The Brief

A teachers union endorsement has been a powerful, but not invincible, force in Los Angeles school board elections.

An endorsement from United Teachers Los Angeles typically brings money and the people-power of 35,000 members. Since January, educators dressed in the union's signature red, armed with stacks of door-hangers, have canvassed the city, knocking on doors every weekend in competitive districts.

Echo Park elementary school educators Betsy Ures and Emily Ponce joined more than a hundred fellow members at the union’s headquarters near Koreatown last month to spread the word about the union-backed candidate in Board District 5, Karla Griego.

“I actually really enjoy knocking doors, talking to regular working people and hearing about their experiences with LAUSD,” Ures said.

Candidates endorsed by UTLA have a significant edge — since 2015, 63% have won their school board races.

And when an endorsed candidate missteps, it also draws scrutiny to the union. That was the case last week when UTLA’s choice for Board District 1, Kahllid Al-Alim, was revealed to have made antisemitic remarks online.

The power behind an endorsement

Ures and Ponce started teaching at the school around the same time, went on strike together in 2019, and navigated remote learning during the early years of the pandemic.

“I don't think people realize how much you know children are dealing with,” Ponce said.

For example, more Los Angeles families are being evicted than before the pandemic. A higher rate of students are reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. An estimated 32,000 California youth experienced the death of a parent or caregiver from COVID-19.

Ures and Ponce’s pitch for Griego as the “teacher’s choice” included her almost 20 years as a special education teacher — she would be the first such educator on the board — and that she’s the parent of a teenage student.

“She's a really great advocate for teachers and for students,” Ponce said at one door.

This year, the union endorsed candidates in three of LAUSD’s four open races.

• In Board District 1: Community organizer and parent Kahllid Al-Alim. 
• In Board District 3: Incumbent former principal and teacher Scott Schmerelson. 
• In Board District 5: Special education teacher Karla Griego
• In Board District 7: No endorsement. Incumbent Tanya Ortiz Franklin is running against Long Beach educator Lydia Gutiérrez.

Griego is one of four candidates in District 5. The others are Bell mayor and school board staffer Fidencio Joel Gallardo, parent and retired teacher Victorio R. Gutierrez and educator and Huntington Park city councilmember Graciela Ortiz.

Ortiz has been removed from her LAUSD job pending the outcome of a confidential investigation related to a civil lawsuit.

Pamphlets of Karla Griego are left on residents' doors by UTLA members. Photo by Zaydee Sanchez for Laist.

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West area board directors of UTLA, Marie Germaine and Stacy Yakimowich Chavez, go door to door in the West Adams Historic neighborhood canvassing for Karla Griego. Photo by Zaydee Sanchez for Laist.

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UTLA’s endorsement process takes weeks, if not months to complete. In the fall, an expanded endorsement team of members reviewed research compiled by a political consultant, interviewed candidates and submitted its recommendations to the union’s political action council, board of directors, and house of representatives who all vote on the endorsements.

UTLA chose to endorse candidates that are closely aligned with its platform, which in recent years has included workforce issues like teacher salaries and class sizes, but also housing, adding more green space to campuses, defunding school police and creating restorative justice programs.

One of the school board’s primary responsibilities is to determine how to allocate an annual operating budget of $9 billion.

“The [district] budget reflects the values of our school district and the school board members determine that budget,” Ures said. “It's not just like we need someone on the board with our values in mind. It's also, we need someone on the board, who has a movement behind them, who can help inform the candidates once they become members.”

Teacher working conditions, student learning conditions

UTLA allies regained majority control of the LAUSD board in 2022 after charter advocates tipped the scales in favor of the independently run, publicly funded schools in 2017.

LAUSD elections broke spending records in 2017; the campaigns and outside fundraisers spent $17 million in support of — and opposition to— candidates for three board seats. Though overall spending dipped in 2022, LAUSD races continue to attract millions of dollars from outside funders, an anomaly in school political races.

“The thing about philanthropists and corporate interests is that the focus of what issues they get excited about changes from election to election,” said Michael Hartney, a political scientist and Hoover fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. “Teachers unions are perennially powerful because they are largely focused on the education issue.”

