The Brief

Sterling Klippel is awed by the beauty of nature but spends his working days resisting its power.

Casting worried glances at a gray sky above the Sierra Madre Dam in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Klippel, a beefy and upbeat man, was patiently describing the complexities of Los Angeles County’s flood protection system.

As a principal engineer for the county’s Public Works Department, Klippel’s job is to try to stop catastrophic flows of mud, debris and boulders that could rush into fire-stricken neighborhoods in Altadena and surrounding communities. Klippel and his stormwater crews must ensure that the county’s network of dams, debris basins, channels and storm drains are up to the task.

Emergency teams from multiple agencies have cleared out flood basins beneath the Eaton Fire’s 14,000-acre burn scar, rushed to distribute sandbags and placed long concrete barriers to redirect potential flows.

But the work to hold back fire-scarred mountains that no longer have vegetation to stabilize them can be futile and humbling.

While the Eaton Fire is contained, the danger to foothill communities is not.

Nearly 170,000 people live in Altadena, Pasadena and Sierra Madre at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, and many are potentially in the path of debris flows.

Heavy rainfall expected on Thursday and Friday has triggered warnings about fire-scarred hillsides unleashing torrents of mud, boulders and debris from the torched slopes. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for late Thursday, with the greatest risks in areas burned by the Eaton, Palisades, Franklin, and Bridge fires. In Santa Barbara, people in the Lake Fire’s burn areas were told to prepare to evacuate.

Neither flood nor landslide, a debris flow is a creature all its own. Often holding more sediment and rock than water, they usually begin with torrential rain on dry, impervious and unstable earth — conditions often created by wildfires.

The droplets kick up sand and gravel, and the water accumulates much faster than it can sink into the ground. Within minutes, the runoff can snowball into an ashy-gray torrent of tumbling rocks and boulders that blow through bridges, macerate structures and carry away houses and vehicles.

The highest danger of a debris flow can persist for years after a fire, and right now, the southern flank of the steep, crumbly San Gabriels is considered especially vulnerable.

Throughout Southern California, the bases of mountain ranges are strewn with the effluent of past debris flows — called alluvial fans — and cities in the sprawling Los Angeles basin have been built on top of them.

The Eaton Fire damage assessment report, released by the U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday, warns that “the probabilities of hyper-concentrated flows and/or debris flows are high to very high in most channels in the Eaton Fire burn area.” The report projects potentially massive debris flows spilling into Altadena from Eaton Canyon and several other watersheds scarred by the fire.

Southern California has a history of such catastrophic events.

A disastrous debris flow in 1969 killed 100 people after a 20-foot wave of mud rushed through Azusa. In 1994 a man and his 9-year-old son were killed during a flash flood in a park in Sierra Madre, where a canyon had burned a year before. And in San Bernardino County, 16 people died in debris flows after 2003’s Old and Grand Prix fires.

The most recent devastation was in 2018, after the Thomas Fire. A debris flow in Montecito killed 23 people, many of them drowned in waves of mud or crushed by debris.

In the areas scarred by the Eaton Fire, just one-fifth of an inch of rain could trigger a disaster if it falls within 15 minutes, said Jeremy Lancaster, the state geologist who heads the California Geological Survey. The federal report pegged a higher threshold — with 1.57 inches of rain per hour or less than half an inch in the critical 15-minute span — very likely to initiate debris flows in the burned canyons.

“We’re worried about short-duration, high-intensity rainfall, like thunderstorms,” Lancaster said.

This week’s storm will test the capacity of the county’s system to handle the force of what might be unleashed later this week.

Klippel knows the race is on.

“We work with the Weather Service and look at modeling 48 hours ahead of a storm,” he said. “Things start to come into focus. We want all of our flood control facilities to be ready. We’ve got to get everything cleared out.”

Hundreds of feet below the spot where Klippel was standing, bulldozers and other heavy equipment scraped and pushed the canyon’s sediment and rock and loaded heavy piles into dump trucks lined up to haul it away.

This site, built in 1928, no longer operates as a dam, but its solid concrete sweep is designed to stop the advance of mud and debris and allow only water to pass through culverts to open areas where the water percolates back into the aquifer.

