads the county health care agency, told LAist she first learned there could be toxic materials in the burning hangar that could pose a health risk when a consultant for AQMD called her on the evening on Nov. 7.

"I didn't have a full report, it was more of a verbal concern," she said.

Chinsio-Kwong said she had a call with AQMD staff the following morning to better understand the concerns. AQMD issued a smoke advisory on Nov. 7. It wasn't until Nov. 8 that they issued an advisory noting the presence of asbestos in testing results of ash and debris from public areas near the hangar fire.

Jeff Lawrence, whose daughter attends Heritage, emailed district and city officials twice on the morning the fire broke out, urging them to immediately start testing the air and soil for toxins.

The hangar building contains "all sorts of potential hazardous materials raining ash all over our neighborhood," he wrote. In one of the emails, he also excoriated school officials for keeping Heritage open "when you have literally zero idea if it is at all safe."

In an interview with LAist earlier this month, Lawrence said "the county and everyone had these reports,” referring to the Orange County Grand Jury report and documents on the city's website.

“From a logical perspective, as soon as you knew that that thing was burning, [toxic material] was going all over the place," he added.

Lawrence was livid that kids were outside while the fire burned, and that the school allowed kids to touch and take home debris from the fire. He said he blames the school district for not ensuring that students were kept inside and away from potentially toxic material.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with them," he said. "They made the decision to keep these schools open. They did not insist that the principal at [Heritage] keep all the kids inside."

Lawrence said he wished the district had immediately closed Heritage and offered distance learning instead. At nearby Legacy, school officials canceled in-person school when the fire broke out on Nov. 7 and instead held virtual classes.

Public health experts weigh in

LAist reached out to public health experts to better understand the risks associated with asbestos. Richard Castriotta, a pulmonologist at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, said reports of children handling asbestos and potentially bringing it into their classrooms or homes were "concerning."

"We don't really know what a safe level [of asbestos] is," he said.

But, he added, "in order to be dangerous, the asbestos has to be in a form that people can inhale." He said large chunks of asbestos-containing material, if disposed of properly, are less dangerous.

Tustin Unified recently released the results of surface and air testing done in November at Heritage and Legacy that showed no asbestos was detected on either campus. The testing was done in high-traffic areas including the main office and gym at Legacy and the administrative office and several kindergarten classrooms at Heritage.

Orange County Public Health Officer Regina Chinsio-Kwong said her office had also tested for lead at Legacy and Heritage on the heaviest days of smoke and did not detect elevated levels. She said as a whole, the official results from air quality and surface testing in the community nearest to the fire had been "reassuring." (Private testing has shown otherwise, as we explain below.)

In a Dec. 13 letter to Lumbard, the Tustin mayor, and the rest of the city council, Chinsio-Kwong said testing by multiple agencies, including the EPA, "suggests that the main concern for asbestos exposure was from bulk debris while asbestos fibers in the air played a limited role."

Chinsio-Kwong also wrote that environmental experts on the fire's emergency response team had concluded that testing indoor spaces "is not necessary, thanks to reassuring test results from nearby facilities," including public schools, local parks and community centers.

Nevertheless, Tustin officials announced Wednesday evening that they plan to sample soil and interior spaces for toxins from the fire.

"The City appreciates [the O.C. Health Care Agency]’s scientific conclusion that interior residential testing is unnecessary based on the extensive available data," Lumbard said in a news release. "However, in a collective effort to go above and beyond what is required to address lingering community concerns, the City is moving forward with performing exterior soil and interior air/dust sampling for asbestos and lead.”

He said the timing and location of sampling was being developed in consultation with the EPA and would be shared in the coming days.

More than 600 disaster remediation workers have been dispatched to clean up fire debris tainted with asbestos on the former military base and in surrounding neighborhoods.

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John Balmes, an air pollution expert and physician member of the California Air Resources Board, echoed Chinsio-Kwong, saying the reported results from air and surface tests at Tustin schools were "pretty reassuring."

