The Brief

Gross black dust on your windowsill. Sickly yellow haze that obscures the mountains. Childhood memories of recess cancelled due to smog alerts.

You know the air here is dirty. Now learn why.

Once Upon A Time

The L.A. smog story goes a little like this: on July 8, 1943, a mysterious haze descended on the city.

"People were having car accidents," Chip Jacobs, co-author of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, told LAist. "Mothers were wondering why their kids' eyes were watering. Police officers were spinning loopy."

What was this strange haze? Was it a gas attack? Smoke from factories? From some distant fire?

To solve the mystery, local officials formed the nation's first air quality regulator, the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District. They began looking into the problem and quickly learned that there were a lot of sources of air pollution in greater L.A.: people burning trash in their backyards, oil refineries, smudge pots (which are small, smoky fires used by citrus growers to keep trees warm at night), and factories.

But soon, a Caltech scientist figured out that cars and gasoline were largely to blame for the eye-watering, lung-searing haze.

A smog-shrouded view of downtown Los Angeles on October 7, 1968.

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Los Angeles Public Library archive

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What Do Cars Have To Do With It?

Car exhaust has two main components: hydrocarbons, from the gasoline, and nitrogen oxides, which are formed inside hot, internal combustion engines. Both are harmful in and of themselves, but when they float into the sunny, Southern California air, the sunlight bakes them into a new chemical: ozone, also known as smog.

Once scientists figured out what caused smog, the crackdown began: in 1967, a new state air quality agency, the Air Resources Board, was formed. It enacted tailpipe emissions standards for cars. It required catalytic converters on new models, cleaner gasoline and, at the gas pump, those little rubber boots that trap fumes from the nozzle. In 1984, smog checks began statewide. Other industries had to clean up, too: oil refineries, cement plants, power plants. And as California cleaned up its air, other states and the federal government followed.

L.A. has the worst ozone, or smog, in the country, according to the American Lung Association's 2021 State of the Air Report.

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American Lung Association

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Bad Now Vs. Bad Then

The air is a lot cleaner now. In 2020 , we had 157 days of unhealthy air, compared to well over 200 in the late 1980s. However, 2020 tracked the highest number of unhealthy air days since 1997, even with pandemic restrictions seeing a drop in auto travel. So when it's smoggy, it's not as smoggy as it used to be.

But Los Angeles still has the worst smog in the country, according to the American Lung Association's 2021 State of the Air report. (Again, scientists call smog "ozone." But they're the same thing).

Greater L.A. exceeded federal air quality standards for 157 days in 2020.

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South Coast Air Quality Management District

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Part of the problem is that it's been hot, incredibly hot. And heat speeds up the process of ozone-formation. Experts are trying to figure out whether the spate of bad air is a new trend, reversing years of steady progress.

"Is this weather, or has this become climate?" said Atwood. "We're grappling with that question basically."

What Makes Our Smog So Special?

Three reasons.

• One, there are a lot of us, and we own a lot of cars. Angelenos own 0.54 vehicles per person, compared to 0.43 in New York City. Also, we have the busiest ports in the country, which means tens of thousands of heavy-duty diesel trucks are on our roads, and they are way dirtier than cars.
• Two, the mountains that ring the L.A. Basin trap that pollution as it gets pushed eastwards by sea breezes.
• And three, our climate. Nearly three out of four days in L.A. are sunny. And the L.A. Basin frequently experiences a weather pattern where a layer of warm air will sit on top of a layer of cooler air and prevent it from dispersing. That traps pollution closer to the ground. Think of it like putting a lid on a pot.

Where's The Dirtiest Air? Where's The Cleanest?

Because the wind blows smog east, towards the mountains, the air is worst there. So places like Redlands, San Bernardino and even the tiny, mountain community of Crestline have far worse air quality than coastal cities like Long Beach or Santa Monica.

But there's another factor to consider besides smog: the raw vehicle emissions that combine to make smog can also have localized health impacts. So if you live within 500 feet of a busy road or a freeway, you're in a pollution hot spot, because that's where vehicle emissions are the most concentrated. (Use this handy map made by our friends at the LA Times to figure out how close you live to a freeway.)

Trucks on the SR 60 Freeway drive by Anna Gallegos' backyard in Mira Loma Village, California.

