By Colleen Shalby, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Ash still clings to the windowsills of the gray home in Altadena, nine months after an inferno ripped the community apart.

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The couple who rents the house has moved 15 times with their newborn since January as their place of solace for the last decade has awaited testing and remediation to clear it of toxic material and debris.

Help has finally arrived. Wearing white hazmat suits that cover them from head to toe, gloves, respirator masks and goggles, a group of workers enters the residence.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed its debris removal in Altadena after January’s fire tore through the town, the task to clean what survived didn’t stop. Hundreds of smoke-damaged and ash-filled homes remained standing on streets where others burned.

These efforts to clean them have largely been carried out by immigrant workers who have not just risked their health while clearing homes of toxic material and debris but, with ongoing raids, the lives they have built in California.

They meticulously vacuum, and scrub the walls, windows, baseboards and floors, clearing every open surface and precious possession of reminders of the Eaton fire.

Ricardo Melo has overseen more than 100 cleanups in Altadena and 25 in Pacific Palisades. He works for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and said those he supervises have emigrated from Mexico, Central America and South America. Despite fears of deportation, his teams have continued to show up.

Ricardo Melo, a disaster site worker who is overseeing more than 100 cleanups in Altadena, stands in the back yard of Brent Morgan and Corine Harmon’s home on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, in Altadena, California. (Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Melo’s approach to the cleanup is two-pronged: The first is ensuring that the workers understand who lived here before the fire — in this case a family with a baby — so that they will work diligently and with compassion. There’s no music on during the process — he wants the teams to concentrate.

The second is to make sure that his teams follow protocols to protect their own lives. A report from NDLON earlier this year found that many workers under contract with the Army Corps were not abiding by safety standards. Melo said he takes measures to prevent workers from absorbing or inhaling toxic chemicals.

“Every day, I remove all the bags and the filters from equipment because I don’t want to take contamination from one house to another house. I check every part of my equipment so that it’s good for the families and for the workers too,” Melo said. “Who’s going to clean up what’s inside their bodies?”

Two women, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by immigration enforcement, started doing remediation work after the fires burned homes in Altadena they had previously cleaned as housekeepers. They said that they feel safer working inside homes, where they’re shielded, than they do when they’re exposed outside or in transit.

The 34- and 49-year-old women have cleared dozens of homes in Altadena from debris and ash left by the Eaton fire. Although the work they are doing presents certain risks due to exposure to unknown toxic materials, they said that the threat of encounters with ICE causes greater panic.

Workers clean up contaminated possessions and surfaces months after the Eaton Fire at Brent Morgan and Corine Harmon’s home on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, in Altadena, California. (Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

“The exposure to the contaminants from the fire is some kind of fear, but it is double the fear that I feel when I think about ICE and what they’re doing with the raids,” one of the women said in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. “There’s a way to protect us from the contaminants … but with the raids, we have seen that there’s not much that we can actually do.”

One of the women left Colombia for the U.S. with her husband and children to escape violence. The other left Honduras, one of the most violent countries in the world, in search of a better future. But the reality since the fires in January and then as the raids began this summer, she said, has been bleak.

“I don’t know that I believe [the future will get better] anymore. It’s been very hard, and the situation is actually getting worse. Nothing has been getting better for us,” she said, also speaking through an interpreter.

Outside the home in Altadena, trash bags are filled up with loose papers, textiles and anything from inside the house believed to be unsafe; mattresses, boxes of unused diapers and a new nursing chair that will be discarded line the driveway; a Christmas tree out front serves as a time capsule for what happened here.

Across the street, the burn scar on the mountains is visible.

The workers quietly and carefully tackle each room of the house while the garage has been turned into another cleaning zone where they box salvaged items.

Resident Brent Morgan, 42, is grateful for the help after months of seeking assistance after learning that his rental insurance had expired. Since then, he tried to find help that wouldn’t be too costly.

