The Brief

The L.A. County fires have destroyed thousands of homes.

“The first week was really, crisis, like just sheer crisis and panic and a lot of huge uncertainty and fear about our home,” said Adriana Martinez.

She has a home in Altadena with her husband and two children. It was still standing Thursday as the Eaton Fire raged nearby and she entered the house to retrieve passports and other items. Homes a few doors away burned down, she said.

Now in her second week at a West Covina hotel, she’s able to think about the damage smoke and ash have caused inside her home and how her family will clean it. There was a lot of smoke:

“I use a mouth guard. Even the clothes that we were able to grab, toiletries, lotions or whatever, are they actually safe to use? Like toothpaste that I grabbed from the drawers that, you know, things that we put into our mouths or put on our face or our skin,” she said.

Many others are asking similar questions — and there are many ways to do it.

What to understand about fire smoke

Fire smoke is not created equal. Soot from natural fibers such as wood and vegetation cleans out easier than soot from plastics, such as chairs and PVC pipes.

Adriana Martinez's living room during the Eaton Fire.

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Adriana Martinez

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“Most fires are going to be a mix of plastics and natural fibers,” said Tiffany Smith, a franchise consultant for 911 Restoration, a fire and smoke damage clean-up company.

Those manmade materials, she said, tend to produce a greasier and more penetrating soot and odor than the soot produced in a forest fire.

“Most people, in general, feel like they've got a really big odor problem and [yet] they're really underestimating the cleaning challenges that are out there in front of them,” said Robert Bowles, director of service line development for Servpro, another fire damage clean up company.

What to clean, what not to clean

Much of the work to clean up smoke damage inside homes after the L.A. fires will be done by companies that specialize in this. (And insurance can help; more on that below.)

There were some differences of opinion among the companies LAist talked to as to what should be discarded, what should be kept, and what residents can clean themselves. But here's what the experts we talked to said:

• Keepsakes: Take inventory of invaluable items such as childhood teddy bears, Christening outfits, or family Bibles. If you get expert help cleaning, start with these.
• Toiletries, pantry items: Temperature matters because contents may have been affected if flames raised temperatures enough to spoil contents; other than that, Bowles said the outsides of sealed items can be cleaned. Smith recommends throwing everything out.
• Clothes: You can dry clean them, although buying new tees may be cheaper. If you wash them yourself, don't mix them with regular laundry.
• Mattresses: Bowles said mattresses can be cleaned because they are often protected from soot by linings, covers, sheets and blankets. But Smith pointed out that mattresses have dense fabrics — so if your mattress wasn’t well-covered, you might need a new one.
• Couches: The dense fabric makes it difficult to clean but it can be done.
• Pillows: Throw them out; the dense fabric makes it difficult to get smoke soot out.
• Hard, non-porous surfaces: Stone countertops, metal appliances, and sealed wood surfaces can be cleaned as usual.
• Porous surfaces: Walls and ceilings should be cleaned by professionals; here's a good explainer from Keri Blakinger of the Los Angeles Times.
• Cars: 911 Restoration says they might be able to use chlorine dioxide or ozone gas to break down the odors at a molecular level.

A key element of all of this: Time. The experts say that waiting weeks to clean an item allows the soot to set into the fabric, which makes it harder to get out.

Be safe

While Smith and Bowles speak with authority about the process of deciding what to clean, they underline that they are not health experts; decisions about the safety of going into your home and cleaning should be done with protection and with information about what you’re walking into.

“Ash that made it into your home could have asbestos. Heat from the fires could cause acid to leak from batteries,” said Rania Sabty, an occupational health and safety expert, during a webinar organized by an air quality advocacy group.

You may also be able to draw on the expertise of people who have been here before — many people around L.A. have cleaned up homes after a wildfire.

For things you do clean: Again, use protection. The Pasadena Public Health Department recommends a mask like an N95 or P100; gloves; long-sleeved shirts; long pants; shoes and socks; and goggles to avoid skin and eye contact.

What can insurance do?

Insurance that pays for cleaning and replacement of items in a home damaged by fires is called personal property coverage. Here’s a basic description.

“Smoke damage is covered by the standard homeowners policy,” said  David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University, Northridge.

It’s important, Russell said, for the person filing the claim to begin documenting everything that will need to be cleaned or replaced.

“ It's not up to [the insurance adjuster]. It's up to you to tell them what you've lost and then they validate your claim. Don't expect them to accept everything wholesale,” he said. That’s because adjusters approach claims with some skepticism.

Insurance companies balance their responsibility to put the person who’s insured back to where they were before the loss, with being economical.

