The Brief

Lauralea Oliver has worked with dogs for most of her life. She grew up with a German Shepherd as a pet, was a dog trainer for many years, worked in animals shelters — all of which led her to dabble in scent work about 15 years ago.

"I met a lot of people — professional handlers that did narcotics, search and rescue," said Oliver, who lives in the community of Acton near Antelope Valley. "I started to feel a pull in that direction."

Oliver is also a big naturalist. So she started researching fields that combine these different interests.

What she happened upon was the then nascent field of using dogs for ecological scent detection. "A marriage made in heaven for me," Oliver said.

At that time, her sidekick was a working dog rescued from a county shelter named George. Today, Oliver owns and run k9inSCENTive in Acton with a small team of trainers and five dogs.

A nose for everything

Their projects have taken them to various parts of California and beyond, working with different plant and animal species, be it detecting a fungal pathogen in Northern California that causes Sudden Oak Death in trees (with Bolt, the cattle dog), to finding and safeguarding the drop-dead gorgeous and heavily poached San Francisco garter snakes in its namesake city (with Muon, the Belgian malinois), to conducting population surveys for the possibly extinct Morro Bay kangaroo rat (with Vector, the now-retired Belgian malinois).

"You'll find that if you talk to conservation dog people, most of the dogs are trained on something that's either state or federally protected, because that's what they need the dogs for," Oliver said.

Lauralea Oliver with Mayhem, a Belgian malinois, an ecological scent detection dogs.

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Marcella Winslow.

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Courtesy k9inSCENTive

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A majority of her projects, she said, involve finding dead bat and birds at wind or solar farms for impact surveys that are required by the federal government. That work typically falls on Mamba the Labrador retriever mix, another labrador Circe, and Muon.

"They find 80 to 90% of the things that fall from the sky. Previously we'd use a human surveyor to do visual checks and they're not nearly as good, especially with finding small targets like small birds and bats," she said.

A needle in a haystack

Lately, Oliver and her team have been conducting a population count in different areas of Arizona for a species of rare cactus called pediocactus — one of the most trafficked plants in the world.

Not only does the team have to sweep through a large area, these cacti are also tiny.

"Some of them are as small as like a nickel," Oliver said. "The biggest one we found was probably like a quarter."

For several hours in the morning, Circe would tagged team with Muon to search for the plant — with the labrador identifying general areas where the plant is present, and the malinois zeroing in on the cactus.

A discipline founded on poop

The method of using dogs in conservation efforts was documented as far back as the 1890s in New Zealand. The practice started to gain ground in the 1990s, when science figured out how to extract DNA materials from fecal matter, said Kayla Fratt with K9 Conservationists in Oregon.

"All of a sudden finding poop was really valuable, and that's where the dogs really took off," Fratt said, because the technology made more ecological research to be done through fecal-only surveys possible.

Kayla Fratt and Barley, her conservation dog with K9 Conservationists.

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Courtesy K9 Conservationists

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Barley, the ecological scent detection dog.

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Courtesy K9 Conservationists

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And since, Fratt said, "finding poop, which is, for lack of a better phrase, our better bread and butter."

In 2022, K9 Conservationists' very first project was to help train cheetah scat detection dogs in Kenya. Since then, Fratt and her team of trainers and border collie mixes have worked in places ranging from Alaska to look for wolf scat, to Santa Barbara to track the poop of pumas, black bears and other animals.

"From the conservation perspective, if you don't know what an animal is eating, you don't know what part of the ecosystem is most important to protect in order to keep them healthy," Fratt said, who is pursuing a doctorate degree at Oregon State University with a research focus on conservation dogs and hosts a podcast on the topic.

And all it took a handful of expertly trained dogs and their handlers — something unimaginable just three decades ago.

"The way that we all used to survey and get data from a lot of wildlife species was pretty invasive — it's trapping and collaring and following those individual animals," said Alice Whitelaw, a co-founder of the Montana-based nonprofit, Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C).

As such, as advances in fecal DNA took hold, Whitelaw (then a wolf biologist) and a few like-minded scientists founded WD4C in the mid-1990s to explore using dogs in conservation — one among a few organizations to emerge at the time.

