The Brief

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Cynthia remembers the sound of her 1-year-old daughter’s cries as she tried to desperately explain to a caseworker over the phone how the Lineage warehouse fire had affected her family financially. 

She had stopped working as a sidewalk vendor because of the unhealthy air, and her family was unsure how they would pay rent that month. 

“I felt like, I don’t know, I was going insane,” said Cynthia, who chose not to share her last name due to immigration concerns.

When the 32-year-old mother reached out to Lineage for assistance, she was told she didn’t qualify for relief, even though her East L.A. home was less than 1.5 miles away. The company said its relief was only intended “for those closest to the warehouse.” 

“We were close enough to receive the smoke and ash but not to receive aid,” she told Boyle Heights Beat. 

Cynthia is among many residents who say they were left out of assistance from Lineage because of where they live. Residents outside the established boundary say they breathed the same smoke, smelled the same stench and suffered through headaches, nausea and high utility bills as their neighbors who qualified for help.

Their question has been simple: If the air has no border, why did we? 

Cynthia holds her daughter while cooking next to her air purifier and air monitor.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Who qualified for Lineage assistance?

Nearly 800 homes inside a designated area were eligible for assistance from Lineage during its recovery operations, according to the company. The support included free air purifiers, masks, air conditioners, temporary housing, grocery vouchers, utility assistance and cash assistance that were often delivered door-to-door by the company. 

Earlier this month, Lineage said it had provided support to 90% of the 797 households within the designated area and spent over $3.3 million on the recovery and relief effort. Lineage CEO Greg Lehmkuhl told Boyle Heights Beat that the company had made multiple attempts to reach the remaining households.  

“Our bilingual hotline remains open,” said Lehmkuhl. “We remain committed to supporting the community.”

Lineage first presented a map outlining the area closest to the warehouse as it announced a new wave of assistance at a community town hall on July 9. 

The map was later expanded to include all 797 homes and a larger part of East L.A. after L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis pushed for more support, according to her office. 

Now, the map covers households located between Union Pacific Avenue and the 5 Freeway, Los Palos Street and Herbert Avenue, all less than one mile from the Lineage warehouse. 

The map with the outlined resources was presented by Lineage at an AQMD hearing on Aug. 6.

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Courtesy of Lineage

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Why the boundary matters

The expanded map still left out residents like Cynthia, who lives with her husband and baby just one block north of the 5 Freeway. 

But it meant residents like Joaquin Angeles, who lives near Eastman Avenue Elementary School, would qualify. 

Angeles, however, said the support has been lackluster. 

“We haven’t been given what we really need,” Angeles said.

Angeles said his family received an air purifier with no filters and a faulty air conditioner that turns off after just five minutes. He has not yet received the $200 Southern California Edison credit Lineage promised.

On Aug. 25, more than two months after the warehouse caught fire, his family was able to move into an Airbnb for nearly three weeks. While it allowed them a chance to finally breathe and not worry about what chemicals may be lingering in the air, the support came far too late, Angeles said. 

By then, his wife and son had already racked up medical bills of more than $1,300 each for emergency room visits for shortness of breath, respiratory infections and painful skin rashes. 

“We don’t have money to spare. We’re renting and living paycheck to paycheck,” Angeles said. “Aside from the illness itself, it’s a psychological blow. You feel discriminated against; you feel like they don’t care.”

Joaquin Angeles’s wife, Aurora , shows scarring from a rash on her arm after being exposed to smoke coming from the Lineage fire at her home in East Los Angeles.

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Isaac Ceja

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Who created the boundary? 

It remains unclear who initially identified the 797 homes. 

Lineage said it did not create the map. A company spokesperson said the map originated with the Boyle Heights Unified Recovery Command, a centralized body made up of city departments established to coordinate updates during the remediation process. 

The command operates under the city’s Emergency Management Department and was created at the direction of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ executive orders to speed up the Lineage cleanup and recovery. The Emergency Management Department did not respond to multiple inquiries about the map’s origin. 

Supervisor Solis’ office told The Beat it had no say in the original map but advocated for the area to be expanded. 

Navigating help hasn’t been easy

Residents outside the boundary have had to find alternative resources on their own. 

“The wind doesn’t have a boundary, why would you make a map?” Cynthia recalls asking herself as she navigated long lines at city and county resource centers.