“The insurance adjuster has to protect and minimize the payment of claims for the benefit of all policyholders, because losses flow through ultimately to the premiums we all pay at the same time,” Russell said.

He said state and federal regulations keep abuse at bay.

Documenting what’s been lost or damaged, along with finding receipts, is critical for the many people who find themselves now with smoke damage in their homes.

The damage to homes and property from the current L.A. fires ranks, he said, as one of the big three major property loss events in recent U.S. history, behind Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Russell expects that the magnitude of the current losses will lead to lengthy waits for policyholders.

“Impatience and urgency can be the enemy of a thorough and complete accounting of what's been lost,” he said.

His own replacement cost insurance on his $1 million Westwood home, he said, is about $3,000 a year. He has a $1,000 deductible and a California Earthquake Authority policy that costs him about $4,000 yearly.

It’s critical for people to review their own policy. Some people don’t have enough coverage to replace what may be lost.

“I didn't know that much about my policy,” said Diane Read, whose four-bedroom house was partially damaged by the Woolsey Fire in 2018. She recommends listening to recommendations and asking the companies a lot of questions about what the cleaning process will look like. In hindsight, she said, she would have done more about her keepsakes.

“I wouldn't have listened to ‘everything is ruined,’ because it wasn't, and you can take books and let them air out, anything that's really important to you,” she said.

The silver lining to the difficult process of recovery, she said, is that her home was rebuilt. And, she said, it looks gorgeous now.

Los Angeles Angels legend Garret Anderson has died. The team announced his death today on social media.

The cause and location of his death were not immediately announced.

"Garret was a cornerstone of our organization throughout his 15 seasons," owner Arte Moreno said in a statement, "and his stoic presence in the outfield and our clubhouse elevated the Angels into an era of continued success, highlighted by the 2002 World Series championship."

Anderson's story is a Southern California one in so many ways. He was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, where he was a three-sport star in baseball, basketball and football. He won All-Los Angeles City and All-League Honors as a junior and helped lead Kennedy's basketball team to an L.A. City Championship.

The Angels drafted him out of high school in 1990, and he made his Major League debut in 1994.

He spent all but two of his 17 Major League seasons with the Halos and was a key player on the 2002 team that won the franchise's first, and still only, World Series.

After the Angels decided not to renew his contract at the end of the 2008 season, Anderson signed with the Atlanta Braves in 2009 before returning to SoCal in 2010, this time as a member of the Dodgers. He spent a single season there before retiring in 2011.

He leads the Angels all-time in a slew of statistics, including games played (2,013), hits (2,368), RBIs (1,292), doubles (489) and several others. He was a three-time All-Star, the 2003 Home Run Derby winner and All-Star Game Most Valuable Player.

But Angels fans will probably remember him best for his go-ahead, three-run double in Game 7 of the 2002 World Series. It gave the Angels a 4-1 lead, which they never surrendered.

But despite all the accolades, one of the most impressive stats from Anderson's career was his reliability. He had a stretch of eight seasons where he appeared in at least 150 games and played in at least 140 games in 11 of his 17 seasons in the pros.

Shortly after he retired, he joined the Angels television broadcast team to provide pregame and postgame analysis.

The Angels will wear a special "GA" memorial patch on their uniforms for the remainder of the season. They'll also play a tribute and hold a moment of silence in his honor before tonight's game against the San Diego Padres at Angel Stadium.

This story first appeared in The LA Local.

For Koreatown resident George Chan, the appeal of public transit in Los Angeles is simple: avoiding the daily grind of driving.

“I don’t like cars, so I’m all for having more public transportation,” said Chan, who lives near Olympic Boulevard and Hobart Street and uses transit about twice a week to get to work in Culver City. “I feel like that’s one of the things L.A. really lacks, a working public transportation system. You go to any other major city and you’re able to take a train anywhere, but here you can’t.”

Even if it takes longer, he said, public transit offers something driving doesn’t.

“I don’t have to sit in traffic. I don’t have to deal with drivers at all,” he said. “I feel pretty comfortable on the train and bus, so it’s not a big deal for me.”

That’s why Chan is looking forward to the opening of the first phase of the Metro D Line extension on May 8, which Koreatown residents like him say will make it easier to reach some of Los Angeles’ most visited cultural hubs without sitting in traffic.

Where things stand

The project, more than a decade in the making, will add three new underground stations along Wilshire Boulevard at La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega, closing an important gap between Downtown Los Angeles and the Mid-Wilshire area.