Alice Whitelaw and her detection dog, Rue, in the Carrizo Plain National Monument in central California.

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Courtesy Working Dogs for Conservation

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Scat from Alice Whitelaw's recent project to locate the scat of endangered Blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and California Whiptail lizard, as well as Blainville horned lizard.

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Courtesy Working Dogs for Conservation

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"We were all dog people that just happened to be biologists and ecologists," Whitelaw said. "We reached out to a lot of narcotics officers, and they all thought we were kind of nuts, because we wanted to find poop."

From that starting point of using scat for ecological monitoring of endangered and rare animals, WD4C expanded to other areas: anti-poaching detection; finding invasive plants and species known in the conservation field as biosecurity; and environmental justice, like working with the Blackfoot tribe and the nonprofit Indigenous Vision to identify contaminants in the environment.

"The dogs aren't finding forever chemicals and toxins in the water supply or diseases in the landscape, what they're looking for is mink or otter scat that contains those contaminants," Whitelaw said. "That gives us an idea of what the indigenous population might be facing in terms of their water quality and also their ability to use land and water resources the way they have forever."

'Girls with dogs'

An OG in the field, Whitelaw has the rare vantage point of seeing how dog conservation detection has evolved over the last 30 years.

"Often we would show up to do a project and it was like, 'Oh God, it's the girls and their dogs,'" said Whitelaw. "It just wasn't taken very seriously in the beginning, and now it's taken very seriously worldwide."

As the discipline develops and expands, the conversation has turned to the potential of coming up with a set of standards to maintain the integrity and longevity of the field. But it's not easy.

"Any law enforcement certification, you know, there's very specific things that you test for. Can the dog smell cocaine? Can the dog properly track a human at this distance in these given parameters?" said Whitelaw. "Those things can be more easily tested for than can a dog find Kit fox scat, blunt nosed leopard lizard, invasive plants of four different species, the list is endless."

That's because the abilities of these working dogs are endless.

"Their capacity to not only learn multiple scents, and great numbers of multiple scents, but to remember them for years and years and years. It just still kind of blows me away," Whitelaw said.

After months of pushing back on the Trump administration’s attempt to stop youth gender-affirming care nationally, California is establishing its own safety net for vulnerable patients and families.

California approved $26 million in one-time funding aimed at protecting access to health care for transgender youth in the state’s budget package for its 2026-27 fiscal year. It also includes $30 million earmarked for providers of reproductive and transition-related care.

This was welcome news to many LGBTQ+ advocates, families with trans youth, and health care providers. Over the last year, many California families with trans youth have either seen their providers stop youth gender-affirming care or announce plans to do so.

About the funding

The one-time fund will be distributed to health care providers across the state through targeted grants. The money will give providers “meaningful resources” to continue and expand their gender-affirming care offerings, according to TransFamily Support Services, one of the organizations that lobbied for the bill.

Advocacy organizations say the fund will expand the network of trans youth health care providers and insulate the provider network from federal funding cuts.

Meanwhile, the $30 million fund for uncompensated care will help providers deal with funding gaps due to cuts to Medi-Cal and other federal programs.

Newsom’s approval followed months of back-and-forth as California looked to balance its budget after years of budget shortfalls. Newsom’s initial version of the budget did not include the gender-affirming care fund. The legislature then added it back, and it stayed in the final version.

The budget also includes other provisions aimed at helping California’s struggling health care industry, like delaying cuts to Medi-Cal. Newsom has also approved similar funds to protect reproductive health care and abortion access this year.

The response

Trans advocacy organizations celebrated the news this week.

“This historic investment will help keep care accessible, support the providers doing this lifesaving work, and remind trans young people that California will not abandon them,” Kathy Moehlig, TransFamily Support Services’ director, said in a statement.

Many advocates highlighted the importance of this fund during a critical moment for trans health care.

“We must continue to work together to ensure the well-being, health, and autonomy of all people in our state,” Bamby Salcedo, president and CEO of the L.A.- based TransLatin@ Coalition, said in a statement.

The current threats

As the Trump administration continues to restrict trans youth health care nationally, hospitals and health care providers are seeing the federal government try a new tactic to obtain records of trans youth patients: criminal subpoenas.