Hartney evaluated California, New York and Florida school board elections between 1995 and 2020 and found union-backed candidates won 7 out of 10 seats.

Educators make the case that better working conditions for teachers create better learning conditions for students. The message seems to work most of the time.

“Voters perceived that the union-backed candidate would do a better job than the non-union-backed candidate,” Hartney said of a study that asked people to evaluate a fictitious match up between two candidates, one with and one without teachers’ endorsement.

Whether electing educators themselves — or candidates who’ve won their endorsement — makes a difference on academic outcomes is harder to determine.

One study based in California found when an educator serves on the school board, teacher salaries rise and charter school enrollment declines. Average test scores and high school graduation rates do not change.

Universally, unions seek to improve the working conditions of its members.

“That may benefit students, but there are also instances we can point to where the union is, by necessity, going to have to fight for things that are good for school employees that may not be in the best interest of all students,” Hartney said.

Hartney pointed to the first years of the pandemic when teachers unions’, including UTLA, pushed back on plans to reopen schools to in-person learning. Student attendance, reading, and math test scores have yet to rebound, though some research shows states where schools reopened earlier didn’t have significantly higher academic outcomes.

Turning out parents

Primary elections typically have a lower turnout than the general election and as of Feb. 24, 7% of California voters had returned their ballots.

Hartney said when turnout is low, teachers, their families, and others in their network can sway the election outcome.

“Parents have an incentive to vote and participate in school board elections, but their interest really declines after their kids graduate from the local schools and move on,” Hartney said.

Many of the people teachers Ures and Ponce talked to in Koreatown readily admitted they had little awareness of the upcoming school board election, but there were exceptions.

“I actually moved here after my school years, but I'd like to at least stay up in the local,” said Jerin Haynes.

Haynes said he remembered getting lost in the shuffle of overcrowded classrooms growing up and wants to see Black and brown students have access to books that reflect their identities.

“Just because you don't have the kids in the room does not mean that that generation won't affect your vote, your welfare, their welfare, your kids welfare,” Haynes said. “It's all connected. It's all community. It's all network. So you have to literally try and it starts by one vote.”

Could the union lose Board District 1?

In mid-February, screenshots alleging Board District 1 Candidate Kahllid Al-Alim liked dozens of anti-semitic and sexually explicit posts from private, pre-campaign social media accounts began circulating online.

In the post that sparked the most backlash, Al-Alim wrote that an antisemitic and academically debunked book should be made “mandatory” reading for students in LAUSD schools serving high-need and Black students.

“What he is suggesting doesn't align with union values,” said Educators Caucus for Israel Chair Amy Leserman. “What he is suggesting does not align with district values and somebody who has these values should not be making decisions about students. Period.”

The caucus is made up of educators and advocates, and amplified screenshots of Al-Alim’s social media activity. Its members have called on Al-Alim to quit the race.

UTLA suspended its campaign for Al-Alim after that social media activity resurfaced last week. A final vote to rescind the union’s endorsement is scheduled for Monday, March 4, one day before the primary election. It’s unclear whether the controversy will doom Al-Alim’s campaign and overshadow the union’s other endorsements.

Al-Alim initially apologized in a brief three-paragraph statement on his campaign website Feb. 20 and expanded his response in a video published online Sunday.

“I am sorry for amplifying these dangerous ideas,” Al-Alim said. “I understand that doing so has harmed people and undermined the vital collective work we are doing to advance justice for all people, expand educational funding in LAUSD, and protect public schools.”

Al-Alim agreed to be available to talk with parents, educators, and community members, and to participate in training about countering antisemitism.

United Teachers Los Angeles decorate the walls with UTLA posteres. Photo by Zaydee Sanchez for Laist.

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Assembly Democratic Caucus Chair Rick Chavez Zbur, LAUSD Board President Jackie Goldberg and Board Member Rocío Rivas are among those who have called for the longtime community organizer to withdraw from the race. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor announced on Feb. 23 that it would no longer campaign for Al-Alim and that its members will discuss whether to withdraw the endorsement completely.

“As a Jewish educator, I was really hurt to see some of the antisemitic content on his Twitter posts,” said Echo Park first grade teacher Hannah Day. “Antisemitism has no place in our movement for the schools that L.A. students deserve or any movement for social, racial, or economic justice. Nor does any other form of racism or discrimination.”

