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.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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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.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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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.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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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.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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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.

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Julie Leopo

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CalMatters

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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.

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Wally Skalij

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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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.

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Brian van der Brug

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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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.

The autonomous ride-hailing service Waymo plans to file a voluntarily software recall after several reports that its self-driving taxis illegally passed stopped school buses.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation in October in response to "a media report involving a Waymo AV [autonomous vehicle] that failed to remain stopped when approaching a school bus that was stopped with its red lights flashing, stop arm deployed, and crossing control arm deployed."

WXIA-TV in Atlanta aired video in September that showed a Waymo vehicle driving around a school bus.

The NHTSA website also includes a letter from the Austin Independent School District, saying the district has documented 19 instances of Waymo vehicles "illegally and dangerously" passing the district's school buses. The letter, signed by the district's senior counsel, says in one instance the Waymo vehicle drove past the stopped bus "only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road."

In a statement emailed to NPR, Waymo Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña said that while the company is proud of its safety record, "holding the highest safety standards means recognizing when our behavior should be better." Peña wrote that Waymo plans "to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA" and it "will continue analyzing our vehicles performance and making necessary fixes."

The company says it identified a software issue that contributed to the incidents and it believes subsequent updates will fix the problem. Waymo says it plans to file the voluntary recall early next week and it points out that no injuries have occurred because of this problem.

Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. It has focused on safety in public statements, showing that driverless Waymo cars have a lot fewer crashes than those with human drivers. In the cities where the company operates, it says there have been 91% fewer crashes with serious injuries and 92% fewer crashes with pedestrian injuries.

Independent analyses from technology news website Ars Technica and the newsletter Understanding AI support Waymo's claim that its AVs are safer than human drivers. Still, federal regulators are asking the company to provide a lot more information about these incidents.

According to NHTSA, Waymo's AVs surpassed 100 million miles of driving last July and continue to accumulate 2 million miles a week. Given that and discussions with Waymo, the agency says "the likelihood of other prior similar incidents is high."

Earlier this week, NHTSA investigators sent a list of detailed questions about the incidents to Waymo as part of its inquiry. The agency asked Waymo to document similar incidents and provide more information about how it has responded. NHTSA set a deadline of Jan. 20, 2026, for Waymo to respond.

Editor's note: Google is a financial supporter of NPR.

Copyright 2025 NPR

"3... 2... 1..."

Voices rang out in unison until the nearly mile-long row of cedar trees along Santa Rosa Avenue burst with color.

The Christmas Tree Lane lighting is Altadena’s kickoff to the holidays, a 105-year-old tradition that attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year.

And it was all that on Saturday night.

After the Eaton Fire, though, the celebration was more for many who attended. Many things about the lighting remained the same: speeches by dignitaries, a performance by the high school drumline.

But so much was different. A tree just off the lane was lit in white with 19 green lights honoring every person who died in the fire.

A tree off the Christmas Tree Lane was lit in white with 19 green lights honoring every person who died in the fire.

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Josie Huang

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And during the ceremony, a minute and 19 seconds of silence was observed, led by the night’s emcee, actor Edward James Olmos.

LAist was at Saturday night's lighting event.

Megan Murdock

Longtime Altadena resident Megan Murdock and her partner Steven Valle.

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Fiona Ng

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Saturday marked longtime Altadena resident Megan Murdock's very first outing.

"I love Christmas Tree Lane, but I've never been to the lighting event," she said. " This felt like the year to show up and represent."

As the first anniversary of the Eaton Fire approaches, Murdock said it's been amazing to see the community rebuild, even though the scars are still raw.

"Through the rebuilding, there were really hard days, there's going be more really hard days," she said. "But today's a good day."

Seamus Bozeman

Seamus Bozeman and his family lost their home in Altadena.

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Seamus Bozeman will always call Altadena home.

He and his family lost their house in the Eaton Fire. But every chance he gets, Bozeman (a former LAist intern) can be found hanging out in his old haunts.

"I come back and shop at the shops as much as I can, eat from the restaurants here," he said. "I love this place so much."

Christmas Tree Lane lighting ceremony on Saturday.

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He said the tree-lighting ceremony he grew up knowing was a quaint, neighborhood affair.

" With this whole festival and everything because of the fire, I don't know, it's not the same for me," he said.

But change, he knows, is inevitable.

" I'm hoping it's for the better," Bozeman said. "But one thing I do know is that we'll be closer as a community because of this fire."

Patricia Valencia

Patricia Valencia (R) and her friend at the Christmas Tree Lane lighting ceremony.

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Josie Huang

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For Patricia Valencia, who lost her home in the fire, Saturday night's event was a reunion.

"I saw my neighbor for the first time since we evacuated," she said. "It was emotional! I gave him a hug, and I was like, I think I'm gonna cry because I haven't seen you since that night that we left."

Greg Demus

Christmas Tree Lane resident Greg Demus.

