The Brief

A mile-long section of the 10 Freeway near downtown is likely weeks from reopening after a weekend fire. The consensus seems to be that while traffic is worse than usual, it isn’t apocalyptic.

An estimated 300,000 drivers a day rely on the 10 between the East L.A. interchange and Alameda Street.

On Monday there was a 15% traffic increase on city streets near the closure and on Tuesday, the detour routes, which include portions of the 101, and 110, saw 26% more drivers than normal, said Los Angeles Department of Transportation General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo at a Wednesday morning press conference.

We’ve avoided “carmageddon” 3.0, in part because L.A.’s gridlock-navigating veterans are filtering through a web of freeways and surface streets criss-crossing the impacted area.

“If one piece of our network goes down, there's a lot of opportunities for people to make changes and move around those things,” said Brian Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. An unexpected shutdown of a roadway with fewer alternatives would likely be more disruptive.

However, these temporary changes are pushing more cars into freeway-adjacent neighborhoods that are already plagued by some of the worst air pollution in a city infamous for its smog.

Muffy works in Boyle Heights and called into LAist 89.3's public affairs radio show AirTalk on Monday.

“We have terrible traffic here, anyway,” Muffy said. “I'm hoping that this incident is going to bring more attention to this community, which really needs a lot of attention because it's historically ignored, even though it's one of the oldest parts of the city.”

The human cost of L.A.’s freeways

Taylor compares downtown freeways to the spokes on a wheel— they radiate out from the city center.

The goal, in part, was to make it easier for people to commute into and out of downtown, but that convenience came at a cost to past, and current residents.

“The people who lived and worked adjacent to those freeways paid an outsized price of the noise and pollution,” Taylor said.

Air pollution can harm pregnant people and their babies. Children who grow up breathing high levels of air pollution are more likely to develop asthma and long term exposure to air pollution is tied to increased rates of chronic respiratory issues, heart disease, and death.

The people in the areas of Los Angeles with consistently higher levels of air pollution are often Black and Latino, and low income, in part because discriminatory 1930s housing policies made it difficult for people to buy homes in their neighborhoods.

These communities are often breathing in pollutants they didn’t create, according to recent research from the University of Southern California.

“We see whiter travelers, people who drive more, driving through communities where people drive less and are less white,” said Geoff Boeing, who co-authored the paper and is an assistant professor of urban planning and spatial analysis. And these commuters return home to neighborhoods that are less polluted than those they traverse.

Historically, some of L.A. County’s whiter, wealthier communities, including South Pasadena, successfully blocked freeway expansion in their neighborhoods.

Elected officials have repeatedly urged Angelenos to stay home and telecommute and if they must drive, to stick to established detours and avoid cutting through downtown neighborhoods.

“Please remember that our downtown streets, particularly those around the impacted area, are some of our most congested corridors,” Rubio-Cornejo said Wednesday morning.

The 5, 10, 60, and 101 freeways all intersect in Boyle Heights.

"The surrounding neighborhoods are hit with the most impact since drivers are taking the streets where many of our students and their families reside," said Mendez High School teacher Rebecca Gallego. She thinks some students were late to class because of the influx of detouring drivers.

St. Turibius Catholic School is downtown, blocks away from the now-closed section of the 10 Freeway.

Principal Audrey Blanchette re-routed her morning drive from the 10 to Whittier Boulevard, and across the 6th Street Bridge to Central.

“There's just a lot of big rigs on the regular streets that we usually see on the freeway,” Blanchette said.

How and why drivers change course

UCLA’s Taylor also studies travel behavior — the how and why of the ways we move through the world.

“People adjust their behavior by changing their routes, changing the time of their travel, and changing the mode by which they travel, in that order,” Taylor said.

That tracks with John Lewis, who’s been a bus driver in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 1989.

“They'll let you know over the radio to avoid trouble areas, but with my experience of the city, I know how to get around,” Lewis said.

Though he doesn’t regularly drive the 10, he said congestion tends to ripple out from wherever there's a big disruption. That’s another well-studied traffic phenomenon: adding more cars to the road doesn’t really impact any one of those vehicles until the thoroughfare fills up completely — “at which point things become very unstable,” Taylor said. See the sluggish snake of brake lights where cars previously zipped along.

Lewis started his commute earlier this week to accommodate known construction projects and any potential residual traffic from downtown.

“We typically try to route around freeways because they’re such parking lots in the morning,” Lewis said.