These and dozens of other structures are critical safety barriers — the roof of a home is visible through trees behind the dam and many cherished neighborhoods are tucked away downstream in wooded ravines.

Of particular concern is the secluded enclave known as Pasadena Glen, a quirky mix of ultra-modern designer homes and rustic cabins. Running through the community is a deep, rocky cleft that carries water coming from higher elevations past the live oaks and sycamores into collection basins below.

One of many steep, burned slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains behind the Sierra Madre Debris Basin and Dam along Little Santa Anita Creek in Sierra Madre.

(

Jules Hotz

/

CalMatters

)

Left: Gas utility repairs are underway in an Altadena neighborhood that was burned in the Eaton Fire. Right: The Sierra Madre Dam is one of many structures emergency officials rely on to protect vulnerable neighborhoods.

(

Jules Hotz

/

CalMatters

)

In an unburned landscape, roots and other flammable organic material help hold sand, gravel and rock together, explained Benjamin Hatchett, a Colorado State University fire meteorologist based in Northern California who has assessed landscapes after wildfires. The overhead canopy, he said, also absorbs the shock of raindrops before they land.

But after a severe fire, much of the ground is burned down to nothing but bare mineral earth, ready to come unzipped at the first torrent of water.

That’s where things stand in the charred footprint of the Eaton Fire.

The state response team that handles watershed emergencies reported that “the Eaton Fire has a high likelihood of generating large magnitude post-fire flood and debris flow events,” adding that “the risk is very high” because of the “critical values exposed.”

In other words: This is an emergency — and people’s lives and the places they care about are in danger.

Mountains can crumble

If you wanted to purposefully design a mountain range to come apart and slough off its rocky flanks, you could do no better than the San Gabriels. Their steep slopes efficiently funnel storm runoff through narrow cuts from peaks that widen at the bottom.

This extreme architecture enhances fire: deep, narrow clefts transport flames like chimneys. And those broad alluvial fans are expert at what geologists call entrainment — water, mud, sediment and boulders coalesce and gain speed and mass as they race downhill, hitting the bottom and spreading debris flows across a wide area.

The speed of the flows can reach 30 to 40 mph and are urged along by the slopes’ steepness and lack of vegetation. Severely burned soils coated with ash become hydrophobic — meaning that rather than soaking into the hillsides, the water rolls easily off the surface.

For example, water dumped from the local peak, Mt. Wilson, at 5,700 feet, will come down the mountain seven times faster after a severe fire, said Sean Norman, a Cal Fire team leader on the Eaton Fire.

That acceleration is unwelcome news for communities nestled in the foothills. In the same way that trees are fuel for wildfires, steep hillsides clogged with boulders become fuel for debris flows.

Most debris flows dissipate in minutes or less, often when a leveling of the land diffuses the energy and brings the torrent of rubble to a standstill. This often happens where a canyon opens onto a wide plain or river valley, creating an alluvial fan — one of the most visually compelling and dynamic features of geology.

In the case of the San Gabriel Mountains, debris flows are a scenario that’s been explored many times, none so closely as in John McPhee’s 1989 book, “The Control of Nature,” in which he vividly details a devastating debris flow from the San Gabriels that plowed through homes, washed away automobiles and carried off disinterred coffins.

The book’s title is more a wry oxymoron than a confident statement of humankind’s ability to impose its will on natural systems. “In Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains, it is not always clear which side is losing,” McPhee wrote.

The remains of an Altadena home are splayed out at the base the charred San Gabriels on Jan. 29.

(

Jules Hotz

/

CalMatters

)

In geological reckoning, the San Gabriel Mountains are immature, unruly teenagers. Sitting at the intersection of the Pacific and North American plates meeting at the San Andreas Fault, the mountains are still fitfully growing — the western end of the range lifted several feet during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

The average slope gradient in the San Gabriels is over 65%.

Their steepness defines their “angle of repose,” a geologic concept critical to catastrophic debris flows. It’s the steepest angle at which material starts to fall — the point at which too many shovels of sand collapse the whole pile.