A worker cleans up contaminated possessions and surfaces months after the Eaton Fire at Brent Morgan and Corine Harmon’s home on Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, in Altadena, California. (Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

The cleanup process is daunting. His wife, a professional dancer, has multiple costumes that have yet to be cleaned; it’s been so long since he’s been home that he doesn’t remember which photographs still cling to his fridge. The last several months have in many ways been a blur, but it’s unclear when normalcy will resume.

“It’s definitely been the most challenging time of our life, that’s for sure. Having a new baby was hard without all of this on top of it,” Morgan said. “We’re happy to hopefully move forward. It’s just the fact that with the baby being so young, we still just don’t know if it’s safe to be back. So all we can do is make progress and then do testing after and see if it’s clear.”

At a nearby church, all-day training sessions are held to teach workers how to prepare for risks on these job sites. Debora Gonzalez, the health and safety director at NDLON, carries out thought exercises with a group of workers, asking them to think through what obstacles they may face — such as fallen branches or gas — and how to assess the safety of an area. They learn to properly put on the protective gear required to go inside these homes in the coming days, helping each other step into their hazmat suits and affixing their masks over their noses and mouths.

Gonzalez has trained hundreds of workers on remediation efforts since January’s fires. She has worked with NDLON since 2019 and has helped to restore several communities in the aftermath of tragedy.

The fire that destroyed much of Altadena, she said, is one of the worst disasters she has seen.

“Raids are another disaster for us. And when a disaster happens, you can see what it does.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times

When Texas neurologist Hamid Kadiwala told his parents he was heading to Gaza to volunteer at a hospital there, they begged him to reconsider.

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“Why would you take that risk?” they asked. What about his Fort Worth medical practice? His wife? His four children?

But Kadiwala, 42, had been deeply shaken by images from Gaza of mass death and destruction and felt a responsibility to act. Israel’s siege on the small, densely populated Gaza Strip was “a history-shaking event,” Kadiwala said. “I want my kids to be able to say that their father was one of those who tried to help.”

Kadiwala is one of dozens of American doctors and nurses who have worked in the Gaza Strip since 2023, when Israel began bombing the enclave in retaliation for the deadly Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.

The volunteers — men and women of all ages, agnostics as well as Muslims, Christians and Jews — have labored under the constant threat of violence, amid raging disease and with little access to food and medicine they need to save lives.

Many are hopeful that the new ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that took effect Friday will halt the violence. But even with new aid rolling in, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza remains daunting.

With foreign journalists largely barred from Gaza and more than 200 Palestinian media workers slain by Israeli bombs and bullets, on-the-ground testimony from doctors and nurses has been critical to helping the world understand the horrors unfolding.

But bearing witness comes at a steep personal cost.

As Kadiwala drove into the enclave in a United Nations convoy late last year, he saw an endless expanse of gray rubble. Emaciated young men swarmed his vehicle. The sky buzzed with drones. Bombs sounded like rolling thunder.

Kadiwala compared the landscape with dystopian films such as “Mad Max.” “It’s so hard to understand because our brains have never seen something like that,” he said.

He knew that worse was yet to come.

“You have to get numb,” he told himself as he prepared to enter Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where he would be living and working for more than a month. “These patients are here for help, not to see me cry.”

Death in Gaza

The explosions began each morning shortly before the call to prayer.

“Within 20 minutes, there would be 150 people sprawled wall-to-wall with serious injuries,” said Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina who has been to Gaza twice, and who was working at Nasser in March in the violent days after a ceasefire broke.

Perlmutter, 70, had volunteered on more than 40 humanitarian missions: in Haiti after its devastating earthquake, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in New York after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Nothing prepared him for Gaza.

Hospitals stank of sewage and death. Doctors operated without antibiotics or soap. Never before had he seen so many children among the casualties. The hospital filled with shell-shocked kids who had been wrenched from collapsed buildings and others with bullet wounds in their chests and heads.