The 10 Freeway closure altered about 3% of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 1,300 bus routes Monday, according to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. He said the average delay for students at 13 schools Monday was about 10 to 15 minutes.

Will commuting changes stick?

City officials have also urged would-be drivers to take the bus or Metro.

L.A. Deputy Mayor of Infrastructure Randall Winston said at Wednesday's press conference that the E Line, which runs from Santa Monica to East L.A., saw a 10% increase in ridership the previous day.

Taylor, who studied how drivers reacted to the Sepulveda Pass’s 2011 and 2012 construction closures, said it’s unlikely these changes will stick.

“It becomes an opportunity to alert people that these options exist and that that can be a positive effect,” Taylor said. “But it's unlikely that the event itself … might cause people to reconsider their travel choices.”

So when the 10 eventually re-opens, it’ll be back to our congested status quo.

The Japanese American National Museum announced today it will reopen in January after a two-year, $25 million overhaul of the country’s largest museum dedicated to the Japanese American experience.

The museum in L.A.’s Little Tokyo is reshaping its galleries and expanding its signature exhibition to include more perspectives and connections between Japanese American history and current debates over race, immigration and democracy.

The new exhibition at JANM features A.I.-assisted avatars of Japanese American survivors of incarceration.

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Courtesy of Japanese American National Museum

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“We want to tell the story in a way that is more expansive and that other immigrants, communities can see their own story reflected,” said Ann Burroughs, the museum’s president and CEO.

That effort to tie history to the present comes as JANM itself has faced political pressure, with the museum losing federal funding amid Trump administration cuts.

From the outside, visitors returning to the museum, which has been closed since January 2024, will recognize its modern, minimalist exterior. Once they step through the doors, though, the experience will be vastly different.

The biggest change will be the installation of a 9,200-square-foot permanent exhibition occupying nearly all of the museum’s first floor — more than twice the space of the exhibition it replaces.

"Common Ground," which opened in 1999, covered Japanese American history from migration to the U.S. in the 1800s to the passage of a federal law — the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 — that formally apologized for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and provided $20,000 in reparations to surviving detainees.

The new exhibition, called "In the Future We Call Now: Realities of Racism, Forging Democracy," will include more recent history, such as Japanese American support for reparations for Black Americans and vocal opposition to the Islamophobia that swelled after 9/11. It will also cover the Japanese American response to ICE detention and incarceration of migrant children, drawing parallels to World War II camps.

Galleries have been reconfigured to include more recent history and more objects from the past, including kimonos owned by women from Japan, who immigrated to the U.S. in larger numbers starting in the turn of the 20th century.

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Courtesy of Japanese American National Museum

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It will also bring lesser-known perspectives to familiar history through telling the story of incarceration from “women and mothers” and those incarcerated at Tule Lake, the camp in Northern California where Japanese Americans labeled as disloyal by the U.S. government were isolated during World War II.

“JANM hadn’t told that story before,” Burroughs said. “You can’t draw those parallels of what’s happening now if you don’t talk about the camps and if you don’t talk about Tule Lake.”

The new exhibition will also lean more heavily into audiovisual storytelling, using technology and archival media to make the history feel more immediate.

The interactive “StoryFiles” incorporate AI so visitors can pose questions to digital avatars of incarceration survivors like the actor George Takei.

Burroughs stressed that the museum is not using generative AI, but drawing upon hours and hours of interviews in which subjects answered hundreds of questions.

The new exhibition will also draw deeply from JANM’s extensive collection of Japanese American home movies, including footage dating to the 1930s, and give visitors a window into everyday life before World War II.

Some of JANM’s best-known objects will be included in the new exhibition, like barracks from the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming and a model of Manzanar in California’s remote Owens Valley, the first of the camps to be built.

The museum is also emphasizing everyday culture, with displays ranging from kimonos brought by Japanese immigrant women at the turn of the 20th century to rice cookers, and the worldwide reach of Hello Kitty.

The Hirasaki National Resource Center has been relocated to the second floor and will showcase work from artists like Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi.

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Courtesy of Japanese American National Museum

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The larger new exhibition was created without growing the museum's footprint through reconfiguring the building. For example, the museum’s Aratani Central Hall will take on a new role as the museum’s main entrance, with visitors entering through its sweeping curved glass wall and moving directly into the exhibition galleries. But Burroughs said the redesign will not come at the expense of the hall’s longtime function as a community space available to local nonprofits.

