The Brief

At 5 a.m. California time, when it is still dark outside, a member of the state's Department of Public Health gets on a weekly call.

The topic? Health emergencies all over the world.

For years, the U.S. federal government participated in these calls, which are organized by the World Health Organization. Now, as the Trump administration says it has withdrawn from WHO over its handling of COVID, among other things, California is stepping in.

It is the first state to join WHO's Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network, also known as GOARN. Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, says she's been in touch with other states hoping to follow suit. Illinois, in a press release, said it's "making preparations" to join.

"The Trump administration's withdrawal from WHO is a reckless decision that will hurt all Californians and Americans," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement. "California will not bear witness to the chaos this decision will bring."

This move by states to take things into their own hands is part of a broader trend, according to Dr. Gavin Yamey, a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University.

"I think this is a very smart and savvy play," says Yamey. "The federal government has reneged on its public health protection responsibilities, and you're seeing states taking steps so they still are part of the international response to outbreaks and emerging threats."

Not quite a member but still a participant

That doesn't mean California, for example, could become a full-fledged WHO member. Many forums and meetings hosted by WHO are limited to member states — meaning national governments. But some parts of WHO, like GOARN, are open to a broader array of groups, including nonprofit and multinational organizations, academic centers and different levels of governments. Like American states. 

GOARN is made up of over 350 such groups that work together to detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks and public health emergencies. The network was created in 2000 after leaders realized that a lack of coordination was hindering outbreak response. Since its creation, GOARN has helped organize, analyze and respond to emergencies like SARS, Ebola and mpox.

Members of GOARN participate in weekly calls, get regular outbreak updates and also get access to WHO Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources platform, which "is continuously scanning global open sources for signals of outbreaks and health events," says Pan. "We're just now getting training and onboarding."

Pan says participating in the network and platform brings better awareness of global health threats — and lets the state respond accordingly. "[It] helps us anticipate threats earlier," says Pan, noting a drop-off in federal health guidance, including the lack of a national flu vaccination campaign this flu season.

Indeed, the U.S. federal government has said it does not plan to continue participating in groups like GOARN. In a statement sent to NPR earlier this month, the U.S. State Department wrote: "The United States will not be participating in regular WHO-led or managed events."

"Charting its own course"

Instead, the U.S. is taking a different approach, pursuing health and aid agreements directly with individual countries. These agreements often include sharing disease outbreak information.

"The United States is charting its own course on global health engagement, grounded in accountability, transparency, and the expertise of America's public health institutions," said a statement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to NPR. "States do not set U.S. foreign policy."

Not everyone agrees with this stance.

Some conservative voices have urged the U.S. to continue participating in certain WHO forums, particularly those that provide information, data and assessments for emerging infectious disease outbreaks. For example, Brett Schaefer — a senior fellow at the right-leaning thinktank the American Enterprise Institute — said, even as the U.S. withdraws from WHO, the U.S. should continue to participate in initiatives like the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources platform "to make sure that you have full, robust access to the information."

This type of international platform would be "a very difficult thing for the U.S. to replicate or to try and build outside of the World Health Organization — also [it'd be] somewhat inefficient," says Schaefer.

However, he said over email that the jury is still out on California's decision to join GOARN. "It's interesting but unclear at this point," he wrote, noting that WHO has not clarified California's status. He added: "It also could just be a PR stunt by Newsom."

WHO did not respond to NPR's requests for comment on California's participation in GOARN or any other parts of WHO as well as on other states that have reached out to join.

This new model does have a potential downside — a split between states that join part of WHO and states that don't, says Yamey: "You could end up having this awful, tragic divide" where some state leaders have access to better, more up-to-date outbreak information for making public health decisions than leaders in other states, he says.

Pan says California is hoping to partner with other states that don't join GOARN. "Our intent is really to — acknowledging that we are the biggest state with the largest state health department — step up and provide some leadership."
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Lineage Logistics walked back its report that it had removed more than 100% of food waste from its burned Boyle Heights warehouse, acknowledging the figure misled residents about how much rotting food remains inside. 