From Koreatown, the new stops will put destinations like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the La Brea Tar Pits within roughly a 15- to 20-minute ride from Union Station, offering a faster alternative to driving along one of the city’s most congested corridors. 

Another view of the Wilshire/La Brea Station.

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Courtesy Metro Art

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Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority

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Metro projects the new stations will add roughly 16,200 daily riders and increase foot traffic for local businesses. The opening comes more than three years behind its original 2023 timeline and about $700 million over budget, with this part of the project now reaching around $3.51 billion. 

The project is part of Metro’s “Twenty-Eight by ’28” push to finish major transit expansions before the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics.

For Chan, that could mean easier trips west, whether that’s grabbing brunch near Miracle Mile or visiting museums that currently require multiple transfers.

How residents are feeling

Other residents said the expansion is also expected to reshape how often they use transit, particularly for trips that currently require driving. Davis Read, a Koreatown resident who is a part of the Wilshire Center Koreatown neighborhood council, says he uses Metro about once a week now, but that will likely change once he gets more access to the museums by La Brea. 

“I’m also excited to be able to go to Beverly Hills, where a lot of my medical appointments are,” Read said. “That’s something that was usually like a half-hour drive.”

But while many welcome the expansion, residents say the city still has work to do — especially when it comes to building housing people can actually afford, shortening timelines for major transit projects and improving bus infrastructure.

Sherin Varghese, a Koreatown resident and organizer with Ktown for All, said buses remain essential for many in the neighborhood.

“A lot of our neighbors, housed and unhoused, don’t have cars,” she said. “Building out infrastructure that isn’t car-forward is generally a good move.”

At the same time, she noted that buses, which often serve lower-income riders, have historically been deprioritized.

“I’m really excited about the trains,” Varghese said. “But I also want us to continue investing in bus infrastructure, like dedicated bus lanes that don’t get closed off that aren’t just for rush hour.”

Wilshire/La Brea Metro station remains closed off to the public as of April 14.

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Marina Peña

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The LA Local

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For Varghese, who relies on transit regularly, the D Line will open up parts of the city that currently feel out of reach.

“I’m going to be able to take the D straight to LACMA or to the Academy Museum to see a movie,” she said. “It opens up a huge amount of access to the west side.”

Metro's overall plan

The D Line extension is part of Metro’s broader plan to connect Downtown Los Angeles to Westwood through a nine-mile subway, with future phases expected to open in 2027. Additional stations will include Beverly Drive, Century City, Westwood/UCLA and Westwood/VA Hospital.

Another major project — the K Line Northern Extension — would further expand that network by linking South L.A. to West Hollywood. But with funding not expected until 2041 and an opening still years after that, between 2047 and 2049, many residents say the timeline highlights a broader frustration.

After last-minute negotiations between Mayor Karen Bass and local leaders, Metro’s board voted unanimously in late March to approve the route. The planned underground extension would tie into four major rail lines and is projected to carry up to 100,000 riders daily

“There’s a repeated trend in which these great public projects are having to conform around the needs of wealthy home ownership groups. I think that’s frustrating,” Read said. “I think at this point, we should be pressuring our elected leaders to act quicker on the Metro.”

He pointed to the K Line extension as one example, where opposition from a group of homeowners in Mid-City, particularly in affluent Black neighborhoods like Lafayette Square, raised concerns about construction, safety and property values, contributing to delays.

“That’s the most important stitch in the Metro system — it would be a game changer,” Read said. “A two-seat ride to LAX from Koreatown or downtown would make a huge difference. Right now, it takes about three lines and can take just as long as driving in traffic.”

The Wilshire/Fairfax station where the D line and K line would meet is expected to add 33,000 riders, according to Metro.

Residents ask: Why'd it take this long

Varghese, who has lived in Koreatown for 15 years, said her frustration is less about the current timeline and more about missed opportunities in the past.

“I wish we had started this 50 years ago,” she said. “But I’m glad it’s happening now.”

Alongside transit improvements, residents also raised concerns about what new development around stations will look like, particularly whether it will include housing that current residents can afford.

“A lot of the housing is built for upscale renters,” he said. “If they built low-income or cheaper housing, that would be great, but that’s not what’s happening.”

Read said transit and housing need to be planned together.

“If we don’t act drastically to construct new housing, we’re never going to dig ourselves out of this crisis,” he said.

Varghese echoed that concern, pointing to what she sees as a gap between policy goals and what’s actually being built.

“We need to build housing that people can actually afford now,” she said. “We need to be affecting the supply directly and not hoping that housing eventually trickles down in terms of pricing.”

