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From LA Times

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Kenny Senstad lives near a grim reminder of what mudslides have wrought in his community.

“Every time I look at it, it reminds me of all the people that died,” said Kenny, a 12-year-old Boy Scout.

The fire left many burn areas — including nearly all of the 712-acre Deukmejian Wilderness Park — devoid of vegetation that would stop debris from flowing toward homes when the winter rains start.

“We'll do this again, probably in a couple weeks,” said Jeff Weinstein, who helped coordinate this event for the city.

“We're hoping for the best, preparing for the worst,” he said.

One key piece of data the Public Works Department is waiting on before distributing those materials is preliminary maps prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey and other services that give projections of debris flows under certain conditions of precipitation.

Scientists from the USGS, meanwhile, will be installing gauges in Dunsmore Canyon on Tuesday to measure rainfall in burn areas and water flow across the ground. That information will then be shared with the National Weather Service, which can send the city alerts.

Although flooding can occur soon after fires, residents and officials noted that it wasn't until three years after the Mills fire of 1975 that the area had mudslides.

“That's the scary part for us here,” said Mike Lawler, 53, president of the Historical Society of Crescenta Valley. “We may be waiting years for mudslides.”

Said Glendale park naturalist Eric Grossman: “Complacency will set in, but this is a constant concern.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/10/amid-fears-of-mudslide-risk-glendale-volunteers-fill-1000-sandbags.html#more

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A group of Los Angeles neighborhood activists is organizing a campaign to put a measure on the November 2010 ballot that would slice the salaries of Los Angeles elected officials in half.    

Under the City Charter, council members currently make $178,789 – an amount pegged to the salary of Superior Court judges. The mayor's salary is set 30% higher at $232,426, while the city attorney and the controller make $214,547 and $196,668 respectively. Whenever Superior Court judges get raises, Los Angeles elected officials automatically get the increase.

When officials received a 4% raise in late 2007 -- which was the fourth in 2 1/2 years -- the mayor and at least four council members, including Janice Hahn, Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss, told reporters they would forgo the increase. Two council members, Dennis Zine and Jose Huizar, planned to give the raise to charity. Council members and other elected officials are not permitted to earn outside income.

But discontent with the council's performance was evident today at a daylong neighborhood council action summit held at Los Angeles City College, where the ballot measure was debated during the first of a series of panels concerning issues facing the city.

One of the ballot measure's organizers, Doug Epperhart of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council, noted that council is the highest paid in the country. "Compared to salaries of other city council members, elected officials in the United States it's ridiculous," Epperhart said. "For instance the city attorney, whom I like, makes more than the attorney general of the United States."

"We're not getting what we paid for, so let's pay for what we get," Epperhart said.

Bill Christopher, who argued against the measure as a panelist, questioned whether it was the best use of activists' time and resources. Proponents must gather 240,000 qualifying signatures -- the equivalent of 15% of registered voters in Los Angeles -- over 180 days to meet the threshold for a charter change.

"That is a huge undertaking," said Christopher, who helped found the Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils. He warned there might be "a bit of blow-back from politicians" that could diminish the influence of neighborhood councils.

Audience reaction was mixed at the forum, which drew about 70 people.

Jeff Jacobberger, chair of the Mid City West Community Council, said the average house in his area costs around $1 million. In some council districts, he said, "if you are relatively young with a family, and a relatively new mortgage with an expensive house, that is not enough money to live on, and you are telling young, talented people that they are ineligible to run for City Council."

Speaking in favor of the measure, Nina Royal of the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council, said the city should "give [the money] to the neighborhood councils and give the neighborhood councils more power."

In an informal poll, 32 of the community activists involved in the discussion said they supported the idea while 20 said they were opposed.

Epperhart said his group formed a state committee and plans to file official paperwork with the city as early as December.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/10/activists-seek-ballot-measure-to-cut-la-elected-officials-salaries-in-half.html#more

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Police chiefs see Zazi case as example of citizen anti-terror efforts

The Major Cities Chiefs Assn., meeting in Denver, endorses the new iWatch program for spotting and reporting suspicious behavior.

Associated Press

October 4, 2009

Denver

A store clerk's curiosity about why Najibullah Zazi was buying large quantities of beauty products was an example of the kind of citizen vigilance that can help combat terrorism, law enforcement officials said Saturday.

Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Joan McNamara cited the recent case at a Denver meeting of police chiefs, who adopted a model for a nationwide community watch program that teaches people to identify suspicious behavior and encourages them to report it.

Federal authorities allege that Zazi, 24, bought beauty supplies from Denver-area stores in order to make explosives. He has been jailed in New York on charges of conspiracy to detonate a weapon of mass destruction, possibly targeting New York City. Zazi has denied the charges.

Zazi reportedly told an inquisitive clerk that he needed a large amount of cosmetic chemicals because he had "lots of girlfriends." His purchases weren't reported to authorities, but the police chiefs said they hoped a coordinated publicity effort would make people think differently about such encounters.

LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, who developed the iWatch program with McNamara, called it the 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch.

The Major Cities Chiefs Assn., headed by Bratton and composed of the chiefs of the 63 largest police departments in the U.S. and Canada, endorsed iWatch at the group's conference Saturday.

The program would have provided an easy way for that Colorado store clerk and others to report suspicious activity so that police could launch investigations earlier, McNamara said.

"That clerk had a gut instinct that something wasn't right," she said.

Using brochures, public service announcements and meetings with community groups, iWatch is designed to deliver concrete advice on how the public can follow the oft-repeated post-Sept. 11 recommendation: "If you see something, say something."

Program materials list nine types of suspicious behavior that should compel people to call police, and 12 kinds of places to look for it. Among the indicators:

* If you smell chemicals or other fumes.

* If you see someone wearing clothes that are too big and too heavy for the season.

* If you see strangers asking about building security.

* If you see someone purchasing supplies or equipment that could be used to make bombs.

The important places to watch include government buildings, mass gatherings, schools and public transportation.

The program also is designed to ease reporting by providing a toll-free number and Web page that the public can use to alert authorities. Los Angeles put up its website ( http://www.iWatchLA.org ) this weekend.

"It's really just common-sense types of things," Bratton said, adding that his department was providing technical assistance to other agencies that want to adopt the program.

But American Civil Liberties Union policy counsel Mike German, a former FBI agent who worked on terrorism cases, said that the supposed indicators are relatively common. He suspects people will fall back on personal biases and stereotypes of what a terrorist looks like when deciding whether to report someone to the police.

"That just plays into the negative elements of society and doesn't really help the situation," German said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration proposed enlisting postal carriers, gas and electric company workers, telephone repair workers and other workers with access to private homes in a program to report suspicious behavior to the FBI. Privacy advocates condemned that as too intrusive, and the plan was dropped.

Bratton and McNamara said that privacy and civil liberties protections are built into this program.

"We're not asking people to spy on their neighbors," McNamara said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-community-watch4-2009oct04,0,4115174,print.story

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Nuclear chief ElBaradei visits Iran

Ahmadinejad defends Iran's nuclear activities as the head of the IAEA arrives to arrange an inspection of the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.

Associated Press

October 4, 2009

Tehran

As the head of the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency arrived in Iran on Saturday, the country's president declared that it had reported the existence of a new nuclear site earlier than required.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is in Tehran to arrange an inspection of the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.

The revelation that Iran has been building the nuclear plant has heightened the concern of the United States and many of its allies, which suspect that Tehran is using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing weapons-making capability. Iran says it wants only to generate energy.

President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain accused Iran of keeping the construction hidden from the world for years. The U.S. president said last month that Iran's actions "raised grave doubts" about its promise to use nuclear technology only for peaceful purposes.

ElBaradei has also said Tehran was "on the wrong side of the law" over the new plant and should have revealed its plans as soon as it decided to build the facility.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged that view in a speech Saturday, saying that Iran voluntarily revealed the facility to the IAEA in a letter on Sept. 21. He said that was one year earlier than necessary under the agency's rules.

Iran agreed to allow U.N. inspectors into the facility. Its meeting with six world powers Thursday near Geneva included the highest-level bilateral contact with the U.S. in three decades.

Iranian officials argue that under IAEA rules, a member nation is required to inform the U.N. agency about the existence of a nuclear facility six months before introducing nuclear material into the machines. Iran says the new facility won't be operational for 18 months, and so it has not violated any IAEA requirements.

The IAEA has said that Iran is obliged under the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to notify the organization when it begins to design a new nuclear facility.

Iran says it voluntarily implemented the Additional Protocol for 2 1/2 years as a confidence-building gesture, but its parliament passed legislation in 2007 forcing the government to end such cooperation after the country was referred to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

The IAEA says a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.

