Jacob Margolis
covers science, with a focus on environmental stories and disasters, as well as investigations and accountability.
Published February 17, 2024 5:00 AM
An aerial image shows homes along Scenic Drive standing on the edge of a cliff above the Pacific Ocean after a landslide following heavy rains in Dana Point, California, on February 15, 2024.
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Patrick T. Fallon
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AFP
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Topline:
Soils in places like Santa Barbara and L.A. Counties are quite saturated after last week’s storms, which brought more than a year’s worth of rain to some spots, which raises the risk of landslides with this next storm system.
Lots of slides: The last round of rain resulted in more than 240 slides across California.
Too much moisture: There’s a limit to how much water soils can carry. When they’re saturated and a huge burst of rain comes along, the pressure from the water can push individual grains apart, causing a landslide.
High risk areas: We can’t pinpoint exactly where landslides will occur, but if you’re in a steep, slide prone area, or if the last rainstorm caused noticeable erosion around your home, you should take precautions.
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.
Flooding in Seal Beach Saturday afternoon. Heavy rains began Sunday.
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Courtesy Rhea Presiado
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Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 at the 5 Freeway, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County today. Tomorrow, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today (Sunday, Sept. 6) across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 Freeway at the 5, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Advisories and closures:
An ocean water quality rain advisory has been issued for all L.A. County beaches until Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. That means to avoid ocean water contact for at least 72 hours after the rain.
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County throughout Sunday. On Monday, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published September 6, 2026 7:08 AM
Firefighters assess the remains of the Lineage warehouse that burned for a week and sent smoke into nearby communities.
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Andrew Lopez
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
Final cleanup of the burned Boyle Heights warehouse was completed Saturday, according to Lineage Logistics and air quality officials.
Why it matters: On Aug. 29, Lineage removed an estimated 88 million pounds of rotting food waste from the site. It then faced a seven-day deadline to complete the final phase of cleanup, including debris removal, power washing and disinfecting of required areas.
What the company says: Lineage said workers have spent 210,000 hours on cleaning up the 491,000 square-foot site, which burned for about a week after igniting on July 7. The cost of cleanup, the company said, is more than $100 million.
Odor issues: Air quality officials from South Coast AQMD said odor complaints have fallen to fewer than 5 per day since food waste removal — instead of several hundred per day in July.
What's next: Lineage must continue to comply with an odor abatement order from South Coast AQMD, including sealing wastewater from the cleanup in a tank.
Lineage is also required to continue air monitoring around the warehouse.
Keep up with LAist.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
The Bee Museum is inside the vintage store, Hive & Hanger, in Burbank.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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Topline:
Hive & Hanger in Burbank sells vintage clothes and antique jewelry. Inside, you'll also find a pop-up Bee Museum.
What? The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
The backstory: When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. The museum was opened almost a year ago after Diazzz became fascinated with the honeybee.
A sign on the front door says “Beekeeper owned,” and inside the Hive & Hanger store in Burbank, the layout is a mix of vintage clothes, antique jewelry and something rather unexpected: a pop-up Bee Museum.
The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. “I was not looking to change careers,” she said, but after taking a two-hour beekeeping experience course, she was hooked.
Hive & Hangar in Burbank doubles as a bee museum.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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“I don’t like dirt, and I don't like bugs. I'm a heels and lipstick, nails, kind of person,” she said. “There's just something magical about the honeybee. The more you know, the more you want to know.”
That prompted her to pursue a bee master certification at UC Davis. She collaborated with Elina Niño at the university’s Bee Lab to curate information and research to bring her pop-up Bee Museum to life almost a year ago.
A crash course in bees
The Burbank Bee Museum.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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There’s a Bee 101 explainer by the front door, which shows the differences between bees and wasps, and fun touches like pop songs containing the word “Honey,” and a list of Noteworthy Beekeepers including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Jolie and Sherlock Holmes.
One long-standing myth is that honeybees are stingers. “People always ask me how often I get stung, but I don’t wear gloves, and I don’t use smoke, and it very rarely happens. And honeybees die after they sting, as opposed to wasps, who can sting repeatedly,” she said.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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Most arresting is a floor-to-ceiling collage series of framed model fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, all of which the honeybee has a role in pollinating. Beside that is an exhibit on pesticides, one of the insect's biggest threats. Pieces of dried honeycomb are everywhere.
Diazzz has also been hosting school trips for the Boys & Girls Clubs. “I might be the only beekeeper they will ever meet,” she noted. The point is to give bees the respect they deserve. “Did you know that it takes 12 honeybees their entire lives to make one teaspoon of honey?”
Rescuing hives across Southern California
The Bee Museum serves up not just honey, but bee knowledge.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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There are no live bees in the store, but Diazzz has her own hives in Burbank.
“They are from rescues: I cut the hive out from a wall,” she explained. She takes care of hives from San Diego to Bel Air, with many in the San Fernando Valley, and a couple with a view of the Hollywood Sign. Her caretaking quests have taken her on skyscraper roofs, at apartment buildings and in parking lots.