City and county agencies initially offered temporary shelters, air purifiers and masks, and later added mobile health clinics, grocery gift cards and resource centers in Boyle Heights and East L.A. But residents also reported being turned away at distribution sites depending on whether they lived in Boyle Heights or unincorporated East L.A. 

A resident picks up air purifiers from a pop-up resource center in Boyle Heights on July 13, 2026.

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Isaac Ceja

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Boyle Heights Beat

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Many often turned to nonprofit organizations already working in the community.

In her search, Cynthia managed to secure an air purifier from InnerCity Struggle, a $500 prepaid Visa card from El Centro de Ayuda and had her July rent covered by Proyecto Pastoral. She bought a $250 air conditioner to manage the unbearable summer heat and a $300 personal air monitor to track the air quality outside her home. 

Others haven’t been so lucky. 

Maria Duran, a Boyle Heights resident who lives outside Lineage’s assistance boundary, said she called 311 to receive an air purifier but was told they had run out. She later learned Proyecto Pastoral had stopped accepting applications for rent and utility assistance because of a waitlist of more than 1,500 people. 

“We are all being harmed. I feel frustrated. I feel down,” Duran said. 

Three months after the fire, Duran is struggling to pay a utility bill that nearly tripled over the summer. She continues to deal with stubborn eye irritation that has disrupted her daily life. 

Cynthia bought an air purifier following the Lineage fire.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Nonprofits have been unable to keep up with the demand

Angela Gutierrez, a community organizing coordinator at Proyecto Pastoral, says the demand for relief reflects the scale of the disaster. 

Gutierrez lives about one mile from Lineage and said she was also frustrated that she didn’t qualify for assistance from the company. 

“To me, it was like we were abandoned because of our ZIP codes,” Gutierrez said. “But for Proyecto — for me — there is no ZIP code. To me, everyone is equal. The help is the same.”

Proyecto Pastoral received about 1,500 requests for assistance before closing its application in the wake of the fire. The organization helped cover rent and utility bills for residents living primarily within a 3-mile radius of Lineage, with emergency funds extending to families living as far as Monterey Park. Its fire relief funds were exhausted last week.

“It makes me sad and angry, because people were affected by the fire — and it wasn’t just in the immediate area,” Gutierrez said. 

Cynthia holds her daughter’s hand in her home.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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Is more help on its way?

Lineage said it remains committed to providing resources to the roughly 80 households that have not yet received assistance. 

“We’ve been working for weeks to make sure that we support everybody in this area that the county and city determined were impacted,” Lehmkuhl said. 

The company did not indicate whether it planned to expand its assistance boundary. 

District 14 Councilmember Ysabel Jurado is pushing for additional funding for the Lineage fire recovery. On Wednesday, the L.A. City Council approved a motion to explore creating a fund of up to $10 million to support the affected community. 

For residents like Cynthia, the need is urgent. She is already behind on rent and is using a credit card to pay for basic necessities.

In unincorporated East L.A., Angeles said more should be done to help the families affected. 

“It is not asking for a favor; it is simply asking for justice,” he said. 

Correction, Sep. 21, 2026 4:49 pm: This story was updated at 4:48 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2026, to clarify that Proyecto Pastoral received about 1,500 requests for fire assistance. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the organization had helped cover rent and utility bills to 1,500 people

Rhea Borja and her husband bought their little home in Altadena in 2022. After the January 2025 Eaton Fire, it still stood, in a pocket of other homes that also survived.

At first, that was a relief. As many fire survivors have found, though, remediating smoke damage has been nearly as daunting as rebuilding a home that burned.

That has been true for the Borjas too. They’ve been living in Northern California since the fire, while they work to get their home cleared of the toxic remnants of the smoke.

The Eaton Fire destroyed 9,414 structures, including homes and businesses. For the thousands of structures were left standing, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws in September setting new rules for smoke damage cleanup.

What has that looked like in practice? Three Eaton Fire survivors spoke with LAist recently about the challenges they’ve faced.

Remediation challenges

Rhea Borja stands in her driveway just a month or so before the January 2025 fire. All of the houses behind her across the street burned down, including all the trees and greenery.

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Rhea Borja

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On the blocks around Borja’s home, the frames of homes being rebuilt are taking shape. But her home has stood empty for 22 months.

“It has been an enormous test of patience,” she said.

Her home has gone through four remediations. The lead test results after the most recent remediation cleared EPA standards. Since then, Borja has had a new HVAC system installed.

Next up, re-insulating the attic.