Day is a member of UTLA’s expanded endorsement team and said she supported suspending the campaign while union members decide how to move forward, but that she still supports Al-Alim’s candidacy.

“The only way we're ever going to fight off privatization, build the schools our students deserve, is if we…address these harmful ideologies within our movement and outside in the world, and work together in solidarity with one another,” Day said.

Before the news about the posts broke, teachers unions, including UTLA, had already spent $650,000 supporting Al-Alim’s candidacy.

Charter school advocates and other outside donors spent $377,000 to support Didi Watts, a longtime educator and chief of staff for current LAUSD Board Member Tanya Ortiz Franklin.

We won’t know definitively how the late development shaped last-minute fundraising or opposition ads until after the primary.

At least one candidate referenced the controversy in an emailed campaign update. “I stand against discrimination in any form that would deny any of our students access to a high quality education,” wrote Sherlett Hendy Newbill, who’s been endorsed by four sitting board members. “That's why we have to keep Kahllid Al-Alim off the school board and away from our children.”

One outstanding question is whether— or how— UTLA was unaware of Al-Alim’s social media activity.

Day said a review of the candidates’ social media was not included in the research provided to the union’s expanded endorsement team.

“I think this was an oversight and I think we're learning from this experience,” Day said.

A room on the second floor of a Camarillo building is quickly filling with smoke. From the far end of the room, flames start to shoot across the ceiling.

While the flames and smoke are real, the danger is not.

This is the Ventura County Fire Department’s new Live Fire Training Complex. A firefighter is controlling the flames and smoke with what looks like a TV remote control.

The $32 million project includes live fire training buildings, a dedicated ladder training prop, and other facilities designed to give firefighters hands-on experience.

"This complex has a 'Class A' combustible burn building, which we are standing in now," said Ventura County Fire Department Training Chief Casey Rosdaile. "The 'Class B' building is propane-fed. This building allows us to train in real fire conditions and real fire behavior. That building (the 'Class B' building) allows us to do a lot more of the operational steps. There's always a gap between the simulated thing and a real thing, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible. That way, when someone trains, they aren't going to be the real thing and say that it's nothing like they practiced."

The buildings are made of concrete, so they won't be affected by the flames and smoke. The smoke kind that's used on movie shoots, so it doesn't leave clothing with the smoky smell like you get from a brush fire.

He added that the new facilities can help train firefighters, as well as other first responders, on ways to deal with a number of emergencies.

"These buildings can host anything from sheriff's operations to (simulated) structure fires, to search and rescue," said Rosdaile. "There are a million things you can do in here. You can train 50 to 60 firefighters at a time, so it really gives us a lot of flexibility."

The two new buildings are just part of the fire department’s fire training complex. It covers 22 acres of land on the southeast side of Camarillo Airport. There are nearly 18,000 square feet of indoor training space, with 32 training rooms.

The dedicated live fire training buildings give firefighters experience with scenarios that were often difficult and time-consuming to create.

"We would light the materials, and let the fire conditions and environment build, to create a realistic training environment, and then send the folks in to extinguish it," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "Then, we would have to clean it all out, and reset it, and start again. We would get a couple of burns a day done. Now, we're getting multiple burns an hour."

Gardner said it's a complex they've sought to create for years.

"This facility allows us to close the gap between training and reality. This allows us to expose our firefighters to as realistic an environment as we can repetitively, and under safe conditions."

Among the props at the facility is a vehicle chassis equipped with gas lines, which can be ignited, so firefighters can practice fighting those types of fires.

"This is our vehicle prop, and it lets us simulate fire. We can push the fire to different parts of the vehicle, so we can set it in the interior, in the cab, the wheel well, as well as the engine compartment," said Ventura County Fire Department Quartermaster Jake Finley. "It creates a good learning environment, with teachable moments. You can see in the background some of the old vehicles (we used to burn salvaged vehicles), and it was a really intensive process. We couldn't repeat it as quickly."

While the Ventura County Fire Department owns and operates the facility, the goal is for it to be used to train first responders from throughout the region. It’s already hosted firefighters from a number of other agencies in the county, as well as teams from neighboring counties.