"If they tested several classrooms a week after the fire started when smoke was the highest concentration, that's probably good enough in terms of the schools," he said.

Balmes said the people most likely to be exposed to dangerous, airborne asbestos fibers were the firefighters who responded to the fire, not children attending a nearby school weeks after the fire burnt out.

Disaster experts contracted by the city of Tustin have sealed in place the dust and debris immediately around the former hangar site with an adhesive substance.

Work to take down the hangar doors and adjacent structures — which Chinsio-Kwong had recommended be completed before schools reopened — was finished on Monday, according to the city's latest update.

The Navy announced this week that it had finalized a $6 million contract with a remediation company to clean up and dispose of debris from the fire. But Navy officials said they don’t know when the work will actually start.

“Before we can take action, debris removal plans must be reviewed and approved by state and federal regulatory agencies to ensure the safety of both the community and the environment,” said Gregory Preston, who directs the Navy's base closure program, in a news release.

What happened as students returned to Heritage this week

In an email last week to parents announcing the reopening of Heritage and Legacy, school district officials said both schools would undergo extra cleaning, including of ducts, carpets and rugs, "out of an abundance of caution and in response to potential concerns within our community."

Tuesday was Heritage students’ first day back on campus following a more than month-long closure due to the fire.

During afternoon pick-up, Heritage students streamed out of the school gates carrying handmade ornaments and construction paper Santa Claus cutouts. Ravi Chilakapati, who was picking up his kindergartener and third grader, said he had had some concerns about the school reopening but felt good about the information he had received via school emails detailing extra cleaning that would take place before students returned.

"At least for now, we are happy to be back," he said, adding that the past weeks of dropping off and picking up his kids from far-away school sites was "kind of horrible."

Still, he said he wished school leaders had closed Heritage as soon as the fire broke out. "We would have zero concerns if that had happened," he added.

Peter Thok, who also has two kids at Heritage, said he was "really happy" that the school had reopened and he no longer has to drive his kids to alternative campuses. He said he was satisfied with the school's asbestos testing and cleaning protocols.

"They took extra precautions, which is good," he said.

But he echoed Chilakapati in saying he thought the school should have been closed during the first two days of the fire.

"That's when the fire was raging the most," he said. "That's when it felt like we had the most debris in our house so for sure, it should have been closed."

Heritage students returned to campus on Dec. 19, more than a month after a fire broke out and consumed a massive World War II-era hangar less than a mile away.

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Thok and Chilakapati were both unaware that students at Heritage were allowed to bring home debris from the fire until they were asked about it by LAist.

Thok said, across the board, communication and direction from local authorities has been poor throughout the fire response.

"You could've had guidance that let the teachers know and the parents know what not to do and what we can do," he said.

Nearby homes test positive for asbestos and lead

Sean Storm, who has a child at Legacy and another at Heritage, told LAist he was concerned that authorities hadn't done enough testing at the schools and hadn't tested for a full range of heavy metals. He also said he and other parents would like to see the results of the lead testing Chinsio-Kwong said her department had done at the schools in November. "I just want to know it's safe," he said.

On Wednesday, Storm shared with LAist and school and district officials the results of testing done earlier this month in his neighborhood, which is across from the hangar burn site and about a mile from Heritage. The tests, conducted by AQS Environmental Services and paid for by a local homeowners association, found asbestos and lead in all 20 samples of suspected fire debris collected from buildings throughout the community.

Federal public health officials say even low levels of exposure to lead can damage children's health and development.

Storm also shared testing ordered by his insurance company and conducted on the inside and exterior of his home that showed lead levels in soot on his windowsills exceeded the EPA’s lead hazard levels in dust by at least 14 times.

The testing also found elevated levels of arsenic and barium. The report recommended that the family move out "until all cleaning is completed."

The EPA is monitoring air quality around the perimeter of the former military base and in multiple locations in the surrounding community.