The post ‘I wish we had started this 50 years ago’: Koreatown is ready for Metro’s D Line appeared first on LA Local.

Earlier this year, tickets to see SZA perform at the Crypto Arena in Los Angeles were selling for $600 the day before they officially went on sale at $35 a piece. In San Francisco, tickets to see Sam Smith at the newly renovated Castro Theater went on sale for $120, only to be quickly snatched up by scalpers and resold for upwards of $600.

Those are some of the stories that California lawmakers are citing as they advance two plans to change the ticketing landscape. One caps the extent to which resellers can mark up the original ticket price while the other prohibits resellers from selling tickets they don’t yet own.

Democratic Assemblymembers Issac Bryan of Culver City and Matt Haney of San Francisco are each carrying bills that they say would protect consumers from fraudulent and deceptive ticket sales.

Both measures are backed by the ticket market’s dominant seller, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. Its support has some worried that the bills will help the company crush its competitors and jack up prices. A federal jury in New York this week found that the company illegally acted as a monopoly in a victory for, among others, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who with colleagues in other states sued the company two years ago and kept going after federal prosecutors settled. Live Nation is now awaiting penalties.

Despite these headwinds, the ticket bills are sailing through the Legislature.

Supporters say the legislation has nothing to do with the antitrust case against Live Nation and helps consumers. Opponents disagree.

“The state Legislature should really be standing up for consumers instead of advancing bills that are there to help a monopoly that has been caught on record calling its fans stupid and has bragged about robbing them blind,” said Jose Barrera, national vice president for the far west region at the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights advocacy group.

Ticketmaster’s competitors in the online resale market are lobbying against the measures, a sign that they view the proposals as a threat to their business.

Jack Sterne, StubHub’s head of policy communications, wrote to CalMatters, stating, “Passing laws that hand the Ticketmaster monopoly more power and don’t actually make tickets more affordable is the last thing California’s leaders should do.”

But Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, which is co-sponsoring the bills, argues that they will regulate the marketplace to better protect fans by limiting price gouging and encouraging the face value — or below face value — exchange of tickets.

“Ultimately, that is what these bills will do, in addition to making sure that the tickets are actually real,” he said. “That is a good thing for California consumers. It's a good thing for artists and it's a good thing for these small businesses and nonprofits that make up the independent stages across the state.”

A Live Nation spokesperson said in a statement to CalMatters, “The resale lobby constantly tries to change the subject by pointing fingers at Ticketmaster, even though it has less than 25% of the resale market. This has nothing to do with anyone’s monopoly, but rather is about protecting fans from scalpers and the resale sites that cater to them.”

The company has spent roughly $165,000 on lobbying efforts this legislative session, including to support Bryan’s bill.

'Unlikely allies'

Bryan’s Assembly Bill 1349 would ban the sale of speculative tickets — or tickets that are not in the possession or ownership of the people who list them online. In an April hearing, Bryan said the bill protects consumers from predatory mark ups.

“This bill is so important that, after our introduction, it brought unlikely allies together,” Bryan said, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. “In fact, this bill brought the Giants and the Dodgers together, brought the National Independent Venue Association and Live Nation together. It brought Kendrick Lamar and Kid Rock together. It brought Isaac Bryan and Donald Trump together.”

Several secondary ticket sellers are fighting the measure, including StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. The three companies have spent roughly $1.1 million dollars on lobbying efforts this legislative session, which included opposition to Bryan’s bill.

People watch fireworks during Bad Bunny’s halftime show from a parking garage outside Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on Feb. 8, 2026.

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Jungho Kim

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CalMatters

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Opponents including Robert Herrell, executive director for the Consumer Federation of California, argue that the bill strengthens Live Nation Ticketmaster’s grip on the ticketing and live entertainment industry. According to them, the measure would give Live Nation complete control over the ticket even after it has been purchased — meaning, for example, that consumers could lose the ability to sell it or give it away.

“There’s no consumer choice in the matter,” said Herrell. “They can keep people out of shows if they want to. There have been situations where, if you bought a ticket on the secondary market, you’ve been denied entry into a show.”

Proponents say Herrell and other opponents are mistaken. They say they are not trying to prevent transferability but rather, they want to protect fans from speculative costs.

“We want those rooms full,” said Ron Gubitz, executive director of Music Artists Coalition, which is co-sponsoring both bills. “So you have to be able to transfer a ticket. We just want it to be in a way that’s safe, trustworthy and not creating this run on the market that exists now.”