She’s hoping to be back in Altadena early next year but recognizes there’s still a lot to do, including remediating the front and back yards. She’ll have to pay for those projects out of pocket.

“I miss Altadena. I miss Los Angeles. I miss being by the San Gabriel Mountains,” Borja said. “So I just feel kind of removed from the area, and sometimes it almost just seems like a dream.”

A hallway in Rhea Borja’s home after it was remediated for a third time in June 2026.

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Rhea Borja

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Rhea Borja removed the remediator’s tape and plastic covering over a living room window of her Altadena home in mid October.

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Courtesy of Rhea Borja

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Simon Perry and his partner have two properties in Altadena that still require remediation.

One is their home right outside of the fire zone, and the other is a rental property right in the middle of it.

At Perry’s home of 15 years, the contamination was off the charts.

“To give you an indication of how badly contaminated it is, the attic crawl space tested at 3,391 units of lead,” Perry said. “So there's 50 times the safe level of lead in the crawl space of the attic.”

Perry had intended to retire the week of the Eaton Fire. He postponed that while he dealt with the fire’s aftermath — spending hours itemizing personal items, then throwing them away.

By the end of September, he and his partner moved for the fourth time since the fire.

Before that move, their temporary home was “full of cardboard boxes and boxes full of stuff, you know, because everything is in transition and has been in transition for 20 months,” he said.

A return home

After 19 months of being displaced, Susan Mohini Kane, husband Bernard Kane and their cat returned to Altadena.

Being displaced was unsettling, but Kane said she learned a lot.

Susan Mohini Kane shared this photo with LAist from March 2026 after most of her home’s contents were removed. The walls were cut up for rewiring.

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Susan Mohini Kane

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Susan Mohini Kane and her husband Bernard Kane began moving in over the summer. A friend gifted her hand-sewn quilt to replace one they lost to smoke damage.

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Susan Mohini Kane

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“More things happened every day that I didn't expect,” Kane said. “They ended up, basically, having to tear our house down.”

The walls of the Kane home were removed and then replaced. They filled and hauled bags of fire-damaged goods out of their home.

Now that she’s back, Kane is excited to return to her work as a voice teacher, singer and songwriter.

Susan Mohini Kane and her husband Bernard Kane are happy to be back in their home after 19 months of remediation and repairs after the Eaton Fire.

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David Rodriguez/LAist

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She wants people who didn’t experience the wildfire to know what people are still going through nearly two years later.

“We're still here. We're still suffering. We're still needing so much help,” she said.

The nation’s largest physician group has backed a near complete ban on the most popular countertop material, which is linked to an aggressive lung disease disabling and killing stoneworkers in California and other states.

The American Medical Association has adopted a new policy opposing the manufacturing, importation, distribution, sale, fabrication and installation of high-silica engineered stone products across the U.S. Doctors in California hope that the declaration by the AMA, which counts more than 250,000 physicians and medical students as members, will spur greater regulation of the factory-made material and promote the use of safer alternatives.

“Workers are developing an incurable lung disease that can progress to respiratory failure and sometimes, death, often at a young age among workers,” AMA Board Member and radiation oncologist Sheila Rege said in a statement. “Silicosis is preventable, and the most effective way to prevent silicosis is to use safer countertop materials containing less than 1% crystalline silica with appropriate dust control measures.”

The move could boost a push by California regulators to phase out the use of engineered stone with more than 1% crystalline silica to make countertops and other construction surfaces. A state workplace standards board is poised to vote on a first-in-the-nation emergency regulation next month. Australia was the first country to ban engineered stone slabs in 2024.

More than 680 stoneworkers in California have contracted silicosis after inhaling toxic silica dust generated when cutting or polishing engineered stone, also known as artificial stone or quartz.

Most of them are Latino men who say they didn’t know about the hazards of handling artificial stone until they or co-workers felt shortness of breath and other worsening symptoms.

Dozens of workers have died, while 75 have undergone lung transplants since 2019, according to the California Department of Public Health. Physicians in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Texas and other states have reported cases as well, though California is the only state systematically tracking the disease in the industry.

“Having personally gone through the illness caused by artificial stone, I believe that eliminating the use of artificial stone would be a good decision,” said Lopez, a former stoneworker in the Bay Area who underwent a double lung transplant in March after years at a job cutting engineered stone into kitchen and bathroom countertops.

“Health must take precedence over commercial interests,” the father of four added. KQED is not using Lopez’s full name, as he fears losing vital medical care if arrested by immigration authorities.