When the war with Iran started, one of the top economic concerns globally was the slowdown of oil shipments. But there was another critical export that got stuck in the region when hostilities began: fertilizer.

Before the war, around one-third of the world's fertilizer transported by sea passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to UN Trade and Development. The waterway has become a shipping chokepoint in recent months.

With the strait closed, fertilizer shipments from the Persian Gulf slumped and prices rose, affecting countries all around the world that import fertilizer. The war also created a global shortage of natural gas, a key component in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

It caused a massive headache for U.S. farmers who were hit with higher fertilizer prices and limited availability just as they were deciding what to plant for the upcoming growing season.

But the costs borne by farmers don't necessarily get passed on to consumers, and food system experts say they're unlikely to have a major impact on the retail prices of fruit and vegetables.

"Consumers are going to see higher food prices come September to January, once harvests start coming in, and the few months thereafter," said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Very little of that is going to be directly attributable to fertilizer."

That's because food inflation is generally driven by larger factors affecting multiple parts of the food supply chain, such as fewer workers and high fuel costs.

US farmers are rethinking their plans

About one-third of the fertilizer used by U.S. farmers is imported, according to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade group. TFI Vice President of Public Affairs Christopher Glen said little of that comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

"But we get impacted in a big way because the fertilizer market is global," Glen said over email. "Even if those tons from the Mideast aren't coming to the US, they are still tons that have been removed from the market and need to be made up elsewhere. That's where the pressure comes from."

An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released in April reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn't afford all the fertilizer they needed this season.

Some farmers are more vulnerable to price swings than others. Producers of corn and wheat, which rely heavily on fertilizer, can spend around a third of their operating costs on fertilizer alone. Half of the farmers who responded to a survey released by the National Corn Growers Association in early April said they wouldn't apply the full amount of fertilizer to their corn crop this year, due largely to higher costs and limited availability.

Because farmers often secure their fertilizer stores well before a growing season begins, some weren't seriously affected by the price swings created by the war in Iran. (Iran said it closed the Strait of Hormuz shortly after it was attacked by the U.S. and Israel at the end of February. U.S. corn growing season typically begins in April.) But they are worried about the future: corn growers who responded to the survey were twice as concerned about the 2027 corn crop as they were about this year's.

This season, some farmers may opt to plant crops that require less nitrogen fertilizer than corn, such as soy beans, in response to rising costs.

According to USDA data, farmers are expected to plant 95.3 million acres of corn this year, down from 98.8 million acres last year. But the total acreage of soybeans is predicted to rise to 85.4 million acres this year from 81.2 million acres last year.

US grocery prices probably won't take a huge hit

If higher fertilizer costs lead to smaller harvests, that could contribute to modest retail price hikes. A TD Economics analysis estimated that a 2-5% production shortfall in North America could grow food inflation by around 0.1-0.5 percentage points in 2027.

Sponsor MessageBut experts say the costs of the fertilizer shortage will be largely shouldered by farmers.

The amount a farmer spends on fertilizer is a small fraction of the total cost to grow food and get it to grocery store shelves. Just 12 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend on food goes to farms, while the rest is received by transportation companies, processors, wholesalers and grocery stores, according to the USDA. And the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service reported that U.S. farms spent around 7% of their budgets on fertilizer, lime and soil conditioners in 2024 (though farmers growing crops more reliant on fertilizer such as corn would spend more).

Additionally, farmers don't have much bargaining power to negotiate with wholesalers for higher crop prices when their operating costs rise, according to Rob Vos, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. "Those buyers will go to other farmers to try and get it cheaper," he said.

But there are factors other than the fertilizer crunch that are more likely to cause food prices to jump. Barrett said the global food industry is facing a "really unpleasant layer cake" of pressures, from tariffs and extreme weather to higher prices on labor, fuel and fertilizer.

"No one of those by itself is especially painful," he said. "But when you add them all up, they become quite painful together."

In parts of Africa and Asia, the effects of the fertilizer shortage could be far worse. Jorge Moreira da Silva, Executive Director of the UN Office for Project Services, said in April that the reduction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz may prove "very significant and severe" for poorer countries. Less-developed countries that rely heavily on fertilizer from the Persian Gulf include Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Somalia.