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Andrew Cullen for LAist

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In the very worst places to live, like near a freeway in San Bernardino, you will be exposed to both smog and raw vehicle emissions, said Ed Avol, the head of the Environmental Health Division at the USC Keck School of Medicine.

"It's sort of like a double whammy, so you get both the local impact of being near a roadway, and you also get the accrued accumulation of pollution that's become a regional issue," he said in an interview with KPCC/LAist in April.

What Will Breathing Dirty Air Do To Me?

When you breathe in dirty air, it triggers an inflammatory response in your body. And once that happens, a lot of bad things can happen. In the short term, air pollution can cause:

• Difficulty breathing and chest pain.
• Increased rates of asthma.
• Respiratory diseases like bronchitis and pneumonia.
• Lost school or work days.
• Doctor and hospital visits.
  

Over the long term, it's much worse. Kids who grow up breathing dirty air, whether it's from living near a freeway or in a smoggy area, or both, have weaker lungs that don't work as well.

"If they never get that maximum lung growth early in life, it looks like it's permanently lost," Avol said.

For older adults, air pollution can contribute to cognitive decline, memory loss and premature death. It can also exacerbate heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cause cancer. There's even research suggesting fetuses are harmed when their moms breathe dirty air.

"In a cynical, joking way, you could say we believe air pollution causes everything," Avol said.

Smog-making cars on March 22, 2006 in L.A.

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David McNew/Getty Images

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How Can I Protect Myself And My Family From Bad Air?

One of the most common ways people are exposed to pollution is while driving. So when you're on the freeway, be sure to keep your windows rolled up and re-circulate the air, instead of drawing it in from the outside. Changing your air filter also helps. And new cars are more tightly sealed than older cars, keeping pollution out.

If you can, try to live at least 500 away from a freeway or busy road. If you can't, using HEPA air filters has been shown to significantly reduce indoor air pollution when the air outside is dirty. Clean that black dust, which is a combination of diesel soot and rubber dust from tire wear, off your window sills.

Outside of the home, try to walk or bike on less busy streets, to limit your exposure to vehicle exhaust. When waiting for the bus, stand back from the street corner, where pollution levels soar when vehicles accelerate from a stop. And don't exercise near busy roads during rush hour, especially in the morning, or when the air is especially bad.

You can also check the air quality every day. This South Coast Air Quality Management District map will give you a good overview of air in your area. You can also check the Purple Air network, which measures particulate matter (like soot, dust and wildfire smoke), or have a low-cost air monitor installed at your home or work.

What Do We Need To Do To Make The Air Actually Clean?

It all comes down to transportation. Cars and trucks make up nearly 90 percent of the smog-forming pollution in Southern California (not to mention they are also the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the state), and it's because they run on gasoline and diesel.

Switching to fuels with zero tailpipe emissions, like electricity and hydrogen fuel-cells, will make a huge difference, says Will Barrett, the clean air advocacy director for the American Lung Association.

Trucks drive along Interstate 80 on February 18, 2014 in Berkeley, California.

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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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"We need to see more focus and urgency on the conversion of the heavy duty sector to zero emission technology," he said.

But heavy duty trucks have proven tricky, so far, to electrify, because they would require a massive battery to power them over long distances while carrying heavy loads. Also, truckers would need frequent, convenient charging stations, and that infrastructure doesn't exist yet.

California regulators, ever the clean-air optimists, are throwing cash at the program. The ports of L.A. and Long Beach, for example, have a goal of shifting their entire fleet of largely diesel trucks and equipment to zero emissions technology by 2035 -- at a cost of $14 billion. If they can figure it out, all of our lungs will benefit.

This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal.

A park is a city’s heart and soul. At its highest calling, it’s a community’s conscience.

Such is the case with Ascot Hills Park, 93 acres of hiking paths and native habitats built 20 years ago in the Eastside neighborhood of El Sereno, thanks to a retired civil engineer and residents who wanted the land to return to nature — and to the community.

"There was nothing there," said Val Marquez, one of those residents, who's lived in El Sereno for more than 50 years. "It was just hillsides, fenced off for the most part."

Ascot Hills Park took 20 years to build.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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Ascot Hills Park.

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Fiona Ng

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Today, dirt trails are molded into the hills. Some dip down to a lush canyon of native trees and shrubs fed by a small stream.

Others take you higher — way higher.