Major manufacturers of high-silica artificial stone have sought to place the blame for rapidly rising silicosis cases on countertop fabrication employers who fail to follow safety precautions. Cambria, the largest U.S.-based producer of the material, has pushed for a bill in Congress that would immunize manufacturers and distributors from hundreds of lawsuits by sick workers seeking damages.

Meanwhile, the International Surface Fabricators Association, which is supported by Cambria and other manufacturers, has petitioned California regulators to require countertop fabricators to be certified to do business, instead of restricting their use of artificial stone.

ISFA CEO Laurie Weber doubted that a ban would benefit most workers, since “unlicensed, uninspected operators who cut stone unsafely today would continue to cut whatever comes next the same way.”

“ISFA respects the medical community’s concern for workers and calls for a solution that protects them now, licensing and verified compliance for every shop that cuts stone,” Weber said in a statement. “Silicosis is real, it is devastating and it is preventable. We respect the physicians and researchers who have treated these workers and sounded the alarm. Our disagreement is not with the medicine. It is with the idea that a product ban on fabrication, by itself, will protect the people doing this work.”

California, which has more protective silica regulations than federal standards, already requires fabricators to cut the material under a layer of water to reduce airborne dust, and provide workers with sophisticated masks and ventilation systems.

But the rules are expensive and difficult to implement, and Cal/OSHA inspectors have found most fabrication businesses they’ve visited had violations. In addition, mounting evidence shows that workers can get sick even at sophisticated shops complying with the current regulations. Within the next decade, between 1,000 to 1,500 stoneworkers in California could develop silicosis, leading to roughly 285 deaths, according to Cal/OSHA. The state is home to about 5,000 countertop fabrication workers, predominantly Latino immigrants.

Dr. Robert Blink, a San Francisco-based occupational medicine physician urging California to ban high-silica artificial stone, said AMA’s resolution will help increase awareness about its hazards, and increase potential regulation by federal OSHA, other states and even Congress, which is expected to tie or break a record number of physician representatives next year. The material is safe for consumers once installed.

“This is recognition by the larger house of medicine that the material cannot be safely used.” said Blink, a former president of the Western Occupational and Environmental Medical Association. “We’ve certainly been trying to raise the alarm because this is a deadly epidemic that is killing people.”

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach’s speed cameras are now online at 18 locations throughout the city, and they’re here to stay until at least 2031. They started issuing warnings on Oct. 7, and they will start giving out tickets on Dec. 7.

It’s a big change. Many people have questions about how they work. Many others hope the cameras can finally slow down a stubborn surge in fatal crashes.

If you have a burning question, email jacob@lbpost.com. He might be able to find the answer.

Frequently asked questions

Where are the speed cameras?

The cameras are watching for speeding vehicles at 18 locations throughout Long Beach, with two in each City Council district.

Half of the cameras are on streets where deadly or severe crashes have occurred most often. The other half are in school zones or in areas where street racing is a problem.

How will the cameras work?

Tickets ranging from $50 to $500 start going out on Monday, Dec. 7. The cameras capture only the rear license plates of vehicles. Based on the license plate information, a citation is then sent to the car’s owner at the address where the car is registered.

If you don’t receive a warning during the 60-day warning period, then your first violation will be a warning instead of a citation.

Here’s how the cost of each ticket breaks down.

Payment is due within 30 days, but payment plans and diversion programs are available.

You can find more info on those here.

Where will the money go?

Long Beach officials estimate that citations will generate roughly $5 million in revenue in the first year, with half of that money going to cover the costs of administering the camera program.

The rest will pay for traffic-calming measures in neighborhoods where traffic studies have found they’re needed most. Those safety measures could include things like crosswalks, no-turn-on-red signs and speed humps.

The cameras are allowed as part of a state-approved pilot program that forbids the money from being spent on anything else.

Why does Long Beach have speed cameras?

Long Beach has been fighting a rising tide of deadly crashes in recent years. Last year saw the city’s highest total – 53 – in more than a decade. This year, there have been 41 fatal crashes, which is more than double the number of homicides.

Local officials see the cameras as part of the solution and lobbied for state authorization to install them under a pilot program. That program also authorizes them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Glendale, Malibu and San Jose.

Citations are already being issued in San Francisco and Oakland.

Long Beach also got approval to install two more speed cameras on Pacific Coast Highway next year thanks to another state bill.

What other questions do you want answers to? Email jacob@lbpost.com to give us suggestions.