The Brief

Update 8:30am on 08/21/23: According to the City of Avalon, the evacuation warning has been lifted:

From City of Avalon:
Storm Update: The LA County Sheriff has rescinded the evacuation warning status for Catalina Island. Pebbly Beach Road is now reopened and Catalina Express will resume regularly scheduled services starting at 9:50am.

As Hurricane Hilary churns north from the Baja Peninsula, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is advising Catalina Island residents and visitors to leave the island as soon as they can.

An evacuation warning issued Saturday night is in effect beginning at 6 a.m. Sunday. That warning from the L.A. Sheriff's Dept. cautioned:

"Residents and visitors, especially those with medical, access and functional needs, are advised to LEAVE as soon as possible. Departure via Catalina Express is recommended."

Those instructions followed an earlier alert telling both Catalina Island residents and visitors "especially those with medical, access and functional needs" that they should leave via the Catalina Express as soon as possible on Saturday "due to a forecast of storm impacts and possibly prolonged utility outages."

The City of Avalon additionally said: “Red Cross, LA County, and the City of Long Beach will have services available at the Catalina Express Ferry Terminal, including transportation, shelter, and other essential services.”

The city also said Avalon Bay would be closed to all incoming boaters.

Meanwhile Long Beach said it would open a temporary shelter for those leaving the island.

Travelers caught by surprise

The alerts came as droves of passengers disembarked from Catalina Express ferries Saturday morning. Several passengers looked at their phones in bewilderment as their devices pinged them just as they arrived in Avalon.

“Are we going to be okay?” Catalina day tripper Anna Rodriguez said as she rolled a suitcase with her family in tow. Rodriguez had just gotten the alert from LASD on her phone and said her return ticket was scheduled for 9 p.m. Saturday.

“Do we switch [our ticket]? They should have switched everybody if that’s the case,” Rodriguez said.

Avalon on Saturday, August 19

(

Robert Garrova / LAist

)

Outside of Avalon city hall, Sheriff's Deparment spokesperson Miguel Meza said Catalina Express would be providing services back to the mainland.

As of late Saturday afternoon, all Catalina Express return ferries from Avalon to the mainland seemed to be sold out on the website, but spots remained open for Sunday. Meza with LASD said as of Saturday around 5pm, he was not aware of any ferry cancellations.

Meza said visitors to the island who don’t have an emergency should not travel there. “We want them to stay home and avoid the forecast.”

A normal Saturday for many residents

But many people on Catalina Island — home to about 4,200 permanent residents — seemed unphased Saturday morning, even after the advisory to leave the island was sent out. People sunbathed, swam in the ocean, dined in the restaurants and took part in scavenger hunts around the island.

“People are still coming over," said Breeann Boyd, who works at the local hospital’s fitness center. "They probably shouldn’t be because they could get stuck here, we don’t really know what the weather is going to be like,”

“This is a new situation for everyone,” Boyd said.

John Lafleur of Island Threadz

(

Robert Garrova / LAist

)

In front of Island Threadz, a clothing store that sits just on the pedestrian walkway across from the Avalon beachfront, owner John Lafleur was shoveling sand into two white sandbags before going about the rest of his day.

“Mother Nature has her own agenda,” said Lafleur, who has been on the island since 1988. “All you can do is just prep for what might possibly happen. And if it does happen then we’ll just all reach out as a community and help each other,” Lafleur said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for recent television advertisements that promoted his political message while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda and accuses Trump of personally directing them. It asks the court to declare the ads illegal and stop the use of federal funds to pay for them.

Trump has faced bipartisan backlash for the ads, which glorify him and echo his campaign pitch as voters cast early ballots with the midterm elections less than a month away.

The spots, which began airing in September, already have cost more than $12 million to run, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, and a total of $20 million in Homeland Security Department funding has been tapped to pay for them.

Responding Monday to the criticism, Trump defended the ads as “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said he’d pay for them using his MAGA Inc. super PAC going forward.

But on Tuesday, the fifth ad in the campaign began airing with the notice “paid for by the U.S. Government,” promoting Trump’s military actions in Venezuela earlier this year. The same day, Trump made it clear he hasn’t committed to reimbursing any money that has already been spent, telling reporters “we’ll decide.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement that Trump is misusing taxpayer dollars in “a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he added.

Legal experts have suggested the ads run afoul of a federal statute against congressionally appropriated money being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and potentially other federal laws. The Homeland Security money tapped for the ads comes from a $175 million package Congress gave to the department as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have done to promote various policies. Legal experts have said the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

The defendants in the lawsuit — Trump, the White House, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Fall has only just begun, but it's already time to start thinking about the quintessential winter bug: the flu.

The annual flu season usually starts in October or November. But this year, it looks like the flu started to pick up in early September.

"There are enough signs pointing in the same direction to make me think, 'OK, yes. This is the start of flu season,'" says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The percentage of people testing positive for the flu in the West has been rising steadily since around the beginning of September, she says. And the number of people showing up in emergency departments because of the flu has also been rising for weeks, she adds.

"It's very uncommon to see flu activity rising this early. It's activity that we might normally see more like November or December," she says.

The timing of the flu season isn't the only thing that's odd. It's also unusual that flu activity seems to have started in Western states, such as California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

"It typically starts in the South and then expands from there," Rivers says. "So two uncommon developments there."

Rivers stresses that the amount of flu activity is still very low in most parts of the country. But that's starting to change as the flu picks up nationwide.

It's unclear why flu activity would have started so early, and in such an unusual part of the country. But one clue might be a new variant that evolved a mutation, which appears to make it better at evading existing immunity, especially among teenagers.

"That's our best argument for what's going on right now in terms of this early flu season," says Dr. Alex Greninger, a virologist who heads infectious disease diagnostics at the University of Washington. Doctors there are seeing as much flu right now as they usually would around Christmas, and the mutated variant appears to be common, he says.

So Greninger, Rivers and others are urging people to think about getting their flu shot earlier than usual.

"It's crucial that people get an influenza vaccine," says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this might be a year that people might want to get a vaccine early."

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't been promoting flu shots as it usually does. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, is a long-time vaccine skeptic.

"It is disappointing that CDC is quiet given that flu kills of hundreds of kids a year and can result in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last year as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protest what he called political interference at the agency.

The CDC declined to make an official available to NPR for this story. In a statement, a CDC spokesperson said, "CDC is developing a communications strategy to provide clear, accessible information about influenza vaccination and other critical steps people can take to protect themselves during respiratory virus season. This includes information about the benefits and risks of vaccination to support informed decision-making."
Copyright 2026 NPR