The company also pushed back its timeline for when it would finish food removal until Aug. 30, about a week behind the deadlines required by a South Coast Air Quality Management District order from earlier this month. That could open the company up to fines, though AQMD didn’t immediately respond to The LA Local about what consequences Lineage would face.

Lineage last week reported through a community update that it had removed 104% of the rancid food waste from the warehouse, a figure that confused many residents because cleanup was not complete. A company spokesperson admitted that the percentage was misleading for residents who have voiced their frustration about putrid air, the health hazards of living near the facility and confusion about how long the cleanup will take.

Lineage Logistics walked back its report that it had removed more than 100% of food waste from its burned Boyle Heights warehouse, acknowledging the figure misled residents about how much rotting food remains inside.

In a community update on Sunday, Aug. 23, Lineage said that Freezer 2 has been demolished and all food waste removed, and that Freezer 1, the remaining room, is 92% clean of food waste.

“Our prior reporting percentages tied weight removed from the building relative to our estimates of total food weight at the time of the fire,” reads a statement from Lineage. “That approach produced figures greater than 100% in our reporting this week, potentially creating the misimpression that food removal waste was complete when it is not.”

It added that moving forward, the company would measure 100% cleanup when “food waste removal is fully done.”

The revised calculations for cleanup completion come after questions from residents and reporting by The LA Local and Boyle Heights Beat about how Lineage has been reporting its progress and how that progress is being verified by public officials.

The cleanup progress has been largely based on the company’s estimates.

The LA Local obtained a copy of the daily reports Lineage is required to send to AQMD, showing that the company reports to the oversight agency the number of waste bins of food they remove each day and estimates the pounds of food they contain.

The company has already missed multiple deadlines.

Lineage failed to meet the Aug. 20 deadline for bulk food cleanup established by the order it agreed to with AQMD. There is a second approaching deadline, disinfecting the remaining freezer facility after all the food is removed, which is scheduled for Aug. 27.

AQMD did not immediately respond to The LA Local’s inquiries about what consequences Lineage faces for violating that order.

Lineage also missed a 45-day cleanup deadline on Aug. 14 that Mayor Karen Bass imposed in early July. Bass said the city could pursue a civil suit against the company. 

Lineage said that it expects to spend about $100 million on cleanup, and stressed that it has been working diligently to remove the food and damaged materials from the remaining freezer room.

“We are not pausing, slowing, or reducing our work in any way. If anything, this final stretch demands more focused effort, not less urgency, and we are treating it that way,” the press release reads.

Southern California firefighters and emergency preparedness groups are praising new statewide rules for homes in fire-prone areas.

They’re also raising concerns about the burden they say will fall on homeowners.

The California Board of Forestry and Fire Prevention voted last week to adopt the rules after years of debate, delays and missed deadlines. They are the strictest rules in the country for home fire mitigation.

They will apply to almost 2 million homes across California in areas that CalFire designates as having some of the highest fire risk, defined as State Responsibility Areas and Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.

That applies to large swaths of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Zone Zero details

The rules regulate what can be within 5 feet of a home, an area known as Zone Zero. They prohibit any plants within at least the first foot from the home — or farther, depending on the size of a structure’s eaves. Then, within the first 5 feet, no combustible material is allowed, including dead leaves and branches, mulch, woodchips and firewood.

Other new rules ban wooden fences that are attached to houses and wooden sheds within Zone Zero. Local fire authorities will be responsible for enforcement and have some flexibility to tailor the rules to specific communities.

Once the rules are formally adopted next month, Californians with existing homes will have five years to comply. New construction projects will have to comply immediately.

A public comment period on the new rules is open until Sept. 2.

Tough, but necessary

Fire safety groups acknowledge the necessity of rules and the burdens they will likely place on property owners.

“We're a supporter of actions that help move the needle forward toward resiliency. That's what this does,” said Brent Woodworth, chief executive of the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation, a leading advocacy group for disaster preparedness.

The organization also independently assesses homes for wildfire risk and resiliency at homeowners’ request, primarily in communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountains.

