The Brief

On a recent and very foggy morning, I met the small team of Ghost Diving USA at the 22nd Street landing in San Pedro.

They’re the local chapter of a global mission to clean up ghost nets — abandoned, lost or discarded fishing nets floating through the ocean. The nets often kill marine life that gets caught up in them.

Over five days, the team of volunteer scuba divers pulled up more than 2,000 pounds of fishing net tangled up on a shipwreck just a few miles off the coast of San Pedro.

“ What it was we pulled up are the drag nets that commercial fishermen use, so there were all these weighted balls and things that are attached to it, which added so much weight to the actual net itself as well," said Angie Biggs, a volunteer whose role was to keep everything running smoothly on the ship during this particular mission.

About 1,500 pounds of net that used to be caught on the UB-88 submarine wreck.

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Courtesy Ghost Diving USA

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The wreck is a huge World War I German submarine called the UB-88. The u-boat was paraded from the East Coast to the west as part of a victory tour after the war. Its final stop was in San Pedro Bay, where it was purposely sunk in 1921.

Since then, it’s collected thousands of pounds of fishing nets that have drifted across the sandy ocean floor.

"This could keep us busy for quite some time,” Biggs said.

Ghost nets hurt marine life

Inside the cabin of the dive boat, Jim Babor, president of Ghost Diving USA, shows me a mini 3D-printed model of the submarine. Babor is a musician for the LA Philharmonic for work, but is also a scuba diving enthusiast trained in technical diving.

“It is completely unrelated to being a classical musician, but I think that's one of the reasons I love it,” Babor said of diving.

On the model, there’s a plume over the torpedo tube — what was the biggest tangle of ghost net caught on the u-boat.

“All of this above the torpedo tube is gone,” Babor said.

A 3D-printed model of the UB-88. The "plume" on the right above and below the torpedo tube is the bulk of where the ghost net has been caught.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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Jim Babor, left, of Ghost Diving USA on a recent mission to clean ghost net off the UB-88. Fellow diver Symeon Manias sits across from him.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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On this December day, three days into this round of cleanup, they will begin to cut pieces of net under the torpedo tube and attach inflatable bags to it, so it’s ready to bring up the next day. The goal is to protect marine life, while also preserving a piece of history.

“The problem with the net is, it creates this thing that we call the circle of death,” Babor said.

That’s when a small fish gets caught, then a bigger fish gets caught trying to eat that smaller fish, and so on, all the way up the food chain. So far on this wreck they’ve found entangled crabs and fish — some they’ve saved, most have been dead.

On other Southern California wrecks they’ve worked on, Babor said they’ve found harbor seals, dolphins and even cormorants, a type of seabird, caught in the net.

Divers prep before a recent dive to clear ghost net off the UB-88 wreck off the coast of San Pedro.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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“It's immense. It's daunting,” Babor said of the problem of ocean pollution. As old as fishing itself, the problem has become a massive one to address.

Experts estimate ghost fishing gear makes up at least 10% of all the trash in the ocean. And these nets are often made out of plastic materials such as nylon, so they’re a major source of microplastic pollution too.

A fish takes refuge in a part of the UB-88 wreck, which has become something of its own underwater habitat.

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Courtesy Ghost Diving USA

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Diving for ghost nets

It takes about an hour to reach where we’ll anchor above the shipwreck. When we arrive, the divers suit up. It’s 190 feet down to the wreck.

Five divers will go down in timed intervals to prep more of the net to be recovered the next day. They’re all certified technical divers and volunteers and they have a variety of backgrounds — a scuba instructor, a marine biologist, tech security, an engineer, plus Babor, the musician.

Divers David Watson, right, and Tianyi Lu, left, preparing to get in the water.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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For us on the boat, it’s time to wait. We spot a sea lion leaping out of the water a couple dozen yards away — a reminder of why the divers are doing this work.

About two hours later, all the divers are back on board. Babor lugs himself and his 130 pounds of gear on deck.

“They photographed the lingcod that was down there caught in the net,” he said, unzipping his dry suit. A lingcod is a large fish native to these waters.

The ghost net attached to the UB-88 shipwreck. The orange balloon-like bag next to the diver is an inflatable bag that helps lift the nets to the surface.

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Tianyi Lu

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Ghost Diving USA

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But with so much net gone now, the wreck itself looks pretty epic.

“The wreck is beautiful — with all the net that came up yesterday, you can really see the wreck now,” said David Watson, a local scuba diving instructor and volunteer with Ghost Diving USA.

