The Brief

Last week’s storms not only brought an immense amount of rain to California, they caused more than 240 landslides across the state, many of them in Southland.

Stories have continued to trickle in about homes and lives being threatened, as hillsides, compromised by the heavy rainfall, have continued to erode. Now, with another big storm expected to move in this weekend, experts warn that another round of heavy rainfall could cause more widespread damage.

Multi-million-dollar homes crouched on a Dana Point clifftop got a little bit closer to the edge when a landslide brought tons of rock and soil crashing into the sea on February 15, 2024.

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Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP

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Why hillsides fail

Soils have a limited water carrying capacity, and given that some spots were recently saturated with more than a year’s worth of precipitation in just a few days, the risk of landslides is very real, especially with this next storm that’s expected to bring anywhere from 2 to 8 inches of rain.

“If we get intense bursts of rain on top of saturated soils I wouldn’t be surprised by reports like we saw last week or even worse,” said Jason Kean, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Kean’s part of a research group that’s installed a number of soil probes in the San Gabriels and the mountains above Santa Barbara in an effort to study landslide activity.

“These five holes in the ground are indicating we are around 60% saturated. How representative those are for the entire listening area is difficult to say,” he said.

The probes extend from the soil surface all of the way down to the bedrock, measuring how the pockets of air between all the individual particles of soil are filling up with water. When positive pressure is detected at the end of the probe, it means there’s standing water along the bedrock and the soil is getting saturated.

A view of mudslide damage which destroyed a home as a powerful long-duration atmospheric river storm, the second in less than a week, continues to impact Southern California on February 5, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

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Mario Tama

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Getty Images North America

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Too much water and the pressure between the grains can grow to a point where they struggle to stick together — kind of like when you add too much water to a sandcastle and it collapses.

There are many factors that can influence a landslide, including the composition of the soil (clay holds onto more water than sand), the steepness of the grade, whether soil has had time to dry out between heavy bursts of rain, and how humans have affected the movement of water with construction and drainage.

It’s unclear exactly how much water is needed to trigger a collapse, but long standing guidance estimates that it’s about 10 inches of rain followed by a quarter inch burst within an hour, the latter of which isn’t all that much.

“That's what you saw in the storms of last week,” said California state geologist Jeremy Lancaster. “That storm just sat there and chugged on Monday and Tuesday.”

It helps explain why we saw so many slides.

According to Kean, when last year's cavalcade of atmospheric rivers brought more than 15 inches of rain to our area in early January, more than 7,000 landslides were triggered in the Santa Ynez mountains. While they didn’t greatly impact public infrastructure, they did do damage to Forest Service roadways. This is one of the event's Kean and his team are looking at to better determine when and why hillsides fail.

"There are some good guesses, but nobody knows exactly what it is. More work is needed,” he said.

An aerial view of a home destroyed by a mudslide on February 5, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

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Mario Tama

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Getty Images North America

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What to look out for

Given how saturated soils are, look out for heavy bands of rain.

If you're in a slide prone area or if the last rainstorm caused noticeable erosion around your home, stay on your toes.

If you hear creaking, see pipes break or cracks open up, a deep seated, catastrophic landslide may be imminent, and you should exit your home as fast as possible. I covered this in detail following the Palos Verdes landslide last year.

The National Weather Service is in communication with USGS about potentially hazardous rainfall totals. Make sure to log into LAist.com or to our live audio stream, where we’ll be talking about the latest hazards.

The El Monte Union High School District agreed to sweeping reforms Friday in settling a state attorney general investigation into how it handled allegations staff sexually abused students.

The wide-ranging stipulated judgment with the school district draws to a close an 18-month investigation, which found “systemic shortfalls in the district’s response to allegations and complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse of students.” The investigation was spurred by a 2023 article in Business Insider, The Predators’ Playground, which documented decades of sexual misconduct by teachers, coaches and other staff at one of the district’s schools, Rosemead High, ranging from sexual harassment and groping to statutory rape.

“Every child deserves to learn and grow in a safe and supportive school environment. Unfortunately, our investigation found that this has not always been the case for students enrolled in El Monte Union High School District,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said. District administrators, he added, “consistently mishandled students’ complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse by District employees and others. In doing so, it jeopardized the safety and well-being of its students and violated the community’s trust. Today’s settlement marks a beginning, not an end. I am hopeful that the District will move swiftly to implement the reforms required by this settlement, and my office will be monitoring closely to ensure its compliance.”

In an emailed statement, El Monte Superintendent Edward Zuniga said that “student safety and well-being remain our highest priorities. This agreement reflects our continued commitment to strengthening systems that support safe, inclusive, and respectful learning environments.”