The fertilizer industry is recovering — and may adapt in the process

Some fertilizer prices have begun to fall again in recent weeks, after the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz last month.

The Trump administration has also taken steps to lower fertilizer costs for American farmers. This week, Trump temporarily suspended "countervailing duties" on certain phosphate imports, which are added to some imported goods to cancel out subsidies provided by foreign governments.

Still, it will be a while before the fertilizer sector returns to normal. Vos estimated that it could take weeks or months for fertilizer manufacturing plants to come back online and return to previous production levels. If high prices stick around, that could snarl the plans of U.S. farmers preparing to plant cool-season crops this autumn, he added.

Barrett said the trouble with the fertilizer industry has also gotten farmers thinking about how they can protect themselves from these kinds of supply-chain disruptions in the future and looking for other ways to replenish their soil, such as manure, compost and cover crops.

"Just like we're seeing more people interested in electric vehicles because the price of gasoline and diesel has gone up, you see more farmers interested in other ways of replenishing soil nutrients as the price of fertilizer has gone up," he said.

A consequential act of defiance secured tea's place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America's colonial era.

The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.

But tea wasn't the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America's fight for independence.

Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.

As the United States celebrates 250 years, here's what to know about America's early history of coffee.

Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed

Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.

The Boston Tea Party probably wasn't the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.

Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.

The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government's passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.

To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It's why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father's now-famous letter.

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

Historians say it's hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.

And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.

"There is a vast amount of smuggling," says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. "So they're not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They're probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean."

And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren't always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. "I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company," she posits someone of the era saying. "But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee."

Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas 

In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.

"Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.

A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.

In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities," Pendergrast says: "because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything." The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.

Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.

"There's a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it's because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather," historian McDonald says. "That's where they heard about the economics of the day."

Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers' horses. They were also more likely to have food.

Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.

But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could "riotously drink together" in taverns, coffeehouses often didn't allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.

"The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal," she says. "Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled."

Still, she says, the lines between the two "weren't completely clear."

The cost of America's revolutionary drink 

Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.

Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.

Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. "Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities," says Chaplin.

As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. "They're both becoming affordable luxuries," Chaplin says.

Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.

"These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff," says Chaplin. "The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world."

There's a dark side to coffee's history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.

The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that "all men are created equal," but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.

Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America's fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.

"Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought," Pendergrast says. "But it was also grown by slaves."

Wearing gloves and a KN95 mask, Emmanuel Carrera Ruedas hunkered down near a storm drain, just steps away from the smoldering Lineage warehouse fire, as he filmed himself pointing to what he described as insulation and foam flowing into the drain.

“The thing about this water is that it all gets dumped straight into the L.A. River,” Carrera Ruedas, of Cudahy, told his Instagram followers in a June 22 reel.

In the past two weeks, Carrera Ruedas has spent evenings gathering water samples outside Lineage and from the L.A. River as he and other community scientists are partnering with experts from UCLA and Columbia University to learn what’s in the runoff. Samples will soon be sent to a lab in New York.

“For far too long, the river has just been a drainage, a dumping site for companies,” said Carrera Ruedas, 27, who often encounters toads, birds and fish inhabiting its ecosystem.

“There is life in there,” he told Boyle Heights Beat. “We’re all in proximity to the river, and that’s kind of the vein that runs through the city that really connects us all.”

Community-led testing

Since the Lineage fire ignited June 17 in Boyle Heights, residents, environmental advocates and researchers have taken it upon themselves to find out what’s in the air and water. They’ve launched their own sampling efforts, seeking answers about what people have been breathing and contaminants that may have entered the L.A. River.

The community-led testing comes as residents have reported eye irritation, nausea and headaches while questioning whether the government has done enough to capture the fire’s environmental and public health impacts.

Those concerns are especially alarming in Boyle Heights, East L.A. and neighboring Southeast L.A. communities, where neighbors have long faced disproportionate pollution burdens.

Crews navigate around piles of debris and puddles of water on the eastern edge of the Lineage warehouse as they begin cleanup efforts on June 25, 2026.

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An estimated 31,700 workers, about 81% of whom are Latino, live in the county and city zones where a smoke advisory was issued, according to new data from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute. They work in health care, manufacturing and food service industries. About half of the workers earn $3,333 or less a month, below L.A. County’s “very low income” threshold.