Gubitz pointed to a recent Bruno Mars concert, where tickets were on StubHub for $400 to $2,000 before they were on sale through Ticketmaster.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “That’s a speculative ticket that Bryan’s bill is trying to stop. That shouldn’t happen. It’s not fair to anybody, except for the secondary (market). It seems great for them.”

Price caps in a free market

Haney’s Assembly Bill 1720, also known as the California Fans First Act, would put a 10% cap on resale event ticket markups, inclusive of the ticket fees. In other words, a reseller could not charge more than 10% higher than the original ticket price.

In an interview with CalMatters, Haney said artists, independent venues and downtowns are currently being “screwed over and exploited” by scalpers and brokers.

“We can’t allow the status quo to continue if we want to ensure Californians have access to affordable tickets to see their favorite artists or if we want independent venues or the broader landscape of musicians and artists to thrive in our state,” he said.

Haney rejected the idea that his bill would strengthen the Live Nation Ticketmaster monopoly, saying that the company is one of the biggest operators and profiteers of the secondary ticket market and would therefore be subject to the same restrictions as any other platform or broker.

“I don't think it's a free market to allow folks to come in and buy up all these tickets and then create scarcity and then you're now required to buy your ticket at a much higher price from someone who had nothing to do with the event,” he said. “This is not something we would ever allow for airplane tickets or even dinner reservations.”

The bill has been criticized by opponents like Diana Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at Progressive Policy Institute, who said price caps notoriously distort the market, describing them as “anti-consumer, anti-competitive and anti-artist.”

“If you shut down the resale market with price caps then guess what? Ticket buyers have no place to go but right back to Ticketmaster,” said Moss. “If (Live Nation) succeed(s) in decimating the resale market, then they steer millions and millions of fans back to their own ticketing platform where they charge monopoly ticket fees and where fans are hostage to their glitchy online platform and all of their data, privacy and security concerns that we always hear about in the news.”

Those concerns didn’t stop the bill from passing out of the Assembly Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Tourism last week with a 6-1 vote. The bill also passed out of the Assembly Committee on Privacy & Consumer Protection on Thursday with a 9-4 vote.

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

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

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Copper wire theft damaged business phone lines at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s East L.A. Station in February — two months later, service is still down.

Residents have faced longer wait times to get in touch with the department for non-emergencies. Now, all dispatchers are working from an off-site communication trailer connected via satellite, according to officials.

“We elevated this to the highest level we possibly could,” said Operations Captain Shawnee N. Hinchman at a Maravilla Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) meeting last week. “Our dispatchers aren’t even at the station right now because we had to reroute the lines to a different location, so we’re even down personnel.”

At the meeting, East L.A. resident Guadalupe Arellano said she’s struggled to contact the station to report parking enforcement issues.

“The last few times that I tried to make calls to…the Sheriff’s office, they had answering machines or are no longer answering calls,” she said.  

An officer told her that the best line of action is to contact the Sheriff’s Department directly, but noted delays are expected.

According to Sgt. Michael Mileski, several thousand dollars’ worth of copper wiring was stolen from an electrical vault during the early morning hours on Feb. 13. Fiber optic cables were damaged in the process, which affected a significant portion of the Eastern Avenue corridor in Boyle Heights and East L.A., disrupting phone lines for 100,000 residents for 5 days, Mileski said. 

Mileski was unsure why service had not been restored at the station and did not provide a timeline for repairs.

“We were told back in February that this would be ongoing. They said it would take about a month and a half to fix the problem,” Mileski said.

Copper wire theft has plagued the Eastside in recent years, leaving communities in the dark and disabling public facilities. Repairing damaged fiber lines can be difficult and time consuming for service providers. 

The office of Assemblymember Jessica Caloza has also stepped in to try to expedite the resolution. Hector Rodriguez, a field representative for Caloza’s office, told residents at the meeting that they are working with AT&T to restore service, but it has taken longer than expected.

“It’s extremely frustrating even for us as well but our office takes this extremely seriously, just like the community,” Rodriguez said. A spokesperson for AT&T wasn’t immediately available to answer questions from Boyle Heights Beat.  

As of Thursday, the business phone lines remain down and calls cannot be transferred within the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station.

Lt. William Morris told Boyle Heights Beat that four to seven dispatchers are currently working at a time from an off-site communications trailer. If a caller is unable to get through, Morris recommends trying again and said a dispatcher will eventually pick up. He added that 911 calls will go through no matter what.

LA Documenter Alex Medina contributed reporting for this story. LA Documenters trains and pays LA residents to take notes at local government meetings around Los Angeles. You can find meeting notes and audio at losangeles.documenters.org