“It's a worrying tactic that indicates that there might be future efforts to try to criminalize trans healthcare,” said attorney Megan Noor of the Transgender Law Center.

In California, Stanford Children’s Hospital received one such subpoena, which led patient families to sue the federal government. Attorney General Rob Bonta was one of 19 attorneys general who filed an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit, which Noor said can be part of a “symbiotic relationship” between states fighting against federal policy and the people affected by drastic policy shifts coming from Washington, D.C.

Previous subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice last year were largely struck down.

Meanwhile, Rady Children’s Health, the parent company of Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, will continue offering gender-affirming care to youth under 19 at least until January while a lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta plays out.

More than a week after fire broke out in a cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles Fire Department announced it had finally stopped burning. But neighborhood residents whose homes were enveloped in smoke for days may feel the health and environmental effects of the blaze for weeks or even months.

The fire sent thick plumes of black smoke into the air from Downtown Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley. In Boyle Heights, residents — some who live just across the street from the block-long warehouse — told Capital & Main that they were struggling to breathe and access basic assistance such as home air purifiers.

In an email to Capital & Main, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said that hospital emergency room monitoring data showed an increase following the fire in certain types of visits by people who lived within 10 miles of the warehouse. Visits in which smoke inhalation or the warehouse fire were mentioned in the week after it sparked were three times higher compared with the previous two weeks. The number of visits for throat pain were nearly twice as high on June 21 compared to normal levels.

The Boyle Heights warehouse was built less than a decade ago, but residents had little understanding of what was behind its walls or what risks it could pose. That’s not unusual in this dominantly Latino community and many others like it in Southern California where working-class residents live in close proximity to rail lines, factories, auto shops, rendering plants and many other pollution hazards.

The nearly 500,000-square-foot warehouse is operated by Michigan-based Lineage Inc., the largest cold storage firm in the world and a company with a record of dozens of health and safety and environmental violations. The cause of the fire is still unknown, said LAFD spokesperson Jamie Stewart, but the company believes it started on the warehouse roof as workers from another company serviced rooftop solar panels. That company, Pearce Services, confirmed that four of its workers were on site the day the fire started.

A runoff stream from firefighting efforts flows along Union Pacific Avenue on June 22.

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Aaron Cantú

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Capital & Main

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Five days after the fire erupted, Juan Juarez and neighbor Francisco Carriel stood in their yards speaking over a cinderblock and iron fence. Their homes on La Puerta Street, with cement stucco walls painted white, were awash in relentless waves of toxic haze. Less than a block away, a brown stream of runoff and a row of twisted metal panels and charred foam piled up as firefighters used excavators to pull apart the warehouse and spray water into it.

“Está de la chingada” — Spanish for “it’s fucked up” — they both said nearly in unison as a reporter approached. Pulling his cartoon character mask under his chin, Juarez explained that several of his children and nephews were in his house, sweltering and without access to air conditioning.

A few houses down the street, resident Wendy Ramirez said she sent her two children, who both have asthma, to stay elsewhere. Since the fire began, she had experienced stomach pains and diarrhea, which she said her doctor blamed on the smoke.

“For them to say it’s not toxic, it’s such a lie, it’s such a lie,” Ramirez said, referring to a widely reported statement from the South Coast Air Quality Management District that particulate matter readings in the smoke were “generally near” normal levels.

Wendy Ramirez, a resident of the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles.

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Aaron Cantú

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Capital & Main

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The fire has highlighted the environmental and health hazards of the rapidly expanding cold storage industry, which have largely flown under the public radar. Most cold storage warehouses use anhydrous ammonia for refrigeration, which can be fatal if inhaled. The warehouses are insulated with thick layers of combustible foam that contain the potentially carcinogenic material polyisocyanurate. They also store huge quantities of highly flammable plastic-wrapped food products.

The blaze also brought immediate attention to Lineage, the world’s dominant cold storage company, with more than 500 warehouses in 18 countries in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. California — with 42 Lineage warehouses — is home to more of the company’s warehouse space than any other state or foreign country except New Zealand. In its statement on the fire, Lineage highlighted the strategic importance of its Boyle Heights facility because of its proximity to the Port of Long Beach and its access to millions of people in Southern California.