The San Gabriels are unique in California. They are part of the Transverse Ranges with a West-East orientation, not the North-South run of California’s Sierra Nevada and other mountain spans. North-facing slopes of the San Gabriels offer a glimpse of the Sierra-like ponderosa pines, rugged hillsides and wild country. The south-facing slopes overlook a teeming metropolis and offer a spare Mediterranean array of gnarled shrubs and hardscrabble plants.

“You feel like you could extend one arm in one direction and one arm in another and touch completely different things. It’s amazing,” said Jason Collier, acting manager of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument. “There are extremes in temperatures and elevation. Here in the L.A. basin we go from sea level to Mt. Baldy at 10,000 feet. And you can do it in an hour on Highway 2.”

Collier sees a rich geologic history, and others see recreational opportunities.

Ben White, 79, is in his 35th year as a member of the San Gabriel Mountains Trailblazers, a hardy group of volunteers who trek through the range, repairing fences and Forest Service trails.

The group goes out three Saturdays a month. Before the fire, White had missed only three outings.

“Hiking up there takes your mind off your problems,” he said. The fire has damaged a place he loves. “If I look at it as a loss, I would be depressed, permanently.”

Not all rain is created equal

The flash flood watch for this week is nothing to take lightly. Forecasters only issue such alerts when they are more than 50% confident that the incoming rain will reach critical rates, said Jayme Laber, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s weather forecast office in Oxnard.

For residents living in or near a fresh burn area, the flood watch means it’s time to prepare for a possible evacuation.

“That’s their heads-up to make preparations,” Laber said. “That’s the time to start thinking about making an evacuation call, not when it’s already raining.”

When weather forecasters see live rainfall levels reach or exceed critical thresholds in or near a high-hazard zone, then they issue a flash flood “warning.”

When a watch turns into a warning, there’s little time for preparation. In most cases, it’s too late.

Warnings “can have from zero lead time up to maybe an hour’s worth of lead time, depending how confident we are in what we’re seeing in our radar,” Laber said.

Workers with the California Conservation Corps carry sandbags and compost filter socks as they conduct erosion, flood and debris control work in Altadena ahead of a storm.

(

Jules Hotz

/

CalMatters

)

The neighborhoods within sight of the burn scar are teeming with workers fixed on preparing for the deluge: The state has stockpiled 271,000 burlap sandbags, 777 sheeting rolls and 17,790 wood stakes, among other items. Others from the California Conservation Corps have placed fencing, straw wattles and other means to filter contaminants contained in the runoff. The National Guard sent an engineering crew with heavy equipment to move debris.

There is a feeling of urgency with all of the preparations. Many people recall what happened in similar circumstances in Montecito seven years ago.

The night the hills came down in Montecito

By the time the rains came, everyone had pretty much had it with emergencies. In early January of 2018 residents of Santa Barbara and neighboring Montecito were back in their homes, exhausted after extended evacuations from the Thomas Fire, a monstrosity that blazed for five and a half weeks and was at the time the largest fire in California history.

“We had a month of evacuations and fear. Firefighters saved Montecito. We were so grateful and happy to be home,” said Abe Powell, who was the director of the Montecito Fire Protection District at the time.

But emergency officials were huddling, poring over worrying reports. Meteorologists predicted a significant rain event — soon. And the teams dispatched to assess the stability of the hillsides denuded by fire warned Montecito officials in plain language: “Between friends, if rain comes through, you will be f—ed,“ Powell said, using the team’s salty language.

Former fire official Abe Powell said many people dismissed the dire warnings before the deadly debris flow in Montecito in 2018. Twenty-three people were killed.

(

Julie Leopo

/

CalMatters

)

Powell, whose family had been evacuated for a month, worked with emergency authorities to craft an urgent message: Be prepared to leave your homes again, there could be massive mud flows off the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Crews cleared debris basins, moved in heavy concrete barriers and stacked sandbags. All emergency personnel were called back to work. Residents watched the feverish preparations but also took note of the scant rainfall forecast and appeared to collectively shrug.

Emergency officials began to consider the likelihood that “evacuation fatigue” had set in and that residents might not heed warnings to get out. Powell said door-knocking was not going well, with some homeowners insisting they would ride it out.