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Fiona Ng

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Greg Demus lives right on Christmas Tree Lane. For him, the event is an annual ritual.

" I've been coming here all my life," he said.

But after the fire, few things are a given.

" I wasn't quite sure what to expect," Demus said of this year's ceremony. "But it's good to see so many people come back to try to celebrate Altadena and keep Altadena strong."

Howard and Linella Raff

Howard Raff and his wife Linella at Saturday's Christmas Tree Lane lighting ceremony.

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Josie Huang

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Howard Raff and his wife Linella are renting outside of Altadena while their home is being remediated.

"Coming back, you just want it to be what it was, and you don't know what it's going to be like. So having this was kind of an anchor of something that you knew was going to be there," Linella said.

Marguerite Lockwood de Jauregui

Marguerite Lockwood de Jauregui holds up a photocopy of the house in Altadena she lived in for three years, at the corner of Santa Rosa Avenue and East Mariposa Street where she is standing.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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Marguerite Lockwood de Jauregui and her husband arrived at Christmas Tree Lane on Saturday in the early afternoon.

As soon as they were able to enter the area, the two set up their chairs at the corner of Santa Rosa Avenue and Mariposa Street.

The intersection of Mariposa Street and Santa Rosa Avenue at Christmas Tree Lane

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Fiona Ng

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The lot on that corner now sits razed and empty. But before the fire, it was the house where de Jauregui had lived for three years after college. A place where she built lifelong friendships with her roommates.

"It was such great memories and a great camaraderie," she said.

Altadena, she remembered, was vibrant and free-spirited.

 "It was a really close-knit community," she said. "When you go further down Fair Oaks, you could go to the movies and dinner. You get together with friends in their historical homes, and we'd all sit around and play music."

Marguerite Lockwood de Jauregui brought with her a photocopy of the Altadena house she stayed at.

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Fiona Ng

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She returned to Christmas Tree Lane on Saturday to honor those formative years — and brought along images and drawings of the house that burned down.

"It was almost like claiming a bit of my own personal history back," she said.

The FIFA World Cup is just a few months away, and some national soccer teams, like Cape Verde, Curacao and Uzbekistan are competing for the first time. Their fans — and those of the other 45 countries — will probably look for something familiar when they land in L.A.

• Read: Your essential guide to the 2026 World Cup in Los Angeles

Whether it’s a fast food logo or a restaurant serving regional dishes from home, that sense of familiarity can be the first stepping stone before you start discovering the delights of where you are now.

When I arrived in Los Angeles from England, I was soon directed to Ye Olde King's Head in Santa Monica. Judging by the dozens of photographs on the wall, it has been a kind of entry checkpoint for newly arrived British Isles celebrities and regulars alike since the 1970s. They do afternoon tea, of course, plus their bar will open early to show UK soccer matches. Their store has snacks and candy for the homesick.

It was, of course, reassuring for me to hear familiar accents and recognize the beers on tap and even some of the crisps — sorry, chips — behind the bar. Asking whether any “football” matches were going to be shown didn’t raise any eyebrows either, even though that could mean having to arrive soon after sunrise because of the time difference in the UK.

British comfort food at Ye Olde King's Head in Santa Monica.

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Donal Tavey

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Even if I had been living locally, I don’t think it would have become my “local” (as it were) because I thought it was important to try to get to know my new home, rather than hold on too tight to what I had just left behind.

That said, I did occasionally return to watch football matches and even for a couple of New Year’s Eves, which happen here at 4 p.m. to coincide with midnight in England. Then I could call home and hear the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” while we in the pub were singing it at the same time.

Here's a select list of pubs where you can sample the drinks, eats and even watch the sports from several European countries.

Ireland

• The Auld Fella (Culver City & Brentwood)
  9375 Culver Blvd., Culver City

Auld Fella in Culver City

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Kevin Kearns

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Courtesy Auld Fella

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Owned by an actual Irishman, Kevin Kearns from Inishowen, they pour an excellent Guinness (don’t ask any Irish person about the importance of that, nor how hard it is to find that in L.A.) and have a good selection of savory pies. Kevin’s also an actor and appeared in blockbuster Battleship.

• Tom Bergin’s (Mid-Town/Fairfax)
  840 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles

Tom Bergin's in the Fairfax District.

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James Bartlett

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LAist

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An L.A. staple since 1936, it’s the center of celebrations on St. Patrick’s Day. Stapled to the ceiling and walls around the horseshoe bar are shamrocks with the names of past patrons: try to find Cary Grant, Kiefer Sutherland, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby. A short menu, but you can get shepherd’s pie (steak, carrots, celery, caramelized onions, under mashed potatoes), and it’s said to have invented Irish coffee. Choose that or a good Guinness.

• Molly Malone’s (Mid-Town/Fairfax)
  575 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles
  

Molly Malone's in the Fairfax District.