According to company documents, lawsuits and other records, Lineage — which operates as a real estate investment trust — has expanded rapidly over the last decade as demand for cold storage has increased. The company has a history of environmental and health violations. Lineage did not immediately respond to Capital & Main’s emails inquiring about its record of citations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In Boyle Heights, determining what burned, and what kinds of particle pollution fouled the air for days, will take weeks as the fire department and city and county agencies investigate, officials said.

The harm for residents could be severe, said Rima Habre, an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California. Short-term consequences for those nearest to the warehouse could be asthma and even heart attacks, but other effects will take time to surface. Much of it has to do with what’s in the smoke, which is hard to trace retroactively.

“The larger problem is when these things happen, they’re so dependent on exactly where the smoke is going,” Habre said, adding that heavy metals and industrial chemicals are likely part of the atmospheric mix.

Firefighters walk through smoke alongside the burning Lineage cold storage warehouse.

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Aaron Cantú

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Capital & Main

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Lineage said it’s assisting with firefighting efforts and has contributed $2 million to the California Community Foundation to assist affected communities. It has also launched a damage control effort with the help of a prominent L.A.-based lobbying firm.

Lineage was founded in 2008 by former investment bankers Adam Forste and Kevin Marchetti, who began their careers at Morgan Stanley, where Forste specialized in mergers and acquisitions.

Lineage, then known as Lineage Logistics, began with the purchase of a single Seattle warehouse in 2008. Since then, Lineage has acquired dozens of regional cold storage companies and added hundreds of warehouses that now store and distribute 400 billion pounds of food a year.

Forste and Marchetti took the company public in 2024 with the largest initial public offering that year, raising more than $4 billion. Currently the partners appear on the Forbes billionaires’ list, each with an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion. The company also established a nonprofit, Lineage Foundation for Good, which distributed $8 million in charitable grants in 2024, the last year for which online IRS records are available.

Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Mario Guillen told Capital & Main that both Lineage, which runs the cold storage warehouse, and the warehouse property owner collaborated to remove potentially hazardous ammonia from the building and obtain water cannons and water dropping helicopters. Chill Build LLC is listed as the owner of the warehouse property, according to public records. Lineage didn’t answer Capital & Main’s emailed questions about the amount of money it spent on the firefighting effort.

Lineage has also invested in damage control.

Two days after the fire erupted, Lineage hired a lobbying firm with deep ties to Los Angeles City Hall for “crisis communications and work related to the impact of facility fire.” M Strategic Communications was engaged to lobby various city officials including the mayor, as well as the Department of Building and Safety and the Los Angeles Fire Department, on behalf of Lineage through the rest of the year.

Smoke billows from the Lineage cold storage warehouse.

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Aaron Cantú

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Capital & Main

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Last year Lineage also hired Veritas Public Affairs to lobby city officials for a “remedy related to a rapid shutoff device alternative.” Rapid shutdown devices are safety mechanisms designed to protect firefighters from high-voltage electricity when they access roofs with solar panels during fires or other emergencies. Veritas didn’t specify which city agency it was hired to lobby. Reached by phone, Lineage’s Chris Thurston, who is listed on the lobbying disclosure form, said, “I can’t comment on that.”

The company has also maintained an active lobbying presence on the federal level. Lineage spent $60,000 in 2025 to lobby Congress on proposed tax increases for U.S. companies that would be levied by other countries’ governments.

The fire could damage the company’s reputation, but it’s unclear whether it will affect its bottom line.

In 2024, a Lineage cold storage warehouse in Benton County, Washington, burned for 60 days before it was demolished. The following year, the company reported in its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the fire produced a net gain of $107 million in 2024 and 2025 from insurance reimbursements, even after accounting for costs, including $29 million in clean-up costs.

However, earlier this year in the rural communities surrounding the Benton County warehouse, more than 100 people filed lawsuits alleging their health and the environment was damaged as result of negligent actions by Lineage and others in responding to the fire. In one of the lawsuits, residents said runoff from the firefighting effort contained contaminants that seeped into the water supply and the soil. Residents also alleged that they suffered “acute physical symptoms” including “burning eyes, throat irritation, coughing, difficulty breathing, headaches, nausea, dizziness and cognitive defects.”