“A number of people I argued with at the sandbag pile lost their homes, and not all of them survived,” he said.

Powell estimated that only about 20% of those living in the mandatory evacuation zone actually left their homes.

Authorities pre-positioned search and rescue teams on high ground and deployed swiftwater rescue squads. Then they hunkered down and waited.

Aaron Briner, then a fire engine captain, went to sleep just before midnight at Station 2 in Montecito on Jan. 8. It was sprinkling. A call came into the station at 3:30 a.m. reporting a building on fire. Briner looked out and heavy rain was falling.

“We prepared for the potential, but I don’t know that we could truly grasp the scope of what happened,” said Briner, now the city’s fire marshal.

Left: Cal Fire crew member Alex Jimenez found a body in a mud-filled home on Glen Oaks Drive in Montecito on Jan. 10, 2018. Right: A car in debris along Olive Mill Road in Montecito on Jan. 9, 2018.

(

Wally Skalij

/

Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

)

Briner’s engines tried multiple routes to get to the fire but were cut off by roads subsumed by mudflows and boulders the size of the fire engines themselves.

“We came across people who were trying to pull themselves out of chest-deep mud,” he said. “We had no idea of the scope.

“It was dark. There was no power. Most of the cell service was gone. There were no landmarks, no trees. We almost got lost a few times. Some of our guys ended up in swimming pools. I saw a mudline on trees up to 20 feet.”

Elsewhere in Montecito, Powell also woke up to the roar of heavy rain. And another peculiar sound: Boulders the size of SUV’s were careening down the mountain, their collisions sounding like massive billiard balls smashing into each other.

He rushed to a window and saw an explosion and bright lights in the sky. He briefly thought it looked like an alien invasion. It turned out to be a fire.

The burst of torrential rain caused the watershed behind the San Yisidro Creek Bridge to give way. The debris flow rushed toward town going 40 mph and carrying with it anything in its path.

Including the bridge. The boulder-filled mudslide hit the bridge and took it out, smashing a gas line that erupted in flames. That wall of mud and rocks, now ablaze, crashed into a house containing a sleeping couple.

With mud and flames quickly rising, their pajamas on fire, the pair rushed to the home’s second story. They had a choice: stay above the flood in a burning house or jump from the fire into the darkness and onto a fast-moving, roiling river of mud.

They leapt from the upper floor onto the debris flow, clothes burned off, and badly injured. A firefighter heard their screams and waded into the moving mud to pull them to safety. A helicopter took them to a hospital. They survived. Twenty-three others in Montecito did not.

Suzanne Hyde, a live-in private chef, said her first reaction to evacuating the home she shared next to Montecito Creek was “I’m not leaving,” she said, having just returned home and unpacked from the fire evacuation. She wanted to do her laundry, and it wasn’t even raining.

But her client convinced her, saying, “We really need to leave; we can’t control water.”

Hyde reluctantly left with her two cats and pet rabbit. “Then, obviously, all hell broke loose.” A boulder “the size of a VW bug” crashed through Hyde’s bedroom, apparently rolling over her bed on its way through the wall.

“I would have been killed, probably while still in bed,” she said. “It still blows my mind to think of the power of water.”

Aftermath of the Montecito disaster

Scores of daring rescues played out in the early morning, with ruptured gas lines hissing loudly. As the sun came up, the light revealed a changed landscape. The painstaking search for survivors went on for nearly two weeks, through layers of muck and boulders so large that it took dynamite to clear them.

Until that night, Briner hadn’t given much thought to the full implications of debris flows. Once geologists began to look around the region, they found evidence of historic landslides of such volume that rocks were dragged all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Present-day ocean reefs were formed with boulders from the surrounding mountains, he said.

There’s no reason to believe that the risk will ever go away.

“We mitigate risk; we don’t prevent risk,” Briner said. “It will always be here. We choose to be in these areas, we have to recognize risk comes with that.”

Travis Zehntner looks over the wreckage of a home in Montecito where a family friend was killed in January 2018.

(

Brian van der Brug

/

Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

)

Kelly Hubbard, director of the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management, said most of the remediation began immediately: Federal funding enabled authorities to buy out willing property sellers to expand debris basins.