Reforms mandated after investigation

Among other changes, the stipulated judgment requires the district to designate a compliance coordinator to investigate complaints of sexual harassment or abuse and creates a centralized system to store documents related to investigations. It also requires the district to maintain a list of substitute teachers found to have violated the district’s employee policy on appropriate boundaries with students. The agreement requires the district to establish an advisory committee to study its compliance with the reforms and make additional recommendations, and to provide students and parents with training for how to recognize the signs of grooming — curriculum that Rosemead students have fought to have implemented for the past four years.

The agreement is a rare instance of state law enforcement taking an active role in a K-12 school district’s compliance with California education code and mandated reporting laws. The only other agreement like it was reached in 2024 with the Redlands Unified School District, following sexual abuse and misconduct allegations that cost the district more than $50 million in legal settlements. In El Monte’s case, announced Friday by Bonta at a press conference in Los Angeles, the judgment requires four years of court-supervised oversight, and includes sweeping reforms in how the district handles serious misconduct allegations.

In an interview with CalMatters, Bonta said that his office was focused on trying to establish best practices for school districts across the state in how to address sexual misconduct allegations when they surface. “I don’t think this will be the last case of this type, unfortunately,” Bonta said, adding that his staff would conduct unannounced site visits of the district in the months ahead to ensure compliance with the settlement. “We think we’ve arrived at a model that can really help districts that have failed systemically, transform.”

Attorneys in the justice department’s Bureau of Children's Justice conducted the investigation, which focused on the district’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against school staff since 2018. It included a review of more than 100 complaints, thousands of pages of documents, and interviews with more than two dozen employees, former students and others. The investigation found that district officials had failed to properly respond to complaints, provide adequate reporting procedures and adequately maintain records of misconduct allegations.

The findings mirror those first identified by Business Insider, which sued the school district for not releasing records under the California Public Records Act. That case settled out of court, with district administrators agreeing to conduct new searches for records and pay $125,000 in legal fees. The district's head of human resources, Robin Torres, said in a deposition that her office had discarded disciplinary records it was legally obligated to keep. She acknowledged that her predecessors had failed to properly investigate allegations that staff had sexually harassed students or had sex with former students soon after they graduated.

Years of sex abuse allegations

The stipulated judgment is the latest fallout from generations of Rosemead High students coming forward to share their stories of being preyed upon and groomed for sexual relationships at school. The LA Sheriff’s Department opened criminal probes into at least three former staffers, while students walked out of class in protest and several teachers resigned following district investigations. At least five civil lawsuits have been filed on behalf of former students. Many were represented by attorneys Dominique Boubion and Michael Carrillo, who previously brought a case against the district that resulted in a $5 million verdict in favor of a former student who said she was abused by a teacher the district allowed to continue teaching after he was accused of fondling children.

“The attorney general’s intervention confirms what survivors have been saying for years: EMUHSD failed its students,” Boubion told CalMatters. “This was not an isolated breakdown. It was a longstanding failure to protect children, and it stretches back decades. The district should stop resisting and start complying. Students have the right to be safe at school.”

A new state law, the Safe Learning Environments Act, took effect earlier this year and gives school officials more tools to identify suspected misconduct. State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat from Alhambra whose district includes Rosemead High, authored the law.

Among other reforms, the law establishes the creation of a non-public database of alleged staff misconduct that administrators are required to consult before hiring new employees. Similar databases already exist in other states as part of a growing nationwide effort to prohibit instances of “pass the trash,” where educators accused of sexual misconduct leave a school district only to return to the classroom elsewhere. This happened numerous times in the El Monte district.

Matt Drange is a journalist with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Projectand an alumnus of Rosemead High School. He can be reached at matt.drange@occrp.org.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

L.A. County CEO Fesia Davenport, who has been on medical leave for the last five months, has announced she’ll be stepping down in mid-April, citing health concerns. While on leave, she has faced scrutiny from the public and county employees — as well as a lawsuit — over a secretive $2 million payout she received last August.

Davenport gave notice on Wednesday to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors — her bosses — that she plans to step down effective April 16, according to a spokesperson for her office.

Davenport remains on medical leave and her second-in-command, Joseph Nicchitta, continues to serve as acting CEO, according to a statement from the CEO’s office.

“We appreciate Fesia's nearly three decades of service to Los Angeles County and all that she has accomplished on behalf of its residents and communities,” the statement added.

Davenport said in a LinkedIn post she was stepping down “to focus on my health and wellness.” She also emailed CEO office staff to say she’s learned she has a predisposition for the same type of health problem that killed her brother Raymond in 2018 and that two of her sisters experienced last year. One of her sisters will require 24-hour care for the rest of her life, Davenport wrote.