A document drafted by senior officials at the IAEA says Iran probably has sufficient information to design and produce a nuclear bomb. But the agency has said publicly that there is no concrete proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-nuke4-2009oct04,0,7216140,print.story

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Tentative deal between Armenia, Turkey brings opposition from both sides

Armenian Americans and Turkish Americans both say the governments in their homelands are giving too many concessions. A commission that would study the Armenian genocide is a sore point for some.

By Ann M. Simmons

October 4, 2009

Upset over an agreement that would establish diplomatic ties between Armenia and Turkey and reopen their common borders, members of the Los Angeles Armenian community plan to rally in Beverly Hills today.

Organizers of the demonstration say they will call on Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan to refrain from signing protocols with Turkey that they believe would threaten Armenia's interests and security.

Sargsyan is scheduled to visit Los Angeles today.

A deal that would essentially normalize relations between the long-estranged nations is expected to be signed this month. But the agreement faces opposition from both Armenian Americans and Turkish Americans, who argue that the governments in their homelands are making unreasonable concessions.

"We're not against normalization and peace with Turkey," said Arek Santikian, a UCLA student and chairman of the Armenian Youth Federation of the Western United States. "We really would want peace. But we can't have peace with preconditions."

Among the agreement's provisions is the creation of a historical commission that would evaluate the bloody history between the two countries. The Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918 claimed the lives of about 1.2 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which became the modern republic of Turkey. The Turkish government disputes that a genocide took place.

A historical commission would allow Turkey "to question the veracity of the genocide," Santikian said. "We know that it happened. We can't put a question mark on that."

Turkey disputes the number of those killed and argues that Armenians were equally brutal in slaying Turks when they revolted against their Ottoman rulers and aligned themselves with invading Russian troops.

Armenian American critics of the agreement also argue that the protocols would allow Turkey to keep eastern territories they say are historically part of Armenia.

They are also concerned about the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave populated mainly by ethnic Armenians but within the borders of Azerbaijan, which has close ethnic and political ties with Turkey.

"The protocols are not proportional," said Caspar Jivalagian, a student at Southwestern Law School and an Armenian Youth Federation member. "It is a very pro-Turkish document."

But many Turkish Americans disagree.

"Turkey is giving too much and getting too little in return," said Ergun Kirlikovali, West Coast director of the Assembly of Turkish American Assns.

Some believe the Turkish government is selling out Azerbaijan by reconciling with Armenia before the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh has been settled. Others fear Turkey might be forced to give back land.

Kirlikovali said Turks are also tired of being defamed by Armenians who were "constantly pushing a bogus genocide claim . . . and distorting and misrepresenting history."

He argued that a historical commission would allow experts to come to a "nonpolitical" verdict on the issue, and said that's why Armenians were opposed to the creation of such a panel. It could debunk their main indictment against Turks, Kirlikovali said.

Gunay Evinch, the assembly's Washington, D.C.-based president and a Fulbright scholar, said that despite the concerns over the consequences of the accord between Turkey and Armenia, the agreement presented "a unique opportunity to move forward for these countries and their people, but not without risks."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-armenia-protest4-2009oct04,0,553301,print.story

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Nancy M. Daly dies at 68; prominent activist worked for L.A. children

The advocate had been married to entertainment executive Robert A. Daly and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan.

By Jean Merl

October 4, 2009

Nancy M. Daly, a widely respected children's advocate, philanthropist and arts leader in Los Angeles, has died. She was 68.

Daly, who had high-profile marriages to entertainment executive Robert A. Daly and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan, had been battling pancreatic cancer. She died Friday in St. Louis while traveling back to Los Angeles from New York in a motor home with her three adult children.

"It's exactly what she wanted," her daughter Linda Daly said Saturday. "She got to spend her last moments with us. It was an amazing gift that she gave us."

Daly established herself as one of Los Angeles' most prominent -- and energetic -- activists on behalf of neglected or abused children after visiting MacLaren Children's Center, the since-closed Los Angeles County emergency foster facility.

The dismal, prison-like setting she saw on her first visit in 1979 galvanized Daly, then married to her first husband, to harness her considerable Hollywood contacts to raise money for -- and awareness of -- the county's neediest youngsters.

"Going to MacLaren changed my life," she recalled in a 1994 interview with The Times.