And the difficult public conversation about rethinking living in harm’s way began. “We talked about maybe not rebuilding in the same location, maybe rebuilding better,” Hubbard said. “We had a homeowner who literally survived by riding in his home down the mudslide. He became an advocate in the community.”

This year’s annual vigil to remember the lives lost in the Montecito debris flow was held, as usual, on Jan. 9, two days after the fires in Los Angeles ignited. Community members said prayers, lit candles and expressed support for those in the path of the Eaton Fire.

“We know all too well what can happen,” Powell said.

In Los Angeles, the soundtrack is familiar. Car horns, the whine of leaf blowers.

But in the middle of Chinatown, another sound cuts through the din: the rhythmic hum of washers and dryers from a trailer parked outside the Alpine Recreation Center.

Chinatown hasn’t had a laundromat for as long as anyone around can remember. This mobile setup – run by the nonprofit The Laundry Truck LA – has become the neighborhood’s de facto laundromat, offering the service for free to locals, twice a week.

For 70-year-old Sam Ma, it’s been a relief.

Ma, a retired construction worker, picked up freshly-laundered items — two pairs of pants, a hat, and some socks, bundled in a white garbage bag for the bus ride home.

He usually washes his clothes by hand. But about two weeks ago, he was hit by a car. Bruises and cuts cover his hands, making it difficult to scrub heavier items.

“The things I can wash, I wash,” he said in Mandarin. “But these are too thick. It’s too hard.”

Rebel Fox of The Laundry Truck L.A. hands a garbage bag filled with newly-laundered sheets to a local.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

Nearby, Laundry Truck employee Rebel Fox checked him out with a clipboard after handing him his load.

“We help a lot of seniors out here,” Fox said. “And we offer folding services, too. It really helps people who don’t have the dexterity in their hands.”

The Laundry Truck started out in 2019 providing laundry services to people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles and has expanded to high-need communities, like Eaton Fire survivors.

In February, the nonprofit started operating in Chinatown under a year-long contract with Council District 1, showing up every Wednesday and Thursday at 9 a.m.

A sink or bathtub

Chinatown advocates say the lack of a laundromat is especially hard on low-income tenants living in older, neglected buildings.

“These landlords aren’t doing much to keep it updated,” said Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance.

Maintaining laundry rooms may require major plumbing upgrades and hookups that many landlords avoid.

Newly-constructed residential buildings are typically being constructed with in-unit laundry.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

Advocates say in buildings that do have shared coin-operated machines, they may be broken or in constant use. Many residents decide to launder clothes by hand — in sinks or bathtubs.

“In one building, the sinks were so small, people had to cut their sheets in half just to wash them,” Trinh said. “They’d wash one half, then the other.”

A reversal of access

Those who could benefit from a laundromat include seniors on fixed incomes, and workers living paycheck to paycheck, including garment workers and home health aides.

“You’re talking about low-income, financially-stressed households,” Paul Ong said.

Ong, who studies urban inequality at UCLA, says Chinatown reflects a broader pattern: as neighborhoods change, basic services can disappear.

Each pile of dirty clothes is labeled with customers' names.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

The neighborhood’s last full-service grocery store closed in 2019 after the property was sold to a developer. Meanwhile, new market-rate housing has gone up, catering to higher-income residents with amenities like parking and in-unit laundry.

“The irony is that historically, laundry was bread and butter for the Chinese community,” Ong said.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants built livelihoods around laundry work — one of the few industries open to them at the time.

Nowadays, laundry options have become hard to come by.

Seeking a lasting fix

Residents without access to machines have to leave the neighborhood entirely to find a laundromat in Lincoln Heights or Echo Park, which has seen its own laundromats disappear.

Laundry can be spotted drying on balconies across Chinatown.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

“The long-term, permanent solution is that a laundry service opens up,” in the neighborhood, said Council member Eunisses Hernandez, who represents Chinatown.

Hernandez says constituents have asked for a laundromat from the time she was knocking on doors as a City Council candidate.

Hernandez, who is up for re-election this year, says the neighborhood could benefit from a community-run laundromat offering affordable services.