Almost a year ago, she began her studies as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society in Connecticut, where she learned about the science and experience of honey. Her future includes going off to Bologna, Italy, the world honey hub, for the final round of studies and tests at the Albo Nazionale degli Esperti in Analisi Sensoriale del Miele or the National Register of Experts in Sensory Analysis of Honey.
Carrie Diazzz, owner of the store and the museum, sells small jars of honey sourced locally and from her own hives.
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James Bartlett
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LAist
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“Nectar and honey are not the same thing,” she explained. “Nectar is the liquid sticky substance that bees collect from flowering plants and take back to the hive. They transform it into honey by dehydrating the moisture out of the nectar, and capping it over with wax.”
Diazzz recently held her first informal tasting experience at The Bee Museum, and has small batches of various local honeys for sale: cactus, sage, and honey from her own hives. “I usually leave the honey alone, and only take any extra they have made to sell,” she said, because bees use the honey as sustenance. Her favorite? “A toss-up between dandelion and sunflower. Orange blossom is delicious too, but very sweet.”
NPR's Linda Holmes is a daily puzzle devotee. She recommends games that will test your knowledge of geography, history, and even the most obscure corners of Wikipedia.
Keep reading and dive right into her list of recommendations.
Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.
But maybe you're looking for something else.
So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days — ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee.)
There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax, the word game Smush, the vexing Anthropeum, the movie games Framed and Cinematrix. Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.
Any idea where Regina is? Do your best in MapTap's daily geography game.
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Screenshot by NPR
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MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.
This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.
Look carefully: What's your best guess for where and when this photo was taken? TimeGuessr makes you a detective.
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Screenshot by NPR
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In the same family as MapTap is TimeGuessr, where each day's challenge is made up of five puzzles that each start with a photo. Your task is to choose, on a timeline, what year the photo was taken, and to choose, on a map of the world, where it was taken. Sometimes, the photos are of historically meaningful events, like the aftermath of a battle or a natural disaster. Sometimes, they are photographs of ordinary people going about their lives.
The trick with TimeGuessr is detective work. Some hints are straightforward: a sign in the window of a store that might tip off the location (if you can figure out what language it's written in), a license plate, something along those lines. But sometimes, the clues are more subtle. What are the people in the photo wearing? What do the cars look like? How is everybody wearing their hair? It's a fascinating exercise in putting together clues, and again, you can actually increase your knowledge of the world while you play.
Everything is connected (somehow) in The Loop, which is a perfect first-thing-when-you-wake-up game.
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Screenshot by NPR
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The Loop is my favorite early-morning game, perfect for when I'm only partially awake. It offers you 12 simple illustrations that you have to arrange in a circle so that each illustration connects in some way to the ones on either side of it.
So, for instance, in one round I played, a square-root symbol connected on one side to a carpenter's square (because square/square), which then connected to a picture of a toolbox (because a carpenter's square is a tool). On the other side, the square-root symbol connected to a carrot (because it's a root vegetable), and then the carrot to an icicle (because they're the same shape). It can be fun to crack all the different ways that the images connect to each other, but the game design also offers so many chances to get it right that there's a huge amount of grace for making mistakes. That, of course, is why it's perfect for being half-awake.
It's up to you to figure out who's innocent and who's guilty in Clues by Sam.
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Screenshot by NPR
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Clues by Sam is a logic puzzle. It presents you with a grid — four across and five down — of people, each represented by a name, an emoji and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals. (There is no set number; there could be lots of criminals or only a couple.) Your opening clue might say, "Michael is one of three criminals in row 2." Then you click on Michael and mark him as a criminal, and when you're right, that gets you another clue, and so on.
Like most of these games, this one is enjoyable largely because it's simple, but its diabolical twist is that you can't guess. If you try to label Jane innocent, for instance, and she eventually will be, but the game hasn't given you enough information yet to actually know that, then that answer is wrong and is rejected. You are only allowed to deduce from the clues you have, because it is genuinely the journey and not the destination. Note that Clues by Sam gets harder each day from Monday through Sunday, so if you're a beginner, give it a whirl early in the week to get the hang of it.
Catfishing asks you to figure out the title of a Wikipedia page from its categories — which is harder than it sounds.
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Screenshot by NPR
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Without a doubt, the hardest game I play regularly. In this game, you get a list of at least some of the categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to, and you have to try to figure out what page it is. There are ten questions; my average score is about four, and the highest I've ever gotten is eight.
For example, if you know a page is filed under "20th century musicians," and "21st century musicians," and "American folk musicians," and "people born in Minnesota," you might start to zero in on Bob Dylan. But be warned: Many of the answers are far more obscure than that, and it's very common for me to give up and reveal the answer, only to learn that I never stood a chance, because I've never heard of the person (or event, or phenomenon) at all. It doesn't matter how many ways you classify certain medieval rulers or political conflicts of 19th century Iowa; I may never get there.
This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.