The area also experiences diesel pollution levels three times the county average, as well as higher rates of asthma and cardiovascular disease-related emergency department visits, according to UCLA. Nearly 10,000 households in the area lack air conditioning.

“This is not only an air quality emergency but also a worker and environmental justice issue,” UCLA said.

Behind the push for environmental justice

For years, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has shed light on how Latinos on the Eastside often bear the brunt of the region’s pollution and climate disasters, such as the East L.A. oil spill in late May that dumped nearly 25,000 gallons of crude oil onto streets and into the L.A. River. For the organization, “We are just trying to breathe” is a common phrase.

“Something I’ve told many people over a long period of time is, ‘We’re not polar bears. We’re not whales.’ Nobody is coming to save us. We have to step up and defend ourselves,” said mark! Lopez with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Antonia Castillo, 73, helps her grandson Aiden Velez put on a mask near their Boyle Heights home.

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East Yard members opted to take air samples themselves, dissatisfied with the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s assessment of the fire’s air-quality impacts. They placed sorbent tubes, which Lopez described as passive air monitors, outside nearby homes for about seven days. Soon, they’ll send the findings to a Columbia University lab with the help of UC Irvine.

What officials have done so far

South Coast AQMD said it conducted “mobile monitoring” during the first two days of the fire that found “significantly elevated concentrations” of particulate matter. The agency then deployed particulate matter monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School that provide “near-real time exposure information.” AQMD noted that the L.A. Fire Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted their own monitoring, while third-party contractor Onterris has continued monitoring during the cleanup phase.

AQMD also observed smoke impacts throughout the region, issuing a particle pollution advisory in English and Spanish that remained in effect through June 24.

What's next and lingering questions

Meanwhile, Lopez said more sampling is necessary, and he questioned the effectiveness of efforts by Lineage, AQMD and LAFD. He and other advocates criticized public statements from officials, including Mayor Karen Bass’ assurances that “the air is not dangerous,” even as residents were reporting feeling sick. He also took aim at LAFD Chief Jaime Moore’s statements that ammonia was not toxic to individuals unless they had respiratory issues or came in direct contact with it. East Yard also called for evacuations in the area.

“It feels like at the city and county level they don’t currently have the capacity to really handle this situation,” Lopez added. “I think it really requires state and federal intervention to make sure that the cleanup and restoration isn’t mismanaged.”

Yoshira “Yoshi” Ornelas Van Horne, an exposure scientist and assistant professor with the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said the Lineage fire is exposing how little is done to “respond to public health emergencies and disasters” in communities like Boyle Heights and East L.A., areas “that have so often been referred to as environmental injustice communities.”

Residents and community organizations like East Yard, Ornelas Van Horne said, “are always the ones having to respond.”

“They’re relying on each other. They’re relying on their networks and their organizing power to be able to do that on the ground sampling.”

Ornelas Van Horne reached out to colleagues at Columbia’s Multi-Element Trace Analysis Laboratory in New York after she learned of the sampling taking place and of community concerns about the runoff making its way down to the L.A. River.

Those samples will be analyzed for heavy metals like cadmium, lead and arsenic, she said.

The L.A. County Public Works Department, according to the Los Angeles Times, deployed three containment booms on the L.A. River and continued to monitor the water as it made its way to the ocean.

Carrera Ruedas began collecting water samples on the third day of the fire. He said he took the first sample from the L.A. River, about 100 meters from the spout where it spilled out. The second was taken from outside Lineage. He has amassed dozens of samples since then.

Cudahy sits alongside the lower L.A. River, and after the fire, Carrera Ruedas recalled a “heavy stench that affected people in our community.” The trash he saw in the river was the foam and insulation that came from Lineage, he said.

“It really pissed me off, just to see all this trash go in there and nobody doing anything about it,” said Carrera Ruedas, who also serves as the parks and environmental justice commissioner for Cudahy.

The L.A. River, Carrera Ruedas said, is “part of our ecosystem.”

“This is not just affecting me. This affects everybody else around me. This affects people who love the beach, people who just want our water systems clean,” he said.