“If private industry is not making that investment in Chinatown then perhaps it’s up to the city – and the people of that neighborhood – to build something for them,” she said.

In the meantime, Hernandez has directed about $250,000 from her district — using TFAR payments from developers building larger projects — to cover a year of mobile laundry services.

The contract with the Laundry Truck runs through next February.

After that?

“We’ll keep filling the gap until we get to a permanent solution,” Hernandez said.

Could that solution be combined with housing?

Some community advisors to a new affordable housing project being developed on the northwestern edge of Chinatown have been pushing for a self-service laundry that would be open to other neighborhood residents, says Eugene Moy who sits on the advisory board of New High Village.

But any fix will take time. That project, Moy said, could be two years out from even breaking ground.

Taking a load off 

Back at the truck, the machines continue to spin. By mid-afternoon, nearly 18 loads of laundry are done.

The trailer for the LA Laundry Truck is set up outside the Alpine Recreation Center, across from Castelar Elementary School.

(

Josie Huang

/

LAist

)

Two months in, there are kinks to work out. How to get more residents to take advantage of the unit's capacity? Its machines can churn out 40 loads per shift.

There is also the question of whether some seniors are physically able to transport their laundry even a few blocks.

But the service is starting to get regulars. One woman on her second visit stood by the trailer, cradling just-washed clothes in her arms while clutching her daughter's teddy bear, now a sparkling white.

"If it keeps going, I'll keep coming," said the woman who gave her last name as Mo. "It's very convenient."

Her apartment building doesn’t have a laundry room. Sometimes she asks a friend next door if she can use theirs. With three children, the cost adds up quickly.

Thinking aloud, she calculated how much she saved that day.

About $8, she estimated — money she said could now spend on her kids.

There’s a fair amount of recreational activities Angelenos can do in and around the Los Angeles River like biking, walking, even kayaking, but did you know you can also dance in the dry river bed of a Los Angeles icon?

Adam Weiss, founder of the Gratitude Group leans over and DJs a set at his Los Angeles River dance party.

(

Michael Marshall

/

Michael Marshall

)

Dancing in the sun

Adam Weiss is the founder of the Gratitude Group, a club that hosts various events across Los Angeles like dance parties at the River, a screen-free reading club at the Central Library and meditative sound baths at Elysian Park. That’s just this weekend alone.

Weiss has been hosting the free dance parties for about two years now. The locations vary. Previously he’s held them at the Elysian Park helipad.

“Everybody wants to dance, they're just waiting to be invited to dance, and then if you're a good DJ, you just keep the floor packed,” said Weiss, who also deejays these events. Lately it's been a lot of disco, funk and soul. Weiss also likes to keep the gatherings dry, meaning no drugs or alcohol. He thinks it makes people engage with each other more.

“So the focus really is on connection and dancing,” Weiss said.

Attendees of the Los Angeles River dance party move to the music.

(

Michael Marshall

/

Michael Marshall

)

Ariana Valencia lives in Burbank and attended last month's dance party, also at the L.A. River. She says dancing in the middle of the concrete riverbed made the city feel like a playground that she could explore.

“I’d never been to the L.A. River prior to that. You think it’s just a little swampy little pond, but it was actually really full,” said Valencia. “I would have never thought that was in the middle of the city.”

Uniquely Los Angeles

Weiss says part of the appeal is not just getting people outside but to get them to experience Los Angeles differently.

At the last event, people walking or biking along the river path joined on a whim — some even brought their kids. Weiss says that’s exactly the kind of reaction he hopes for.

“ I want it to be family friendly. I want it to feel welcoming. I want it to be inclusive,” Weiss said. “My main thing is I just want people to actually dance. I think it feels good to dance.”

A woman and two children join in on the dance party.

(

Michael Marshall

/

Michael Marshall

)

For Valencia that inclusiveness is part of the draw. She says she’ll be joining again this Sunday.

“Even though it wasn’t advertised as a dry event I think the fact that it was a family friendly kind of thing was appealing to me,” said Valencia.