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Jill Replogle

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The test results left Storm uneasy. If his home less than a mile from the burn site wasn’t safe to occupy, he wondered how the school could be safe for kids.

"Were the tables power washed and clean?" he asked. "There are gazebos that cover the picnic tables [students] eat off of. Was that cleaned? I just want to know …is the school truly, actually clean?"

Tustin’s fire clean up costs over $45 million so far

Balmes, the air pollution expert, said public health officials could do additional testing of outside areas on local school campuses for arsenic and lead, the two heavy metals initially detected in smoke plumes from the fire, to "assuage parents' fears." "That's not unreasonable," he said.

Balmes added that the rain this week should wash away much of the remaining ash and soot from the fire in the community, significantly reducing people's likelihood of exposure.

According to the latest update from Tustin officials, work to remove potential asbestos-containing fire debris from homes near the former hangar is about 85% complete. In a news release earlier this week, city spokesperson Stephanie Najera said Tustin’s clean up costs for the fire total over $45 million.

The Navy owns the property where the fire took place and has committed $11 million to the clean-up thus far.

Najera said the total cost of recovering from the disaster could exceed $100 million.

A room on the second floor of a Camarillo building is quickly filling with smoke. From the far end of the room, flames start to shoot across the ceiling.

While the flames and smoke are real, the danger is not.

This is the Ventura County Fire Department’s new Live Fire Training Complex. A firefighter is controlling the flames and smoke with what looks like a TV remote control.

The $32 million project includes live fire training buildings, a dedicated ladder training prop, and other facilities designed to give firefighters hands-on experience.

"This complex has a 'Class A' combustible burn building, which we are standing in now," said Ventura County Fire Department Training Chief Casey Rosdaile. "The 'Class B' building is propane-fed. This building allows us to train in real fire conditions and real fire behavior. That building (the 'Class B' building) allows us to do a lot more of the operational steps. There's always a gap between the simulated thing and a real thing, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible. That way, when someone trains, they aren't going to be the real thing and say that it's nothing like they practiced."

The buildings are made of concrete, so they won't be affected by the flames and smoke. The smoke kind that's used on movie shoots, so it doesn't leave clothing with the smoky smell like you get from a brush fire.

He added that the new facilities can help train firefighters, as well as other first responders, on ways to deal with a number of emergencies.

"These buildings can host anything from sheriff's operations to (simulated) structure fires, to search and rescue," said Rosdaile. "There are a million things you can do in here. You can train 50 to 60 firefighters at a time, so it really gives us a lot of flexibility."

The two new buildings are just part of the fire department’s fire training complex. It covers 22 acres of land on the southeast side of Camarillo Airport. There are nearly 18,000 square feet of indoor training space, with 32 training rooms.

The dedicated live fire training buildings give firefighters experience with scenarios that were often difficult and time-consuming to create.

"We would light the materials, and let the fire conditions and environment build, to create a realistic training environment, and then send the folks in to extinguish it," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "Then, we would have to clean it all out, and reset it, and start again. We would get a couple of burns a day done. Now, we're getting multiple burns an hour."

Gardner said it's a complex they've sought to create for years.

"This facility allows us to close the gap between training and reality. This allows us to expose our firefighters to as realistic an environment as we can repetitively, and under safe conditions."

Among the props at the facility is a vehicle chassis equipped with gas lines, which can be ignited, so firefighters can practice fighting those types of fires.

"This is our vehicle prop, and it lets us simulate fire. We can push the fire to different parts of the vehicle, so we can set it in the interior, in the cab, the wheel well, as well as the engine compartment," said Ventura County Fire Department Quartermaster Jake Finley. "It creates a good learning environment, with teachable moments. You can see in the background some of the old vehicles (we used to burn salvaged vehicles), and it was a really intensive process. We couldn't repeat it as quickly."

While the Ventura County Fire Department owns and operates the facility, the goal is for it to be used to train first responders from throughout the region. It’s already hosted firefighters from a number of other agencies in the county, as well as teams from neighboring counties.