Woodworth sees the new rules as a reasonable approach to better protect homes and communities from disastrous blazes, especially after the devastation wrought by the Palisades and Eaton fires.

He hopes it will help create a culture in Southern California that embraces fire mitigation.

But he knows the new rules likely won’t be welcomed by everyone.

“ It's going to take a lot to convince people to do this,” Woodworth said. “But this is a pretty decent start to try to get this culture shift going.”

CalFire started the rule-making process in 2020, and some homeowners have been pushing back ever since. Some feel it’s an overreach of their property rights or may just not want to see their gardens changed. Others are worried about the financial burden of removing vegetation, trees or wooden fences.

“There was such shock in the community from folks about how much work and what it's going to cost them to do. This is a huge burden on many people,” said James Grasso, president of the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness, a volunteer group serving Topanga, Malibu and surrounding areas.

Grasso said that’s particularly true in Topanga, where many homes are built in and around countless oak trees. He called for more incentives, grants or other financial assistance to help people cover mitigation work.

Overall, though, Grasso thinks the approved rules are a good compromise. The state originally proposed banning all vegetation within Zone Zero. He pointed to the gradual implementation timeline and the decision to allow some plants within 5 feet of homes.

He also hopes localized enforcement will allow for some flexibility that will accommodate Southern California communities' varied needs.

For firefighters, mitigation makes a difference

Local fire departments in charge of enforcing the new rules, and responsible for putting out fires once they start, emphasized the need for the changes.

Juan Huerta, a fire marshal with the Orange County Fire Authority, said less combustible material in Zone Zero helps keep blazes more contained and easier for firefighters to manage by making it harder for houses to catch fire.

A recent study from UC Berkeley found the more defensible space around a structure, the higher chance it has of surviving a fire.

 ”When you're talking about these embers that potentially ignite homes that much farther away, we don't necessarily always have the same resources in those areas,” Huerta said.  ”The goal is to help eliminate another variable.”

He urged homeowners to consider implementing other mitigation tools, too, including fire-resistant cladding for homes or mesh that prevents embers from entering vents.

He is sympathetic to peoples’ concerns over the changes, especially the costs, and wants to help the public to understand why the measures are necessary.

“ We will be working with the residents, providing as much education and outreach as we can to help everyone really understand what the requirements are, but also why it's important,” he said.

Huerta’s team is already inspecting properties in at-risk areas of Orange County.

If a home is non-compliant, they will issue a violation notice and follow up until the problem is resolved.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Wildfires once ran on deadlines.

After a series of catastrophic blazes in the early 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service sought to show it was able to control and protect forests under its care. In 1933, the agency mandated the “10 a.m. rule,” declaring that any wildland fire should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported.

Snuffing all fires quickly, the agency reasoned, would prevent disasters like the Big Burn of 1910. That incident scorched more than 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border during a 36-hour rampage, killing at least 85 people and destroying five towns.

Unlike earthquakes or tornadoes, wildfires have weaknesses. We can suppress flames with water or retardant chemicals. Wildland fire crews remove fuels with hand tools and bulldozers. Sometimes they use tactical burnouts — literally fighting fire with fire.

These tools can obscure crucial facts about wildfire and reinforce strategies that can backfire.

Tales of heroism following the Big Burn established the Forest Service as a necessary government service. As New York Times reporter Tim Egan put it, “To this day, I think that agency owes its existence to this fire.”

But Egan also described the consequences of that successful effort to control wildfire: “Actively trying to put out every fire left a lot of standing dead timber. So some of the big fires we had in the latter 20th century, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and some of the Idaho fires of the late 1990s, and fires still to come, are the result of having timber that probably should have burned every now and then during the seasonal fires.”

Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin described the phenomenon as the “Wildfire Paradox” in a 2013 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Using wildfire suppression to eliminate large and damaging wildfires ensures the inevitable occurrence of these fires,” Calkin wrote. “Wildfire suppression, effective 95% to 98% of the time, inevitably leads to ecologically significant wildfires with higher intensities and rapid growth that are unable to be suppressed.”