“On a foggy morning, you can go to the east ridge and you're above the clouds,” said Raymond Rios, another early resident behind the efforts. “Or you can go on a beautiful evening to the west ridge and look at what the Lord painted in the sky.”

View of downtown L.A. from Ascot Hills Park.

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Fiona Ng

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Back to nature

The idea of a park came up as early as 1930 but never came to pass.

In the 1990s, Jerry Schneider was getting a master's degree in landscape architecture, a passion of his after retiring as a civil engineer. His thesis fieldwork took him to El Sereno. He and his colleague saw an ideal site in its dormant hillsides — a place to turn natural landscapes into hands-on classrooms for students from two nearby high schools.

"The area was the subject of a lot of political ideas and proposals that did not resonate with me or a lot of the community," Schneider said. Those ideas included a sports complex, proposed in 2000, that would have leveled the hills.

Jerry Schneider at Ascot Hills Park, with the amphitheater in the background.

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Fiona Ng

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Jerry Schneider at Ascot Hills.

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Fiona Ng

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At a community hearing attended by Antonio Villaraigosa — who went on to represent District 14 on the City Council and later became mayor — Schneider remembered, "We lined up all the students and science teachers and others and we all basically told Antonio the neighborhood wants an open space. In fact, nature — it could be the main theme of the park."

How to build a park

Ascot Hills Park.

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Money came through Proposition 40, a 2002 parks bond, and a lease was hammered out between LADWP — which has owned the site for over a century for water storage — and the Department of Recreation and Parks.

"Nothing happens by itself,” said Schneider, who lives in Mount Washington, of importance of Villaraigosa's buy-in.  "He was key because we needed political support."

The park opened in 2006 with little more than a gravel driveway and a few rocks to sit on — what old-timers call Phase 1.

Raymond Rios helped build Ascot Hills Park.

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Fiona Ng

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Val Marquez helped build Ascot Hills Park. Later, he built the El Sereno Arroyo Playground, where he is at.

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Fiona Ng

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"We were ready to have a ribbon-cutting and we were just waiting for the state to pay for the bill, basically," Marquez said. "And they came back and said, 'Where's the bathroom? You forgot the bathroom.'"

The full park — amphitheater, benches, picnic tables, a restored stream, new trails — didn't open until 2011, delayed three years by the Great Recession.

"Jerry [Schneider] made sure that it stayed as a natural habitat," Marquez said. "If it wasn't for him, that could've been a development. That could've been a regular park with soccer fields."

Slow, steady work

Today, the 86-year-old Schneider runs the park's monthly volunteering program and can still be found at Ascot a few times each week, pulling out weeds and checking in on the native plants and trees planted by volunteers over the last two decades. Students from Wilson High drop in to help out routinely for class credit.

Demian Willette chairs the park's volunteer advisory board. He is also conducting research on urban habitat restoration at Ascot.

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Since 2024, an experiment to grow a micro-forest of California natives has been underway over a 10,000-square-foot plot. It's thriving, despite minimal watering and upkeep, proving there's a cost-efficient way to restore habitat anywhere in this city.

"After two years, it's self-sufficient," said Demian Willette, a Loyola Marymount University biology professor who is leading the research. "You plant it, you let it go. You let nature take over."

Willette also chairs Ascot's volunteer-run Park Advisory Board, part of a new generation of stewards that include Lluvia Arras, who remembered what Schneider said when she first started to volunteer.

"He reminded me that it's slow, steady work," Arras said. "He's like, 'One day you're gonna look back and you're gonna see the progress and feel proud.'"

Lluvia Arras is among a new generation of volunteer park leaders at Ascot.

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Their advocacy didn't stop at Ascot. Marquez, an original Park Advisory Board member, went on to build the El Sereno Arroyo Playground in 2012, informed by his experience at Ascot.

Rios, the current secretary, is active at neighboring Hazard Park. In the mid-2010s he worked with residents to beat back a USC proposal to improve its Health Sciences campus that would take away parkland.

"Not only are we park advocates," Rios said. "We're community advocates."

They are one and the same thing.

A program that helps connect schools and libraries to the internet at discounted rates is under review by the Federal Communications Commission. Educators and advocates are bracing for the funding to shrink or be eliminated.