When the war with Iran started, one of the top economic concerns globally was the slowdown of oil shipments. But there was another critical export that got stuck in the region when hostilities began: fertilizer.

Before the war, around one-third of the world's fertilizer transported by sea passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to UN Trade and Development. The waterway has become a shipping chokepoint in recent months.

With the strait closed, fertilizer shipments from the Persian Gulf slumped and prices rose, affecting countries all around the world that import fertilizer. The war also created a global shortage of natural gas, a key component in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

It caused a massive headache for U.S. farmers who were hit with higher fertilizer prices and limited availability just as they were deciding what to plant for the upcoming growing season.

But the costs borne by farmers don't necessarily get passed on to consumers, and food system experts say they're unlikely to have a major impact on the retail prices of fruit and vegetables.

"Consumers are going to see higher food prices come September to January, once harvests start coming in, and the few months thereafter," said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Very little of that is going to be directly attributable to fertilizer."

That's because food inflation is generally driven by larger factors affecting multiple parts of the food supply chain, such as fewer workers and high fuel costs.

US farmers are rethinking their plans

About one-third of the fertilizer used by U.S. farmers is imported, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group. TFI Vice President of Public Affairs Christopher Glen said little of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

"But we get impacted in a big way because the fertilizer market is global," Glen said over email. "Even if those tons from the Mideast aren't coming to the US, they are still tons that have been removed from the market and need to be made up elsewhere. That's where the pressure comes from."

An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released in April reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this season.

Some farmers are more vulnerable to price swings than others. Producers of corn and wheat, which rely heavily on fertilizer, can spend around a third of their operating costs on fertilizer alone. Half of the farmers who responded to a survey released by the National Corn Growers Association in early April said they wouldn't apply the full amount of fertilizer to their corn crop this year, due largely to higher costs and limited availability.

Because farmers often secure their fertilizer stores well before a growing season begins, some weren't seriously affected by the price swings created by the war in Iran. (Iran said it closed the Strait of Hormuz shortly after it was attacked by the U.S. and Israel at the end of February. U.S. corn growing season typically begins in April.) But they are worried about the future: corn growers who responded to the survey were twice as concerned about the 2027 corn crop as they were about this year's.

This season, some farmers may opt to plant crops that require less nitrogen fertilizer than corn, such as soy beans, in response to rising costs.

According to USDA data, farmers are expected to plant 95.3 million acres of corn this year, down from 98.8 million acres last year. But the total acreage of soybeans is predicted to rise to 85.4 million acres this year from 81.2 million acres last year.

US grocery prices probably won't take a huge hit

If higher fertilizer costs lead to smaller harvests, that could contribute to modest retail price hikes. A TD Economics analysis estimated that a 2-5% production shortfall in North America could grow food inflation by around 0.1-0.5 percentage points in 2027.

Sponsor MessageBut experts say the costs of the fertilizer shortage will be largely shouldered by farmers.

The amount a farmer spends on fertilizer is a small fraction of the total cost to grow food and get it to grocery store shelves. Just 12 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on food goes to farms, while the rest is received by transportation companies, processors, wholesalers and grocery stores, according to the USDA. And the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service reported that U.S. farms spent around 7% of their budgets on fertilizer, lime and soil conditioners in 2024 (though farmers growing crops more reliant on fertilizer such as corn would spend more).

Additionally, farmers don't have much bargaining power to negotiate with wholesalers for higher crop prices when their operating costs rise, according to Rob Vos, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Those buyers will go to other farmers to try and get it cheaper," he said.

But there are factors other than the fertilizer crunch that are more likely to cause food prices to jump. Barrett said the global food industry is facing a "really unpleasant layer cake" of pressures, from tariffs and extreme weather to higher prices on labor, fuel and fertilizer.

"No one of those by itself is especially painful," he said. "But when you add them all up, they become quite painful together."