Join the party

After the last dance party went viral, Weiss says more than 1,500 people have RSVP-ed for tomorrow's event. This compelled him to close reservations.

Weiss plans to hold the event every other week this Spring and Summer — taking place either at the River or the Elysian Field Helipad with its amazing view of the city.

Weiss wants to start branching out too, and is eyeing the Culver City Stairs as a possible location.

“ I just wanna bring people to cool interesting places to dance,” Weiss said.

At Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona, a mural depicts the now-disgraced farm worker leader from the waist-up, in a serene, almost Buddha-like pose. To his left, a lady justice figure holds the scales of justice and on the right, there are images of farm workers toiling in a field. Chavez looks like a saint.

One of five murals at Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona, painted by Paul Botello.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

“And that's what people thought he was,” said Pomona Mayor Tim Sandoval as he stood in front of the mural.

But after several women stepped forward accusing the late labor icon of sexual assault, that view has radically changed. Now there are calls to remove his image from public spaces, widely impacting Southern California, which has a large concentration of murals, plaques, street names, and statues dedicated to him.

But do the entire murals have to be removed, or can there be a more nuanced approach to the re-evaluation of Chavez’s legacy — a re-evaluation that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?

This week, the artist Paul Botello, Pomona Mayor Sandoval, and Pitzer College Emeritus Professor José Calderón, a former activist who was involved in getting the murals painted, met up at the park, in the shadow of the busy 57 freeway, to discuss how to go forward.

The story behind the murals

In the early 2000s violence between Black and Latino gang members gripped Pomona.

“When a young Latino was killed, we actually did a march all the way from City Hall to what is now this park,” said Calderón.

Calderon helped organize that march. He said activists were inspired by something Chavez liked to say, that when you get angry, don’t take it out on others — organize.

So they lobbied for the park, which was filled with trash and syringes, to be cleaned up and made family friendly. And because they used his quote, it was named Cesar Chavez Park.

Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona was dedicated after activists lobbied the City of Pomona to help curb gang violence.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

Muralist Paul Botello was chosen to create five murals at the park that depicted Chavez from youth, through his service in the U.S. Navy during World War Two, to key moments during his farm worker activism.

Today, while he feels betrayed by Chavez, he’s also keen to preserve parts of the murals which tell the bigger story of the exploitation of farm workers and the fight to improve their conditions.

While California state law says an artist must be consulted if there are any proposed changes to a mural, the ultimate decision will be made by Pomona City Council.

Sandoval said he has not received calls or emails at City Hall. But people in his various social and civic circles have told him, he says, that Chavez’s images should be removed.

Paul Botello holds mock-ups of changes he'd like to make to his murals of Cesar Chavez at a park in Pomona.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

Botello had brought mock-ups of the alterations he’d like to make to each mural. For the mural which depicts Chavez in a Buddha-like pose, for example, he wants to replace his face with the face of a farmworker wearing a hat.

He also wants to keep much of another mural, which depicts Chavez as a teenager in a suit surrounded by boys and girls sitting on rows of tilled soil. His one change is to turn the image of Chavez into a Zoot Suiter, a rebellious Mexican American youth from the mid 20th century.

A mural by Paul Botello depicts Cesar Chavez and children on a farm.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

“ 95 percent is going to be there because it just represents all the youth who also toil in the field to help their parents,” he said.

Calderon agrees with these more targeted changes. He fears painting over the murals entirely would erase the neighborhood activism that led to the creation of this park.

He’s also concerned their removal would give fuel to people who oppose Latino activism and the growing movement in public education to require the teaching of Latino history.

“The right and the white supremacists are already using it to say, ‘see this is what we told you about Cesar being anti-immigrant’”, he said. “But now they're going a little bit further and they want to wipe out ethnic studies”.

A mural at Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona.

(

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

)

While Botello wants to keep the mural of Chavez serving in the U.S. Navy, because he believes it's important to show that Latinos have contributed to this country's military, he’s keen to make a change in the fifth mural.

It depicts a young man and woman above the phrase “Sí se puede,” the famous farmworker slogan, “yes, we can.”

The young man is clearly Chavez. Botello says he wants to replace it with the face of Dolores Huerta, the woman who led the United Farm Workers with Chavez and has accused Chavez of rape.