Federal regulators have found Lineage in violation of dozens of health and safety and environmental regulations in recent years. For example, the company agreed to pay $172,000 to settle with the EPA over Clean Air Act violations at an Altoona, Iowa, facility where it allegedly failed to comply with requirements designed to prevent accidental releases of hazardous substances. In 2020, a contractor at a Statesville, North Carolina, facility was killed and others were injured during an ammonia release.

Armando Millan, a disabled and unhoused resident of Boyle Heights, sits across the street from the Lineage warehouse. A representative for Councilmember Ysabel Jurado reached out to Millan about assistance with evacuation, but he was reluctant to leave his belongings behind.

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Aaron Cantú

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Capital & Main

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In response to the Boyle Heights fire, both Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued emergency declarations to facilitate aid to affected Angelenos and aid in firefighting efforts. A Federal Emergency Management Administration spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency is “monitoring” the situation in Boyle Heights, adding that response to the fire “is being led by local and state authorities.” EPA spokesperson Julia Giarmoleo said the agency is “performing ongoing air monitoring and sampling.”

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, said in a statement that she plans to introduce city council motions calling for the public release of air quality and environmental testing results in English and Spanish, and a report on materials that were present at the facility, including what burned. Noting that Boyle Heights “carries significant environmental burdens,” Jurado said the neighborhood “deserves the same urgency, transparency and protection as any other community in Los Angeles.”

Supervisor Hilda Solis said in an emailed statement that Lineage “must take responsibility for the impacts on affected communities,” including “providing immediate support such as air purifiers, masks, and other essential assistance for residents.” On June 23, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved her motion to investigate the company’s role in the fire.

But so far, little help — from the company or government agencies — has reached Boyle Heights residents.

As smoke inundated his house, Juarez explained that he hasn’t even been able to obtain an air purifier from city officials. He said he tried calling the city, but has been unable to reach anyone. Leaving his home isn’t an option because he fears the house will be burglarized.

“This part of the city is very neglected,” Juarez said. “Like they think, ‘Oh, it’s Boyle Heights. It’s fine. Let them be.’”

This story has been updated to include data about emergency room visits related to the fire compiled by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Syndromic Surveillance Project.

Research assistance provided by Kani’ya Davis.

All photos by Aaron Cantú.

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Residents in a two-block area of Koreatown are being told to boil their tap water after routine testing found E. coli bacteria in a water sample, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced Wednesday. 

The boil water notice covers the area bounded by South Ardmore Avenue to the west, South Mariposa Avenue to the east, West 5th Street to the north and West 6th Street to the south.

Anyone in the affected area should use boiled tap water or bottled water for drinking and cooking until further notice, the utility announced in its advisory. The department will deliver bottled drinking water to customers within the affected area while the advisory remains in effect.

LADWP said the bacteria was detected in a routine water sample collected Tuesday at one water quality testing location in Koreatown. Based on preliminary findings, the department believes the issue is limited to that location and does not affect the rest of the city’s water system.

The utility also said the notice is not related to the recent warehouse fire in Boyle Heights and that no fire-related contaminants were found in the water samples.

Residents in a two-block area of Koreatown are being told to boil their tap water after routine testing found E. coli bacteria in a water sample, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power announced Wednesday.

What should affected residents do?

While additional testing is underway, residents are being asked to bring tap water to a rolling boil for one minute before letting it cool and using it. 

The same guidance applies to water used for brushing teeth, making ice, washing fruits and vegetables and preparing food.

The presence of E. coli can be a sign that water has been contaminated by human or animal waste, according to the utility company. That contamination can contain bacteria, viruses or other germs that may cause illnesses such as diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea or headaches. Infants, young children, older adults and people with weakened immune systems face the greatest risk of becoming seriously ill.

Anyone experiencing those symptoms should contact a healthcare provider.

LADWP said it will notify customers as soon as follow-up testing confirms the water is safe to drink and the boil water notice can be lifted. 

Residents with questions can call the LADWP Water Quality Hotline at (213) 367-3182 between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday through Friday or (800) DIAL-DWP for 24-hour assistance.