The Dalys had moved to California from New Jersey in 1978 for Bob Daly's new position as president of CBS' entertainment division. Not long after their arrival, she accompanied some of her industry acquaintances to a holiday party for MacLaren children.

"I had never seen a place like this," she recalled of the facility in El Monte.

"It had been a probation facility, and it was turned into a protection facility several years earlier. . . . They changed the population, but they didn't change the environment for the children.

"The kids looked sad, and I found it almost unbearable."

But she went back, with actor Henry Winkler, and soon helped found United Friends of the Children to aid youngsters in foster care.

When Bob Daly became chief executive at Warner Bros., she got him to dispense with the customary practice of sending expensive gifts to industry notables at Christmastime and instead to make contributions to MacLaren on their behalf. "We were one of the first studio executive families to do this," she said in The Times interview.

Her early work at MacLaren led to a much broader involvement in children's issues.

In 1984, she successfully lobbied for the creation of what is now the county Department of Children and Family Services and served on its advisory commission from the department's founding until 1999.

She also worked to establish the county's Family Preservation Program and its committee.

She also helped found the Children's Action Network, which sponsored briefings for the entertainment industry on children's issues and racked up a long record of lobbying in Sacramento and Washington for legislation to improve the lot of foster youngsters.

In 1989, she was appointed to the nonpartisan President's Commission on Children, which recommended federal government policy reforms.

"She was the central, most important person on the commission for adolescence and foster care and the transition from foster care to adulthood," a fellow commissioner, Donald Cohen of the Yale Child Studies Center, said of her in a 1994 interview.

"She brought this real personal engagement to thinking about these children because she didn't relate to them in a professional capacity, but as a mentor and advocate and friend of children in foster care," Cohen said.

Nancy MacNeil was born June 11, 1941, into a middle-class family in Tenafly, N.J. She grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where her father was an accountant and her mother a homemaker.

She met Bob Daly while she was a secretary at CBS, where he had started in the mail room. They married in 1961 -- she was 20, he 24 -- and settled into an apartment in Brooklyn. She quit work a couple of years later, and the Dalys started a family with the birth of daughter Linda in 1966; sons Bobby and Brian followed.

Daly said she enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom, immersing herself and her children in play groups, soccer and Scouts. Then came the family's move to Los Angeles and Daly's fateful visit to MacLaren and her increasing involvement with children's issues. Her role as entertainment industry executive's wife and her interest in the arts also brought her in contact with many of the city's movers and shakers.

She met Riordan, then a prominent Los Angeles lawyer, investment banker and philanthropist, around 1989, when she asked him to help pay for a computer reading lab for MacLaren.

A couple of years later she called on Riordan again, this time to help bankroll an immunization program for children of low-income families. He gave $25,000 and rounded up more in donations from friends and business associates.

She filed for divorce in November 1991, and Riordan, who was separated from his second wife, invited the children's activist to a Christmas holiday party at Union Station. They soon became a couple but did not marry until 1998.

When Riordan was elected mayor in 1993, she was at his side for inauguration ceremonies. He appointed her to a new city commission on children and families, and she took on another project as well -- overseeing the privately funded restoration of Getty House, the timeworn Tudor city manse in Windsor Square.

As the mayor's wife, and well after he left office in 2001, Daly continued her enthusiastic participation in civic and cultural life.

In 2003, she co-chaired, with former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a committee to oversee the spending of tobacco tax funds to help provide preschool for all 4-year-olds in the county. She was active in Democrat Hertzberg's unsuccessful 2005 campaign for mayor.

In 2007 she and Riordan legally separated.

An avid collector of American and California Impressionist art and Rookwood pottery, Daly joined the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2002 and was elected board chair by fellow trustees in 2005. She also served on the boards of the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Los Angeles Opera and others.

Besides her three grown children, she is survived by five grandchildren.

Services are pending.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-nancy-daly4-2009oct04,0,7323036,print.story

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L.A.: Living in harm's way

Fire, rain, mudslides -- it's a tried-and-true recipe for disaster in Southern California.

By Bernadette Murphy

October 4, 2009

For five consecutive nights, I stood at my front door and watched the Station fire lick at the hillside. The tongues of shooting flame looked to be only a few hundred feet away. Actually, the fire was burning a mile and a half up the mountain from my home in La Crescenta.

I live below Foothill Boulevard, I comforted myself. There was no way the fire was going to make it down here. We aren't like those crazy people who tempt fate by living in harm's way. Even after a 2 a.m. evacuation call, I believed my family and I were safe.