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James Bartlett

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LAist

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Owned by Irish family the Hanlons since 1969, Molly’s was damaged by a fire last year but bounced right back with its dark interior and original mission as a place where Irish troubadours and traditional musicians could get together. It’s long been a respected music venue and occasionally gets some bigger names on stage. You’ll get a good pour here, too, though the menu is just a few items long.

Scotland

• The Tam O’Shanter (Los Feliz)
  2980 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Angeles
  

The Tam O'Shanter in Los Feliz.

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James Bartlett

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LAist

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The Tam O'Shanter's main dining room.

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Jakob Layman

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Courtesy The Tam O'Shanter

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Named after a bonnet worn by Scotsmen, the “Tam” looks like a castle crossed with a witch’s house, in part because the original fairytale European look wasn’t a hit for owners Van de Kamp bakeries when they opened in 1922, so they pivoted to kilts, flags and bagpipes. Actors came in from the nearby studios, and famously, Walt Disney and his companions were regulars. A steakhouse, it also offers Scottish rarebit (cheddar, Scottish ale, cayenne pepper on sourdough) and, as you see when you enter, a large selection of scotch whiskeys. It even has resident ghosts!

Germany

• Wirsthaus Restaurant & Beer Garden (Mid-City/Hancock Park)
  345 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles
  

Wirstshaus in Hancock Park.

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David Marano

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Courtesy Wirsthaus

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Interior of Wirsthaus.

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Courtesy Wirsthaus

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Head to Wirsthaus to experience the best of Bavaria with steins of German beers, giant pretzels, schnitzel (boneless, thin slices of meat that are pounded, breaded and pan-fried until golden and crispy), bratwurst (sausages), plenty of oompah music and staff dressed in traditional dirndls and lederhosen — the Hollywood movie go-to for scenes of beer debauchery.

• Red Lion Tavern (Silver Lake)
  2366 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles
  

  

  Red Lion in Los Feliz.

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  Trashingetc

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  Courtesy Red Lion

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Originally an “Olde English” pub opened by the then-owners of Cole’s in downtown, it always had some German beers on draft, and in 1963, new owners fully embraced that. The German wife of one of them reportedly taught her home recipes to the chef, and it was German-owned until 2004, when Aidas Mattis and family, longtime patrons, took over. They kept up the style at this small, maze-like local favorite: flags, German signs, memorabilia and the back-patio beer garden. Schnitzel, spaetzle (doughy noodles), goulash and bratwurst are on the menu, as well as many beers and ciders. Oktoberfest runs Oct. 14, 15, 21 and 22. Try a four-liter boot of beer.

England

• The Cat & Fiddle (West Hollywood)
  742 Highland Ave., West Hollywood
  

  

  The Cat & Fiddle in West Hollywood.

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  James Bartlett

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  LAist

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Located on Sunset Boulevard for several decades, “The Cat” has long been an expat hangout, especially for musicians. Now on Highland Avenue, the Gardner children carry on offering a friendly face and a familiar meal to all visitors. Their Sunday roasts are a real taste of home, and they have other classic British dishes like shepherd’s pie, a ploughman’s lunch (Gloucester, brie, scotch egg, grapes, cornichons, Branston pickle and baguette), Scotch egg and sticky toffee pudding. Want to know what those last two are? Go visit!

• The Canaby (in the works)

Soon, ex-pats will be able to try Gordon Ramsay at the Carnaby, a recently announced 175-seat British gastropub that will open at Downtown Disney and bring 1960s London to Anaheim. Live bands will play music from that fab era, and dishes will include beef Wellington, fish and chips and sticky toffee pudding. No word yet on an opening date.

The Trump administration has removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from next year's calendar of entrance fee-free days for national parks and added President Trump's birthday to the list, according to the National Park Service, as the administration continues to push back against a reckoning of the country's racist history on federal lands.

In addition to Trump's birthday — which coincides with Flag Day (June 14) — the updated calendar of fee-free dates includes the 110th anniversary of the NPS (August 25), Constitution Day (September 17) and President Teddy Roosevelt's birthday (October 27). The changes will take effect starting January 1.

Non-U.S. residents will still be required to pay entrance fees on those dates under the new "America-first pricing" policy. At 11 of some of the country's most popular national parks, international visitors will be charged an extra $100, on top of the standard entrance fee, and the annual pass for non-residents will go up to $250. The annual pass for residents will be $80.

The move follows a July executive order from the White House that called to increase fees applied to non-American visitors to national parks and grant citizens and residents "preferential treatment with respect to any remaining recreational access rules, including permitting or lottery rules."

The Department of the Interior, which oversees NPS, called the new fee-exempted dates "patriotic fee-free days," in an announcement that lauded the changes as "Trump's commitment to making national parks more accessible, more affordable and more efficient for the American people."

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement: "These policies ensure that U.S. taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks for future generations."

The new calendar follows the Trump administration's previous moves to reshape U.S. history by asking patrons of national parks to flag any signs at sites deemed to cast a negative light on past or living Americans.
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