“The County CEO role requires an extraordinary amount of time and energy to meet the demands of the job, and although I originally assumed that I would be able to return in early 2026, I now know that I would be unable to continue to do the job as it deserves to be done while also prioritizing my health,” she added.

The $2 million taxpayer payout from the county was in response to her claiming she was harmed by a voter-approved measure that will change her job almost two years after her employment contract expires. The settlement was marked “confidential” and not made public until it was brought to light by LAist.

A lawsuit filed last month claims the payout is illegal because Davenport did not have a valid legal dispute with the county. Under the state Constitution, local government settlement payouts are illegal gifts of public funds if they’re in response to allegations that completely lack legal merit or exceed the agency’s “maximum exposure,” according to court rulings.

On Tuesday, county supervisors ordered new transparency measures in response to LAist revealing the secretive payout to Davenport. The county will now create a public dashboard of settlements between the county and its executives, and make sure all such settlements are reported to the public on meeting agendas after they’re finalized.

In her message to staff, Davenport said she was proud of their work together. She pointed to balancing the county’s budget, developing a plan to compensate victims in the largest sexual assault settlement in U.S. history and protecting the county's credit rating when other agencies were being downgraded.

As word of the damning sexual abuse accusations against César Chávez spread this week, California’s farmworking communities struggled to process and reconcile the disturbing details with the image of a labor icon and civil rights fighter many considered a hero.

Reached by phone, people described feeling stunned and disjointed after learning the news from a neighbor’s call, conversations with relatives, work meetings or social media.

“It’s almost too difficult to believe what is happening,” Maria García Hernández, a farmworker for more than 30 years, said in Spanish on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-year-old, who lives in Tulare County, said she and her parents benefited from Chávez's advocacy to include undocumented farmworkers in the last major comprehensive immigration reform in the 1980s.

“I still can’t quite believe it — that such a courageous person who fought for all of us to ensure we had shade, water, clean restrooms, better working conditions, that such a person, so dedicated to the people … could do that,” said García, who seeds and harvests plants in a job represented by the United Farm Workers, the union that Chávez and Dolores Huerta co-founded.

Huerta, now 95, revealed for the first time publicly that Chávez manipulated her into sex and raped her in the 1960s, telling The New York Times that the two encounters each left her pregnant. The Times’ multi-year investigation, published Wednesday, also detailed accusations by two women, daughters of union organizers, who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were children in the 1970s.

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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When Rolando Hernandez first heard about the allegations from coworkers during a job training meeting, the former agricultural worker was confused. He thought the discussion must be about someone else.

“Excuse me, but which César Chávez are you talking about?” Hernandez, 33, asked at the gathering. “Because I only know of one César Chávez who fought for farmworkers’ rights so that there’d be better wages and not so much injustice in the fields.”

“That’s the one,” came the response, leaving Hernandez speechless.

“It landed really heavy,” said Hernandez, an outreach educator for a Fresno-based farmworker nonprofit who began harvesting chile fields as a 14-year-old in Arizona before working with grapes and oranges in California.

The fallout from the revelations was almost immediate. California lawmakers announced they plan to rename the state holiday named after Chavez as Farmworkers Day. Cities, states and organizations, including the UFW, moved to postpone or cancel celebrations planned for March 31 in honor of the Mexican American labor leader’s birthday. Officials are considering renaming streets, parks, libraries, schools and other buildings named after Chávez.

For decades, Chávez and Huerta’s collaboration to advance farmworker rights has been celebrated in children’s textbooks, biographies, movies and parades. Now, mothers like García are troubled that more was not done sooner to prevent and respond to the alleged attacks.

“I feel for them; it really pains me in the bottom of my soul what happened to them,” García said. “But if what happened is true, why wasn’t it spoken of a long time ago? Why now?”

Chávez died in 1993. Huerta said she stayed silent for 60 years because she feared hurting the reputation of a man who became the face of the Mexican American civil rights movement, known for national boycotts, marches and strikes that achieved significant gains for thousands of farmworkers.

“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work,” Huerta said in a statement after the Times investigation was published. “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Luz Gallegos, whose childhood experiences accompanying her parents to UFW pickets and marches inspired her to become a farmworker advocate, said she felt shattered by the revelations. Now the director of TODEC Legal Center, an immigrant and farmworker nonprofit in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley, Gallegos praised the courage of Huerta and the other victims who carried their pain before choosing to speak up.

“We stand with our compañera Dolores Huerta and the survivors. What has been revealed is very painful and deeply disturbing,” said Gallegos, her voice cracking. “We know firsthand that silence has never protected our farmworker communities, and no movement or justice can ask people to stay silent about abuse — not then and not now.”