And we were.

During the fire, my brother, Frank, who lives in Tahiti and studies how geologic factors affect landscapes, looked at my house and the fire on Google Earth. He told me to get John McPhee's 1989 book, "The Control of Nature."

"There's a great chapter on what happens next," he said.

What happens next? They put out the fire, the smoke clears and life goes on. The hillsides will need watching for mudslides, as always after a fire.

Two days later, a journalist friend specializing in climate issues mentioned the same book. "Read the Los Angeles chapter and then act accordingly," he said, raising his eyebrows ominously.

Before the fire, I hiked regularly up Pine Cone Road with a 25-pound pack, training for a Mt. Whitney ascent. The road is not far from my home. Lined with suburban houses, it rises at a 41% incline and snakes high into the chaparral-laden mountains, making it the perfect training ground when there isn't time to make it to the "real" mountains. At the top of Pine Cone, a concrete-lined reservoir marks the end of the trail: Shields Upper Debris Basin.

As it turns out, McPhee's chapter, "Los Angeles Against the Mountains," begins on Pine Cone Road with the story of the Genofile home. On a rainy February night in 1978, three years after wildfires in the area, Jackie Genofile and her children looked up Pine Cone Road from a bedroom window. What they saw would terrify anyone: "a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood."

It was a debris flow; water mixed with solid material. Rock porridge, McPhee calls it.

"The dark material coming toward the Genofiles was not only full of boulders; it was so full of automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked cars from driveways in the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles' house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds ... ."

McPhee describes a nightmare. Debris spilled through the house, trapped the Genofiles, flowed over the roof. The house filled in six minutes. "The mud stopped rising near the children's chins."

Shields Upper Debris Basin, designed to catch 50,000 tons, had overflowed its capacity. "The Genofiles' house was buried to the eves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool."

But such freak disasters can happen to anyone, anywhere, right?

Not exactly, as McPhee patiently explains. The San Gabriels -- "in their tectonic youth," his book tells me -- are rising and disintegrating at a rate that is among the fastest in the world. Their steep canyons are covered in chaparral, one of the most combustible of plant materials, ensuring that when a fire comes, it will raze everything in its reach. Add to that the fact that burned chaparral releases resins that coat the soil, making it pretty much waterproof, and that some of the most concentrated rainfall in the United States occurs in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Typically, exceptional debris flows occur when at least five rainy days have put seven inches of water on the ground and are followed immediately with even heavier rainfall. "On that day," McPhee writes, "the debris mobilizes." In 1978, just before the Genofiles' house filled with debris, nearly an inch and a half of rain fell in 25 minutes.

At least I know what to watch for.

I hold McPhee's book in my hands, and I wonder what to do with this information. Should I warn my neighbors? Check the insurance policy for "debris flow"? Tell people at the grocery store checkout stand to read the chapter on Los Angeles and act accordingly?

And yet, there's no guarantee that a monster debris flow will occur this winter, even if wet weather arrives with the El Niño predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But if not this winter ...

Exceptional debris flows occur at least once a decade. Frequent, but not frequent enough to deter people from living in endangered areas. Communities such as Sunland/Tujunga, La Crescenta, La Cañada Flintridge, Altadena, Sierra Madre and others abutting the San Gabriels are beautiful, with mountain views to one side and city views to the other. The air is a bit cooler and cleaner. There's a reason people like to live here. There's a reason we live here.

But now I can't help but wonder if McPhee's story will worm its way into me, eventually forcing a move. Or will I become one of the crazy people who knows the risks and chooses to live here anyway?

Denial doesn't break down as easily as the mountains. But it's beginning to crumble. For now, I'm still trying to find solace in the fact I live below Foothill Boulevard -- as if debris is aware of that marker. The flow that almost killed the Genofiles didn't get near my neighborhood. But even that thin comfort can be stripped away. In 1934, I read, a debris flow brought a boulder eight feet in diameter into Montrose, about half a mile farther down the mountain from me.

Bernadette Murphy is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction and a forthcoming novel, "Grace Notes."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-murphy4-2009oct04,0,3229992,print.story

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From OurLA

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The Mayor should resign

http://minor-arcana.blogspot.com/


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Less Talk, More Action: Saturday's NC Action Summit Videos

DWP SPECIAL MEETING AGENDA TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2009 . . . Consulting Agreement with H. David Nahai.

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