“I would step over babies that were dying,” he said. “I would see their blood expanding on the floor, knowing that I had no chance of saving them.”

In one haunting experience, an injured boy lying on the ground reached for Perlmutter’s leg, too weak to talk. Perlmutter knew it was too late for the boy, but that other patients still had a shot at survival.

“I had to pull my pant leg away to get to one I could save,” he said.

Perlmutter is Jewish and until visiting Gaza was a supporter of Israel. Around his neck he wears as a pendant a mezuzah, which contains a small scroll with verses from the Torah. It was a gift from his late father, a doctor who survived the Holocaust.

But working in Gaza changed him.

After treating so many kids with gunshot wounds, he became convinced that Israelis were deliberately targeting children, which the Israeli military denies.

As he toiled, he and another doctor, California surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, began taking photos of the carnage. Together they would go on to publish essays in U.S. media outlets detailing what they had seen and to send letters to American leaders begging for an arms embargo. Sidhwa would conduct a poll of dozens of American doctors, nurses and medics who said they, too, had treated preteen children who had been shot in the head.

Activism was a new calling for Perlmutter. He knew it might cost him relationships with loved ones who supported Israel and possibly even patients at his medical practice back in North Carolina. He knew it was straining his relationship with his wife. But he plowed ahead.

“It’s hard to see so many kids die in front of you and not make that your life.”

Hospitals under siege

Andee Vaughan, a 43-year-old trauma nurse, has spent much of her life in ambulances, emergency rooms and on backcountry search-and-rescue trips in her home state of Washington. She spent months providing medical care on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

She prides herself on maintaining her cool, even under trying circumstances. But while volunteering at Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, she often felt tears welling up.

It wasn’t the mayhem of mass casualty events that shook her, or the sound of shallow breaths as a patient who had been shot in the skull slipped toward death.

It was the seemingly countless victims who under normal circumstances could have been saved.

Like the boy she watched suffocate because the hospital didn’t have enough ventilators. Or patients who perished from treatable infections for lack of antibiotics and proper dressings for wounds.

“I am haunted by the patients on my watch who probably shouldn’t have died,” Vaughan said.

Virtually every person she encountered suffered from diarrhea, skin infections, lung problems and chronic hunger, she said. That included exhausted Palestinian doctors and nurses, many of whom had lost family members, been displaced from their homes and were living in crowded tent cities where hundreds of people shared a single toilet. Many Palestinian medical staffers have been working without pay.

“You have a whole system in survival mode,” said Vaughan, who contracted giardia shortly after arriving in Gaza and who ate just once a day because there was so little food.

Vaughan spent three months in Gaza and volunteered to stay longer. Then her hospital came under attack.

As Israeli forces advanced on Gaza City to confront what they described as the last major Hamas stronghold in the strip, Al-Quds was sprayed by gunfire and rocked by bombs. Most of its windows were blown out. A tank missile hit an oxygen room, destroying everything inside.

Vaughan filmed videos that showed Israeli quadcopters — drones equipped with guns — hitting targets around the hospital.

“They are systematically destroying all of Gaza,” she said. “They’re shooting everything, even the donkeys.”

Just a third of Gaza’s 176 hospitals and clinics are functional, and nearly 1,700 health care workers have been killed since the war began, according to the World Health Organization.

It is not lost on Vaughan that most of the weapons used in those attacks come from the United States, which has provided Israel $21.7 billion in military assistance since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, according to a study by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

U.S. involvement in the war is what prompted Vaughan to volunteer in Gaza in the first place. “I was there in some ways to make amends for the damage that we have done,” she said.

Vaughan was evacuated from Gaza last month, bidding goodbye to colleagues and patients who were so malnourished their bones jutted from their skin like tent poles.

She was ferried to Jordan, where on her first morning since leaving Gaza she went down to breakfast, saw a buffet overflowing with food, and began to sob.

Coming home

After three tours in Gaza, Dallas emergency room doctor Bilal Piracha now works with a kaffiyeh draped over his scrubs.