An inflatable orange bag attached to ghost net on the UB-88 wreck on December 16, 2024.

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Courtesy Ghost Diving USA

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What’s next

It’s time to head back — the crew has to keep a tight ship and they’re behind schedule. By the time we return, the fog has burned off, the sun is out and the water is blue and shimmering.

The net the team has pulled up so far has already been dropped off with their recycling partner, Aquafil. The company will clean and grind up the nets so it can be turned into something else — bracelets, swimwear, and even power tools and the interiors of luxury cars. An artist will use some of the net from this mission to create an exhibition raising awareness about the problem of ghost nets.

Captain Jim Simmerman at the wheel of his boat, one of two that assists Ghost Diving USA with its dives.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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There’s still a lot more work to be done, Babor said. They’ve been working to clean this wreck for a year-and-a-half now and it’ll likely be a few years more. They’re working to partner with commercial fishers to expand their ghost net removal work — something that’s been in the works since the early 2000s through a program at UC Davis.

“ I feel like I'm giving something back to the environment that I love so much,” Babor said. “When you see the devastation that the nets do down there, killing fish and birds and seals and dolphins….You get the nets out, it's an immediate effect. That's the reason I do it.”

A criminal justice watchdog is calling into question whether Latinos in the L.A. County Superior Court get a fair shot at bail.

The new report from the nonprofit La Defensa, which advocates for reform in the legal system, analyzes a sample of pretrial decisions from 2025 which had been documented by community court-watching volunteers.

One of the key findings was that defendants who were perceived to be Latino had an average bail amount of $157,700 — more than 15 times higher than white defendants and nearly three times higher than Black defendants.

Studies show that inability to pay bail can affect defendants’ livelihoods and their ability to defend themselves, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“ Most families — no matter what they did, no matter what they sold — cannot actually purchase that person’s freedom to give them the fighting chance to go against the state,” Titilayọ Rasaki, La Defensa’s state policy and legal affairs director.

The L.A. County Superior Court says it’s following the law on bail requirements and that the findings are missing context because observation is limited.

How court-watching works

La Defensa’s Court Watch LA program is a community-led effort to document and hold the courts accountable. They train volunteers to go in and observe cases.

The volunteers take notes on the charges, the judge’s conduct and the person’s criminal history, if it comes up. That then gets analyzed against publicly available case information and state law. Programs like this exist in several other cities around the country.

For the latest report, La Defensa volunteers observed 140 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, chosen at random, between January to November 2025.

Judicial accountability lead Bryanna Siguenza explained how she decided where to send the volunteers.

“ I choose a department, specifically ones that are pretty busy, have high case loads, and are arraignment and pretrial,” she said.

What watchers saw

Racial disparities in pretrial settings have been researched at local, state and national levels, but La Defensa’s findings are based entirely on human observation, Siguenza said.

The volunteers are trained to listen for important details that come up in proceedings, but they may not always get the full story behind the charges, like a defendant’s criminal history.

L.A. County Superior Court spokesperson Rob Oftring said the report needs more context.

“Many of the report’s findings, for example, do not appear to account for charge severity or criminal history, both of which are legally significant factors in any release decision…” he wrote in a statement.

La Defensa did not include in its report what charges had been filed in the cases observed. However, according to the report, comparable charges still had disproportionate bail outcomes that “couldn’t be explained by charge severity alone.”

The severity of charges legally informs bail decisions. The Superior Court is required to have standard bail amounts based on the crime, which judges have discretion to adjust.

State law also requires judges to weigh issues like public safety in bail decisions, as well as the defendant’s ability to post bail. According to the volunteers’ observations, the judges considered the latter in just a quarter of cases when setting bail.

Oftring said the court has taken steps to reduce money bail’s usage as allowed by law.

“Bail at arraignment is set only after both the defense and prosecution have been heard and the judge has weighed the specific facts of the case,” his statement read.

The limits of the findings

Oftring said the court values the role organizations like Court Watch LA play in keeping the justice system accountable, but that the sample size of the researchers used in their report is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

Roughly 272,000 criminal cases took place during that time period, according to Oftring.

Representatives from La Defensa said they know the report is only a snapshot of the system, and that human observation has its limits.

That’s why in November, they requested 10 years of de-identified data to analyze whether bail outcomes differ across judges, courthouses and demographic groups. Rasaki said they haven’t received it.

“  We would say release the data … by all means, we want to partner. We want to analyze,” she said.

Oftring told LAist they are working on several projects that “provide data-informed scrutiny of how the court operates.”

Southern Californians are in for yet another scorching weekend.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for much of the region through Monday, with temperatures expected to hit their peak on Sunday.

Highs in the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and other inland areas of L.A. County are expected to range from the mid-90s to about 105 degrees. Downtown Los Angeles and much of Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties will get up to the lower 90s. Beaches will also be hot — in the lower 80s.

Moving farther east, things get really toasty. Forecasters have issued a more severe extreme heat warning for parts of the Inland Empire, where temperatures could get up to 108 degrees, and for the Coachella Valley, where they could hit 120.

Humidity will likely also continue to add to the discomfort, but will be concentrated in areas closer to the coast, where it will keep nighttime temperatures relatively warm and make it more difficult to cool down. Inland areas will feel drier.

Those who are most at-risk from the heat are people who work or spend time outside, people without access to air conditioning and those who are either over 65 or young children.

Forecasters are also warning of dangerous rip currents and swells along the coast this weekend.

If you’re headed to the beach to beat the heat, as many Southern Californians likely are, they recommend staying out of the water or, if you do go swimming, stay in front of lifeguards. It’s also a good idea to avoid jetties and tidal rocks.

Wildfire risk

This weekend will also come with a high risk of wildfires.

Forecasters warn that fire danger will be elevated through at least Monday, driven by heat, dry vegetation and low humidity levels away from the coast.

Despite some extra moisture in the air over the last several weeks, there hasn’t been enough to actually produce rain. Without precipitation, and under consistently high temperatures, plants will continue to dry out and become fuel.

“We have humidity, but it's not reaching the saturation point. Therefore, we won't have a cloud. We won't have precipitation,” said Rong Fu, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA who specializes in weather patterns and wildfires.

Fu said a system of high atmospheric pressure sitting over the Western U.S. is pushing warm, dry air across the Sierra Nevada from inland deserts and into Southern California.

That can generate what’s known as downslope wind. Those winds plus the already dry conditions align to create some especially dangerous fire weather.

One spark can easily turn into a large blaze, and humans are the most common cause of wildfires in Southern California, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

People can accidentally start wildfires in a range of ways, including throwing a lit cigarette into dry brush or dragging a chain behind a vehicle, creating sparks. One of the most common human causes is improperly extinguished camp fires.

Lightning can also start wildfires but is unlikely under current weather conditions. Southern California has seen minimal thunderstorms this summer.

The new normal?

Heatwaves in the summer and fall are obviously not new for Southern California, but they are getting worse.

Much of the heat currently blanketing the region is being driven by the high-pressure system, which traps warm air and compresses it against the ground, heating it even further. Forecasters say it’s likely to stay that way through the end of July.

But high-pressure systems like this one usually don’t stick around this long.

“For this pattern to linger almost two weeks — yeah, I would say, from a climatological point of view — that's pretty unusual,” Fu said.

One major driver of the change, Fu said, is climate change: As the climate warms, this kind of “anomalous” high pressure system will become stronger and more frequent.

And one consequence of hotter and longer heatwaves, is extended elevated periods of risky fire weather.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Los Angeles will be under a heat wave advisory until Monday evening as temperatures show no signs of letting up over the weekend.

Temperatures will linger in the high 80s and low 90s in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake.

The National Weather Service projects temperatures will peak on Sunday afternoon. Meteorologist Bryan Lewis with the National Weather Service said residents can expect more humidity than usual. 

While dense, urban centers have more concrete and see more vehicle traffic, downtown and the surrounding areas will not be the hottest locations during this heatwave in the Southland, as the Antelope Valley will be under an extreme heat advisory over the weekend.

During hot weather, the beach is an immediate go-to for folks that want to stay cool, but Lewis warns against this as the surf will be extra choppy.

The Pacific Coast will see large swells “coming up from tropical systems off the coast of Mexico,” Lewis said. “We are issuing a beach hazard statement that’ll be in effect through at least the weekend [which] may be extended.” 

While the weather is expected to cool down on Monday, forecasts show that another heatwave could develop by the end of next week.

Pools nearby

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Echo Park Pool

Eleanor Green Roberts Aquatic Center

Cooling centers

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Pico Union Branch Library

Felipe de Neve Branch Library (Westlake)

Pio Pico – Koreatown Branch Library

Councilmember Heather Hutt’s office recommends residents to rest in shade or a building with air conditioning and to stay hydrated with plenty of water.

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