Fire researchers began to notice the paradox in the 1960s, and began implementing “let burn” strategies in remote forests to reduce those fuel loads. The Forest Service modified the “10 a.m. rule” in 1971 to allow some fires to burn, and officially abandoned the policy in 1978.

Over the following decades, wildfire managers adapted to a changing climate, shifting public opinion and funding challenges.

A mid-century moist period began drying out toward the tail of the 20^th century. The 1988 fires in and around Yellowstone National Park burned 1.4 million acres in one of America’s best-known landscapes. Colorado’s South Canyon fire in 1994 killed 14 wildland firefighters and prompted major federal fire policy reviews.

One of the most consequential shifts was the growing focus on the wildland-urban interface, or WUI — the increasing overlap between private homes and fire-prone landscapes.

Several record-breaking fire seasons in the early 2000s made federal budget watchers aware that the Forest Service was spending more to fight fire than almost anything else in its mission, and frequently didn’t have enough funding to do so. In 2017, federal wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion — six times as much as was spent in the 1990s.

The year 2018 produced one of the worst wildfire seasons in history and included the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around Paradise, Calif.

More recently, political pressure for a more aggressive response to wildfire has renewed fire suppression.

Last June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” which in its first sentence declared “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.” 

Draft versions of the policy included a return to the 10 a.m. rule, according to numerous sources in the wildfire community.

“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a 45-year firefighting veteran who worked at the local, state and federal levels and now is vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.

“Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that,” Scopa said.

Draft versions of the Fix Our Forests Act also included a call for full suppression of all wildfires.

Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, said putting that into law would have had dangerous consequences.

“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”

Nevertheless, at a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told members of Congress his agency remained committed to prioritizing aggressive initial attack on wildfire this year.

“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz said. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”

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

With the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing opening to the animal world in about 100 days, officials are announcing ways for humans to also mark the milestone.

There will be a community festival at King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas on Dec. 2, as well as a ribbon cutting ceremony at the crossing that will be broadcast live to the public.

According to officials, the wildlife crossing will be the largest of its kind in the world, reconnecting habitat for Southern California mountain lions, bobcats, deer, bats, birds and other animals — big and small.

Here’s what you need to know.

About the grand opening events

The festival at King Gillette Ranch will include exhibits, music and special guests, according to organizers. The ribbon cutting will be played live on a large screen with visitors invited to cut their own ribbon through a virtual display.

Ticket donations are required to get in and will go toward the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougars campaign.

• When: 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. Dec. 2
• Tickets: $5 for children 12 and under, $10 for everyone else
  
  • You can buy them here
  • Schools and other groups may be eligible for discount pricing or scholarships. You can learn more by emailing: lgill@wildlifecrossingfund.org

A rendering of what the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will look like once construction is complete.

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National Wildlife Federation and Living Habitats

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Officials with the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing announced that SoCal animals will be able to traverse the crossing as of Dec. 2, 2026.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Project partners, including members of its plant nursery team, posing for a picture with installed native plants on the wildlife crossing.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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A stuffed mountain lion plush in front of where the first native plants were placed.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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Beth Pratt (right), leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, placing a native plant with a member of the nursery team.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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The native plants that are installed on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing include dozens of distinct species sourced from within a five-mile radius of the structure in the Santa Monica Mountains.

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Courtesy of the #SaveLACougars campaign

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The view from near the top of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in March 2025.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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There will be a private reception and fundraising event after the ribbon cutting for donors and sponsors. The event will support the National Wildlife Federation and the Wildlife Crossing Fund.

• When: 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Dec. 2 
• Where: Agoura Hills
• How it works: There are different gift levels inspired by animals, such as the “Monarch Butterfly” starting at $10,000, which will get two guests into the reception and a group tour of the crossing.
  
  • You can learn more here

Details on how to tune in to the ribbon cutting ceremony online have not been shared yet.

Collin O'Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said the crossing is a profound testament to what’s possible when people refuse to accept the fragmentation of the natural world.

“When we cut this ribbon, we will not just celebrate a single bridge — we will be celebrating a global movement to restore wildlife connectivity,” he said in a statement.

You can keep an eye on the crossing's progress through three livestream cameras here.

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