She, like others who spoke with KQED hours after hearing the news, said they want this moment of reckoning to help prevent similar abuses in the future. They hope the allegations against Chávez don’t undercut gains by the farmworker movement as a whole, built by many laborers and their families over decades.

“Right now, we are holding grief. I am holding so much pain in my chest, in my mind, in my heart,” Gallegos said. “At the same time, it’s a reflection that we cannot stay silent, we cannot let our movement end … reassuring our community that their voice matters and that no one should endure any type of abuse.”

A farmworker picks grapes at a field in Fresno on Sept. 3, 2025.

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García, who started accompanying her parents to work in agriculture at the age of 10, said sexual harassment by farm labor contractors and supervisors was rampant. She was fired from jobs, she said, as retaliation for not agreeing to men’s advances. But joining the UFW helped improve her job conditions and feel supported to complain if there were problems, she said.

García said that if union insiders or others knew of the allegations against Chávez but failed to investigate or willingly ignored the underage victims, there should be consequences.

“If those people are still around — if they are still alive — then they must be held accountable,” she said.

Outside a courtroom in Fresno, where the UFW is fighting a Trump administration plan to make it cheaper to hire temporary farm labor, union president Teresa Romero asked the public to respect the privacy of victims who came forward, according to CalMatters.

“We do not condone the actions of César Chávez,” Romero said. “It’s wrong.”

Three candidates for Long Beach City Council have joined forces in their bid to unseat the incumbents they’re challenging in the primary election this June.

Deb Kahookele, running for District 1; Tara Riggi, running for District 5; and Sequoia Neff, running for District 9, announced their combined ticket in a video published on social media earlier this month.

At a joint campaign event in front of around 100 people in Bixby Knolls on Wednesday, they reiterated their goal of “breaking up the 9-0 votes” they say are all too common on the mostly closely aligned Long Beach City Council, where it’s rare to see a narrowly-split vote.

All three are political newcomers, coming from careers in real estate.

They’ve claimed the grassroots lane this election, winning backing from resident groups like the Long Beach Reform Coalition that views itself as a check on City Hall power, occasionally suing — and winning — on tax issues.

Kahookele, Riggi and Neff say they feel disenfranchised from the current city government, something they emphasize in their slogan: people over politics.

They’re taking on three well-established incumbents: Mary Zendejas in the downtown area’s District 1, Joni Ricks-Oddie in North Long Beach’s District 9 and Megan Kerr in District 5 that extends east and west from Long Beach Airport. The three have already raised tens of thousands of dollars each for their reelection races and won endorsements from the mayor, other local politicians, labor and business groups.

Tara Riggi, center, and Sequoia Neff, left, talk with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on March 19, 2026. Riggi is running for the District 5 seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Riggi said she decided to run for office after moving to the Cal Heights neighborhood and becoming president of the neighborhood association.

“My allegiance is to my community,” Riggi said at the event. “We are a truly grassroots campaign.”

Kahookele, who moved around a lot at an early age because her father was in the Army, said she found Long Beach home after moving to the city in 2010 and has since risen to prominent roles in several local organizations, including the Promenade Area Residents Association, Long Beach Pride and Long Beach Rotary.

“My votes aren’t going to be bought,” she said.

Deb Kahookele speaks with voters at a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. She is running for the District 1 City Council seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Neff, a Poly High School grad and mother of six who founded a local youth basketball league and track club, owns a brokerage firm that operates in multiple states. Early this year, she held a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking in her district.

“North Long Beach has been unheard and overlooked for too long,” Neff said. “And it’s time we’re a part of the conversation, and I just want to step up and do that.”

At Wednesday’s campaign event, they repeatedly hit on the theme that current representatives aren’t doing enough to represent their constituents, and they vowed to dig into the city’s spending to remedy a looming $80 million deficit. They pledged to vote against the possibility of any new tax measures.

Sequoia Neff speaks with voters before a campaign event in Long Beach on Wednesday, March 19, 2026. Neff is a candidate for the District 9 seat.

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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North Long Beach resident James Murray said he showed up Wednesday to hear more from Neff after she attended a recent Starr King Neighborhood Association meeting, and he came away convinced.

“I think it’s time for a change,” he said.

Dan Pressburg, a longtime neighborhood organizer in the DeForest Park neighborhood, said the three candidates joining together was the right move: He wants people outside the current political structure to have a chance to rise to power.

You can see a full list of candidates who will appear on the June ballot here. The Long Beach Post will have continuing coverage, including a full voter guide to be published in the coming months.