In parts of Africa and Asia, the effects of the fertilizer shortage could be far worse. Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services, said in April that the reduction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz may prove "very significant and severe" for poorer countries. Less-developed countries that rely heavily on fertilizer from the Persian Gulf include Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Somalia.

The fertilizer industry is recovering — and may adapt in the process

Some fertilizer prices have begun to fall again in recent weeks, after the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last month.

The Trump administration has also taken steps to lower fertilizer costs for American farmers. This week, Trump temporarily suspended "countervailing duties" on certain phosphate imports, which are added to some imported goods to cancel out subsidies provided by foreign governments.

Still, it will be a while before the fertilizer sector returns to normal. Vos estimated that it could take weeks or months for fertilizer manufacturing plants to come back online and return to previous production levels. If high prices stick around, that could snarl the plans of U.S. farmers preparing to plant cool-season crops this autumn, he added.

Barrett said the trouble with the fertilizer industry has also gotten farmers thinking about how they can protect themselves from these kinds of supply-chain disruptions in the future and looking for other ways to replenish their soil, such as manure, compost and cover crops.

"Just like we're seeing more people interested in electric vehicles because the price of gasoline and diesel has gone up, you see more farmers interested in other ways of replenishing soil nutrients as the price of fertilizer has gone up," he said.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea's place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America's colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn't the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America's fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here's what to know about America's early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn't the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government's passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It's why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father's now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

Historians say it's hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

"There is a vast amount of smuggling," says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. "So they're not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They're probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean."

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren't always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. "I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company," she posits someone of the era saying. "But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee."

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas 

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

"Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities," Pendergrast says: "because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything." The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

"There's a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it's because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather," historian McDonald says. "That's where they heard about the economics of the day."

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers' horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could "riotously drink together" in taverns, coffeehouses often didn't allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

"The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal," she says. "Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled."

Still, she says, the lines between the two "weren't completely clear."

The cost of America's revolutionary drink 

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. "Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities," says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. "They're both becoming affordable luxuries," Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

"These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff," says Chaplin. "The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world."

There's a dark side to coffee's history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that "all men are created equal," but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America's fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

"Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought," Pendergrast says. "But it was also grown by slaves."

Wearing gloves and a KN95 mask, Emmanuel Carrera Ruedas hunkered down near a storm drain, just steps away from the smoldering Lineage warehouse fire, as he filmed himself pointing to what he described as insulation and foam flowing into the drain.

“The thing about this water is that it all gets dumped straight into the L.A. River,” Carrera Ruedas, of Cudahy, told his Instagram followers in a June 22 reel.

In the past two weeks, Carrera Ruedas has spent evenings gathering water samples outside Lineage and from the L.A. River as he and other community scientists are partnering with experts from UCLA and Columbia University to learn what’s in the runoff. Samples will soon be sent to a lab in New York.

“For far too long, the river has just been a drainage, a dumping site for companies,” said Carrera Ruedas, 27, who often encounters toads, birds and fish inhabiting its ecosystem.

“There is life in there,” he told Boyle Heights Beat. “We’re all in proximity to the river, and that’s kind of the vein that runs through the city that really connects us all.”

Community-led testing

Since the Lineage fire ignited June 17 in Boyle Heights, residents, environmental advocates and researchers have taken it upon themselves to find out what’s in the air and water. They’ve launched their own sampling efforts, seeking answers about what people have been breathing and contaminants that may have entered the L.A. River.

The community-led testing comes as residents have reported eye irritation, nausea and headaches while questioning whether the government has done enough to capture the fire’s environmental and public health impacts.

Those concerns are especially alarming in Boyle Heights, East L.A. and neighboring Southeast L.A. communities, where neighbors have long faced disproportionate pollution burdens.