Upstairs, visitors will find reconfigured spaces including a new reading room filled with works and furnishings by Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi. Behind the scenes, JANM has upgraded decades-old building systems such as its HVAC and elevators.

The museum overhaul was funded as part of a much larger $135 million fundraising campaign, Burroughs said. The rest of the campaign supports JANM’s operations and long-term financial stability, including about $56 million in endowment and board-designated reserves.

"You know, life is never secure in the nonprofit world or in the museum world," Burroughs said. "We have to do a lot more to build up our endowments. We just will keep going."

Public health officials are urging people to be wary of flea-borne typhus after a recent outbreak of the illness.

The outbreak in late July was centered in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. The L.A. County Department of Public Health said five people were hospitalized; all recovered.

The outbreak comes as typhus cases continue to tick up in L.A. County.

Cases have been increasing fairly steadily for more than a decade, but they nearly doubled over the last three years. The Public Health Department logged a record 220 cases in 2025, and officials say this year is on track to exceed that.

Public health officials say the increase is likely because human-animal interactions are also increasing. That could be due to human population expansions into areas with more animals, available food sources for wildlife in populated areas or more people owning pets.

The bacteria that causes typhus is transmitted from animals to humans through fleas.

Typhus can’t be passed from one human to another, and public health experts say the illness is completely treatable, especially if it’s caught early.

Outbreaks and how to prevent them

Most of the time, typhus cases are spread out across L.A. County. But sometimes, there’s a localized spread over a short period of time that turns into an outbreak.

Public health officials respond to a few of them in L.A. County each year.

Generally, outbreaks are triggered by high concentrations of host animals.

“Wherever these animals may be present or wherever they may be congregating, in those areas we can see an increase in the number of human infections,” said Dr. Aiman Halai with the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

The most common hosts for typhus are rats, opossums and free-roaming cats. When people or pets come in contact with host animals, they can pick up the infected fleas and bring them into homes, spreading them to other people and animals in the process.

Halai says a variety of factors can attract animals and lead to an outbreak, including overflowing dumpsters, overgrown vegetation or a well-meaning neighbor feeding local critters.

You can help prevent outbreaks by securing trash in bins, making sure food isn’t left outside, and ensuring pets are on up-to-date flea control medication. Cutting back overgrown vegetation and blocking off crawl spaces can eliminate places where animals can shelter in and around homes.

Halai also says it’s important not to feed wildlife.

Should you be worried?

Although public health experts are wary of the typhus uptick in L.A. County, the 220 cases recorded in 2025 in L.A. County are not overly concerning.

"That’s a very  low rate at the population level,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of infectious diseases at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.

Typhus is an acute infection caused by bacteria known as Rickettsia typhi. Variations of the bacteria also cause other illnesses transmitted by fleas, ticks, lice and mites, including tick-borne Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Doctors can test for typhus fairly easily, and it is treatable with antibiotics. Symptoms are similar to the flu, and can include fever, headaches, muscle aches and nausea. It can also cause rashes in some cases.

Most infections are mild, but they can cause hospitalization and, in rare cases, can be fatal.

Klausner said the concern is that testing for typhus is not always routine.

“The most important thing is that when patients come in to their doctor — and they have fever, they may have a rash, they may have headache, may have muscle or joint aches — that the doctor's thinking about potentially flea-borne infectious diseases because the treatment can be different,” Klausner said.

The best treatment for typhus is the antibiotic doxycycline. If a patient with typhus gets another type of antibiotic like penicillin or amoxicillin, the treatment may not be as successful.

According to Klausner, when presented with flu-like symptoms, it’s also a good idea for patients to tell their doctors if they’ve been around animals, spent time in an encampment or even just gone on a hike.

Topline:

Why it matters: The small amphibian is found in the grasslands of Southern California and the Central Valley. But habitat loss, urban sprawl and longer droughts have been threatening the species’ population in recent decades.

What the protections do: Now that the Western spadefoot is a candidate for permanent protections, any development project planned for Western spadefoot habitats will have to take the amphibians into account.

Some exceptions may apply: The commission did carve out exceptions for solar projects in the Central Valley. To take advantage of federal tax credit deadlines, some projects can continue to be built, as long as they protect breeding pools and curtail construction during the season when spadefoots are most active.

What conservationists say: Brendan Cummings, conservation director with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in Southern California the biggest threat to the Western spadefoot is not solar development: “It’s warehouses or data centers and road widenings and all manner of construction activities.”

What happens next: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife will conduct a year-long review to determine if the Western spadefoot should be permanently protected.