The so-called E-Rate program, created in the 1990s, has considerable bipartisan support. The agency's recent focus on the program has left educators, including David Thurston, on edge.

Thurston oversees technology for the 33 school districts nested inside San Bernardino County. The area covers more than 20,000 square miles of Southern California: "We have mountain regions, far-flung desert regions, and then our urban and suburban areas. We're a really diverse county," Thurston says.

The county already built the infrastructure to get internet access from the edge of Los Angeles all the way to the state's eastern border, but the spending doesn't end once the fiber-optic cables are installed. Internet access bills come monthly.

"There's no doing without," he says. School districts "are gonna have to pick up the costs."

For San Bernardino districts, that's tens of thousands of dollars every month.

"Those are ongoing, essentially, utility costs," he says. "That's what E-Rate pays for."

A 'healthy' program 

E-Rate has had a notable impact since its founding. It was created by Congress in 1996, when only 14% of schools and libraries could access the internet. That number is now near 100%. The FCC has overseen the program through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so when the agency announced a full review of the program in late June, some were confused.

"By its own data and its own measurement, the program is healthy," Thurston says. "The program is doing what it needs to and is important."

Others saw this coming. The Project 2025 blueprint singled out federal broadband policy as a target for cutting agency spending.

Current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr helped write that chapter of the document, compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was meant to guide the second Trump administration.

Less predictable was the chairman's reasoning for reviewing the program: kids getting too much screen time. In the now-approved notice of proposed rulemaking, the FCC calls for a review "to better protect children when using E-Rate-funded networks, including to limit screen time."

His prepared statement at the commission's June hearing focused heavily on the dangers of screen time for kids and the growing body of research around it.

Since January, states including Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation that calls for reevaluating technology's role in teaching and testing, and more than 10 other states are considering similar restrictions. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, recently approved a policy to limit screen time for its students.

Some advocates for limiting screen time at school say gutting E-Rate funding isn't the way to reduce how much time kids are spending on devices.

"We believe there are ways of strengthening school policies to promote more limited and privacy-protecting use of EdTech without taking away critical E-Rate funding," said Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay, a nonprofit focused on digital safety for kids, in a statement to NPR.

Although states and districts are searching for ways to limit screen time, few — if any — are looking to operate without the internet altogether. Many schools rely on internet-based systems to track attendance, monitor school bus routes and give tests required by their state. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 48 states now have some kind of online component with exams.

Bob Bocher, a senior fellow with the American Library Association (ALA), says that because the program is written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC likely cannot fully eliminate it. And last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the Universal Service Fund, which collects the money that schools and libraries in turn use to lower internet costs, is constitutional.

But the FCC could change the way the E-Rate program is run to make it more complicated, so the ALA is still worried.

Bocher, who helped work on the original law back in the '90s, worries the program could become so onerous it drives schools and libraries away by design.

"It's like death by a thousand cuts," he says, "death by a thousand rules and regulations."

Keeping up with the rest of the world

While internet access has expanded significantly since 1996, internet pricing and options haven't changed the way Bocher or his contemporaries expected.

"A common assumption that a lot of people had [was] … competition will evolve," he says. "And then drive down the price."

In cities, this may be true, but for many rural and remote areas, competition for internet service providers, or ISPs, is nonexistent.

"In rural Alaska, we don't have numerous options," says Patrick Mayer, superintendent for the remote Alaska Gateway School District. "We have one provider."

His district, where some students rely on planes to get to school in the winter months, has just under 400 students. Still, the district spends more than half a million dollars per year to ensure it has internet access at its six schools. The price tag is high, but the connection is what allows them to keep up with the rest of the world.

"It means the difference between having a school in the 21st century," Mayer says, "or a school in the 20th century."

The expansion of connectivity in his district allows students to take dual-enrollment courses online with a local college and access virtual speech and occupational therapy.

"To backfill that funding," he says, "would be very, very difficult."

He imagines there would be no way around cutting down on staff and student services to find money to pay the district's entire internet bill. For now, he's focused on making some noise.

Once the FCC officially publishes notice of its planned review, the public can comment for 60 days. After that, there will be a reply comment period of 30 days, followed by a full review of all of that input by the agency. The process can take a long time, but Mayer and other advocates are already working to draw attention to the issue.

He spent a few days this month in Washington, D.C., to meet with legislators about the importance of keeping Alaska's students connected.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.