Mayor Sandoval says he plans to bring up Botello’s proposals at the next city council meeting.

The immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles has placed dozens of people in solitary confinement each month since June, according to the most recent data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In May 2025, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center had 14 people in isolation. When the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort revved up in June 2025, the number of detainees in solitary confinement there more than tripled. By July, it was 73; by August, 105.

The most recent data available shows that number went down slightly in January, to 74 people.

Ranked by percentage of the detainee population in “segregation,” as it is called at immigrant detention centers, Adelanto is among the U.S.’s top 10 facilities as of January, according to an LAist analysis of the most recent ICE data.

The data shows that of 229 ICE facilities that reported holding people since October 2024, between 50 and 60 usually reported putting at least one person in segregation in a given month. Out of the facilities that did place people in solitary confinement, Adelanto tended to do so less often than others until June 2025. (The facility held just a few people from October 2024 into January 2025.) When ICE’s presence increased in L.A. in June, the number of people sent to isolation in the facility also shot up — three to five times as many people have been isolated in Adelanto compared to the average facility that used any solitary confinement.

Since June, only two facilities have sent people to solitary confinement more times than Adelanto: one southwest of San Antonio, the other in central Pennsylvania.

Both of those facilities held twice the number of detainees as Adelanto on average from October 2024 through September 2025; but the number of people held in Adelanto since then has tripled, growing larger than either of the other facilities to hold an average of 1,800 people a day since October.

More on solitary confinement  

According to ICE, detainees may be placed in segregation for “disciplinary reasons,” or because of:

• “Serious mental or medical illness.”
• Conducting a hunger strike.
• Suicide watch.

The agency also says it might place detainees “who may be susceptible to harm [if left among the] general population due in part to how others interpret or assume their sexual orientation, or sexual presentation or expression.”

Not only is ICE holding more people in solitary confinement, but the agency's data also shows that detainees across the country are being isolated for longer periods of time. Detainees ICE considers part of the "vulnerable & special population" spent an average of about two weeks in solitary confinement each time they were isolated in 2022, when ICE first made the data available. By the end of 2025, the average stay in isolation had risen to more than seven weeks straight.

The GEO Group Inc., a private company that operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, has not responded to requests for comment.

How isolation can affect immigrant detainees  

UN human rights experts consider solitary confinement placements that last 15 days or more to be torture, though the U.S. Supreme Court has held that isolation doesn’t violate the Constitution.

The UN also maintains that solitary confinement should be prohibited for people “with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions would be exacerbated by such measures.”

In January, a coalition of immigrant rights groups filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of current detainees, calling for conditions at Adelanto to be improved. In addition to an unsanitary environment and a lack of healthy food and clean drinking water, detainees say solitary confinement is frequently used to punish those who speak out about conditions at the facility.

People held in immigrant detention centers are technically in “civil detention,” meaning that they are being detained to ensure their presence at hearings and compliance with immigration orders — not to serve criminal sentences.

According to the immigrant rights groups’ complaint, one detainee was placed in solitary confinement after complaining about the showers being broken. Another detainee said that, after asking a guard to “use more respectful language toward him, he was ridiculed, written up and given the middle finger by a guard who shouted, ‘Who the f--- do you think you are?’” Then, the detainee was placed in solitary confinement for 25 days.

Alvaro Huerta, the director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing detainees at Adelanto, told LAist that when people are placed in isolation at the facility, they’re typically in the same cell for 23 hours per day, unable to receive visits from their families.

For clients who are experiencing mental health challenges — especially those with suicidal thoughts — being placed in solitary confinement “can really exacerbate their condition,” he added.

In multiple statements to the media, ICE has said that the agency “is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.” The agency has also said that detainees receive “comprehensive medical care” and that all detainees “receive medical, dental, and mental health intake screenings within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility.”

Huerta called that “laughable.”

“We have countless examples of people who have said that this is not true, that they're not getting the medication that they're requesting, that they're not being seen for chronic conditions and emergency conditions,” he added. “And we know it's not true because 14 people have died in ICE custody this year alone.”