Anita Ghazarian and Simon Penny live in a house on the westernmost edge of Altadena—missed by the flames from the catastrophic Eaton Fire, but still close enough to be blanketed in ash. Farther east, in the burn zone, they own a house they rent out, which was minimally damaged.
As soon as the electricity comes back on, Ghazarian’s insurance adjuster told her, the rental house is considered habitable.
“How can I tell my tenants to move back into a house where the entire backyard is filled with ash and broken stuff and the houses around it are all burn zones? Are the kids going to play in that backyard?” Ghazarian asked.
In a maze of online maps, residents can find themselves in an uncertain space: Their house might be in an EPA “normal” zone, meaning it has been repopulated after evacuations, and also marked green on a county map (showing no or minimal damage), and yet surrounded by obliterated structures and covered in ash.
Such intact structures risk being cross-contaminated by nearby burned structures, according to research from the University of Colorado at Boulder that looked at health effects of smoke in homes after the Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in 2021.
After Colorado’s Marshall Fire, more than half of the hundreds of people surveyed experienced symptoms from wildfire smoke six months after the fire, and continue to report symptoms even after extensive remediation.
Homes untouched by the fires had high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including benzene and toluene, carried in by ash and smoke from the homes that did burn.
In scope and scale, the Los Angeles disaster dwarfs the tragic Marshall Fire, and threatens a commensurate environmental crisis.
Los Angeles County’s two major fires, in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, burned through 40,000 acres, about 60 square miles, and killed 25 people, destroying more than 16,000 structures and reducing whole neighborhoods to rubble. […]
— Read More: www.theepochtimes.com
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
But even as it seems nearly impossible to make a living, there are blessings that should not be disregarded. By highlighting strong sponsors who share our America First worldview, we have been able to make lifelong connections and even a bit of revenue to help us along. This is why we enjoy symbiotic relationships with companies like MyPillow, Jase Medical, and Promised Grounds. We help them with our recommendations and they reward us with money when our audience buys from them.
The same can be said about our preparedness sponsor, Prepper All-Naturals. Their long-term storage beef has a 25-year shelf life and is made with one ingredient: All-American Beef.
Even our faith-driven precious metals sponsor helps us tremendously while also helping Americans protect their life’s savings. We are blessed to work with them.
Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