Crews navigate around piles of debris and puddles of water on the eastern edge of the Lineage warehouse as they begin cleanup efforts on June 25, 2026.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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An estimated 31,700 workers, about 81% of whom are Latino, live in the county and city zones where a smoke advisory was issued, according to new data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. They work in health care, manufacturing and food service industries. About half of the workers earn $3,333 or less a month, below L.A. County’s “very low income” threshold.

The area also experiences diesel pollution levels three times the county average, as well as higher rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease-related emergency department visits, according to UCLA. Nearly 10,000 households in the area lack air conditioning.

“This is not only an air quality emergency but also a worker and environmental justice issue,” UCLA said.

Behind the push for environmental justice

For years, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos on the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East L.A. oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the L.A. River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.

“Something I’ve told many people over a long period of time is, ‘We’re not polar bears. We’re not whales.’ Nobody is coming to save us. We have to step up and defend ourselves,” said mark! Lopez with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Antonia Castillo, 73, helps her grandson Aiden Velez put on a mask near their Boyle Heights home.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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East Yard members opted to take air samples themselves, dissatisfied with the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s assessment of the fire’s air-quality impacts. They placed sorbent tubes, which Lopez described as passive air monitors, outside nearby homes for about seven days. Soon, they’ll send the findings to a Columbia University lab with the help of UC Irvine.

What officials have done so far

South Coast AQMD said it conducted “mobile monitoring” during the first two days of the fire that found “significantly elevated concentrations” of particulate matter. The agency then deployed particulate matter monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School that provide “near-real time exposure information.” AQMD noted that the L.A. Fire Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted their own monitoring, while third-party contractor Onterris has continued monitoring during the cleanup phase.

AQMD also observed smoke impacts throughout the region, issuing a particle pollution advisory in English and Spanish that remained in effect through June 24.

What's next and lingering questions

Meanwhile, Lopez said more sampling is necessary, and he questioned the effectiveness of efforts by Lineage, AQMD and LAFD. He and other advocates criticized public statements from officials, including Mayor Karen Bass’ assurances that “the air is not dangerous,” even as residents were reporting feeling sick. He also took aim at LAFD Chief Jaime Moore’s statements that ammonia was not toxic to individuals unless they had respiratory issues or came in direct contact with it. East Yard also called for evacuations in the area.

“It feels like at the city and county level they don’t currently have the capacity to really handle this situation,” Lopez added. “I think it really requires state and federal intervention to make sure that the cleanup and restoration isn’t mismanaged.”

Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the Lineage fire is exposing how little is done to “respond to public health emergencies and disasters” in communities like Boyle Heights and East L.A., areas “that have so often been referred to as environmental injustice communities.”

Residents and community organizations like East Yard, Ornelas Van Horne said, “are always the ones having to respond.”

“They’re relying on each other. They’re relying on their networks and their organizing power to be able to do that on the ground sampling.”

Ornelas Van Horne reached out to colleagues at Columbia’s Multi-Element Trace Analysis Laboratory in New York after she learned of the sampling taking place and of community concerns about the runoff making its way down to the L.A. River.

Those samples will be analyzed for heavy metals like cadmium, lead and arsenic, she said.

The L.A. County Public Works Department, according to the Los Angeles Times, deployed three containment booms on the L.A. River and continued to monitor the water as it made its way to the ocean.

Carrera Ruedas began collecting water samples on the third day of the fire. He said he took the first sample from the L.A. River, about 100 meters from the spout where it spilled out. The second was taken from outside Lineage. He has amassed dozens of samples since then.

Cudahy sits alongside the lower L.A. River, and after the fire, Carrera Ruedas recalled a “heavy stench that affected people in our community.” The trash he saw in the river was the foam and insulation that came from Lineage, he said.

“It really pissed me off, just to see all this trash go in there and nobody doing anything about it,” said Carrera Ruedas, who also serves as the parks and environmental justice commissioner for Cudahy.

The L.A. River, Carrera Ruedas said, is “part of our ecosystem.”

“This is not just affecting me. This affects everybody else around me. This affects people who love the beach, people who just want our water systems clean,” he said.