The black-and-white scarf, a symbol of Palestinian liberation, often sparks comments from patients, some of them disapproving. Piracha, 45, welcomes the opportunity to talk about his experience.

“This is what I have seen with my own eyes,” he tells them. “The destruction of hospitals, the destruction of nearly every building, the killing of men, women and children.”

Like many other U.S. doctors and nurses who have spent time in Gaza, Piracha is racked with survivor’s guilt, unable to forget the patients he couldn’t help, the mass graves he saw filled with bodies, the hunger in the eyes of the local colleagues he left behind.

“Life has lost its meaning,” he said. “Things that once felt important no longer do.”

He now spends most of his free time speaking out against the siege, traveling throughout the U.S. to meet with members of Congress and making frequent appearances on TV and podcasts. He has marched in antiwar protests and dropped massive banners from Texas highways that say: Let Gaza live.

He is in frequent touch with doctors in Gaza, who are hopeful that the new ceasefire will put a stop to the violence, but say massive amounts of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid are needed immediately.

Piracha doesn’t know what to tell them.

“We can give them words of hope and prayers, but that is it,” he said.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

POZA RICA, Mexico (AP) — The death toll from last week’s torrential rains in Mexico jumped to 64 on Monday, as searches expanded to communities previously cut off by landslides.

Another 65 people were missing following the heavy rainfall in central and southeastern Mexico that caused rivers to top their banks, Civil Defense Coordinator Laura Velázquez Alzúa said during President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily press briefing.

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“There are sufficient resources, this won’t be skimped on … because we’re still in the emergency period,” Sheinbaum said.

Thousands of military personnel have been deployed across the region. In northern Veracruz, 80 communities remained inaccessible by road.

Sheinbaum acknowledged it could still be days before access is established to some places. “A lot of flights are required to take sufficient food and water” to those places, she said.

Early official estimates note 100,000 affected homes, and in some cases, houses near rivers “practically disappeared,” Sheinbaum said.

The scale of the destruction across five states was coming into clearer focus a day after Sheinbaum visited affected communities in Puebla and Veracruz, promising a rapidly scaled-up government response.

Mexico’s Civil Protection agency said the heavy rains had killed 29 people in Veracruz state on the Gulf Coast as of Monday morning, and 21 people in Hidalgo state, north of Mexico City. At least 13 were killed in Puebla, east of Mexico City. Earlier, in the central state of Querétaro, a child died in a landslide.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

By MICHELLE GUMEDE and GERALD IMRAY

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A bus veered off a road and plunged down an embankment on a steep mountain pass in northern South Africa, killing at least 42 people and leaving another 49 passengers injured, authorities said Monday.

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The crash happened around 6 p.m. Sunday on the N1 highway near the town of Louis Trichardt, around 248 miles north of the capital, Pretoria.

The Transport Ministry said in a statement that the victims included seven children, 17 men and 18 women. It said six people were critically injured and another 31 had serious injuries and had been taken to several hospitals. One critically injured child was airlifted to a hospital, the ministry said.

Images released by authorities showed the blue bus lying upside down in the embankment with rescuers working underneath it to search for victims. The Limpopo provincial government said rescue operations continued late into Sunday night.

The bus was traveling to Zimbabwe and was carrying Zimbabwean and Malawian nationals who were on their way to their home countries, the Transport Ministry said. It said the cause of the crash was not yet known.

In a statement, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa offered “his deep condolences to the nations of Zimbabwe and Malawi who have lost compatriots.”

“This sadness is compounded by the fact that this incident has taken place during our annual transport month, where we place a special focus on the importance of safety on our roads,” Ramaphosa said.

Last year, 45 people were killed in a bus crash in the same Limpopo province when their vehicle veered off a bridge and into a ravine. An 8-year-old girl was the only survivor of that crash. That bus was carrying mainly Botswana nationals who were traveling to an Easter church gathering in South Africa.

Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa