Westside Subway 101

It takes a while to plan a subway. So for those who want a cheat sheet to catch up with everything that’s happened so far in the plan to create a westward extension of the Purple Line, check out this list of frequently-asked questions just posted on the Metro site.

If you want a more up-close-and-personal tutorial, consider attending a brown bag lunchtime open house in Century City on Tuesday, Feb. 2, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. You will need to bring your own potato chips, but the transit talk and video presentation are free.

LA’s Haiti rescuers

Images of Haiti from returning heroes

The LA County Fire search and rescue team that was hailed for its heroics in Haiti is on its way home. For a look at some of what they encountered and accomplished, click through this gallery of photos the team sent home and posted on Facebook. The team is expected to arrive in L.A. later this afternoon.

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After Haiti, a red-carpet family reunion

Dad was in Haiti on a rescue mission, but the Pinewood Derby waits for no man. So 8-year-old Caden Wells finished building his little wooden car with relatives, christened it “USA” in honor of his father’s faraway search-and-rescue squad and raced it to a personal best third-place finish.

For the Wells family, life went on after Los Angeles County fire captain Bryan Wells shipped out for a 16-day tour of duty in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
But life was not the same.

For the families of the 72-member Los Angeles County Fire Urban Search and Rescue team that returned home to a hero’s welcome Thursday, the time away was measured in hope, prayer, worry, nightly conference calls—and kids counting the days till they could start hanging out with their dads again.

[Read More]

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READ RELATED HAITI NEWS

• Leading the charge from Malibu to Port au Prince
• Next stop Haiti for L.A. County rescue team
• A super Sunday for County rescuers in Haiti

After Haiti, a red-carpet family reunion

Dad was in Haiti on a rescue mission, but the Pinewood Derby waits for no man. So 8-year-old Caden Wells finished building his little wooden car with relatives, christened it “USA” in honor of his father’s faraway search-and-rescue squad and raced it to a personal best third-place finish.

For the Wells family, life went on after Los Angeles County fire captain Bryan Wells shipped out for a 16-day tour of duty in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

But life was not the same.

For the families of the 72-member Los Angeles County Fire Urban Search and Rescue team that returned home to a hero’s welcome Thursday, the time away was measured in hope, prayer, worry, nightly conference calls—and kids counting the days till they could start hanging out with their dads again.

Caden, along with his mom, Tara, and the rest of the family—Brady, 6, Nathan, 4, and baby Ellie—was in the crowd of 300 that greeted the returning squad at the department’s Technical Operations center in Pacoima Thursday evening.

“I missed him a lot,” Caden said simply as he waited. Nathan was more exuberant as he thought of what he’d been missing.

“Tickle Daddy!” he yelled. He said he was looking forward to wrestling with his father again, too. “We both win,” he said, then hollered gleefully “My dad is a hero!”

The kid knows what he’s talking about on that point.

Wells, a 13-year county fire department veteran, led one of the two fire rescue teams in Haiti. Dispatched to by the U.S. government, the task force made 9 dramatic rescues and garnered international attention for the county team during their mission.

Tara Wells is used to her husband’s dangerous deployments. He has fought wildfires in Northern California for weeks at a time, and traveled with the county search and rescue team to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. But for her, Haiti was different.

“This particular deployment was by far the one that gave the most anxiety problems,” Tara said. The uncertainty of aftershocks, the unstable crowd situation, all made her uneasy. “The first couple days were really rough.”

But she gained courage from prayer and a church retreat the first weekend of the mission. The daily updates for family members from Haiti via conference call, something new that the department implemented during this trip, bolstered her spirits as well.

She designed special T-shirts for her kids to wear to the homecoming. The words on the shirts, beside a green map of Haiti, said it all: “The earth shook. The people called. My daddy went. My dad’s a hero.”

Word got around, and before you knew it, everybody wanted one. She ended up handing out 75 to the crowd–navy for the boys, pink for little girls.

Finally, the search and rescue team arrived, after a long traveling day in which they drove from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic, then flew to Orlando and on to LAX, where buses awaited to transport them to Pacoima.

When Wells popped off the bus, his boys climbed all over him, and he took little Ellie in his arms for a kiss.

Then Wells, 40, spoke a little of what they’d seen and done. He was the team manager for the 30-person “Blue Squad,” one of the two rescue teams that the L.A. contingent formed. The worst moment came when his team had to extract a corpse in view of a trapped woman who was already injured and screaming. “It was upsetting to her to see that,” Wells recalls. But the team pulled her out alive, as a throng of Haitians shouted “USA, USA, USA!”

Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas, Michael D. Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky attended the homecoming. “This is the most versatile fire department in the world,” Yaroslavsky said proudly.

Tara Wells spoke, too. “Our hearts were with you as we watched, and we could not stop watching,” she told the team.

And she thanked the department for supporting the families with aid, advice and a steady flow of news from Haiti. “Words cannot describe our gratitude,” she said, “for taking care of us while they were gone.”

READ RELATED HAITI NEWS

• Images of Haiti from returning heroes
• Leading the charge from Malibu to Port au Prince
• Next stop Haiti for L.A. County rescue team
• A super Sunday for County rescuers in Haiti

Images of Haiti from returning heroes

The LA County Fire search and rescue team that was hailed for its heroics in Haiti is on its way home. For a look at some of what they encountered and accomplished, click through this gallery of photos the team sent home and posted on Facebook. The team is expected to arrive in L.A. later this afternoon.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

READ RELATED HAITI NEWS

• Leading the charge from Malibu to Port au Prince
• Next stop Haiti for L.A. County rescue team
• A super Sunday for County rescuers in Haiti

Supervisors to consider creating a countywide recovery zone

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will be asked on Tuesday, Jan. 26, to designate the entire county as an economically-distressed “recovery zone,” paving the way for it to issue hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bonds to fund an array of projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA.)

The county is seeking to take advantage of a massive U.S. Treasury Department program that has allocated $25 billion to help state and local governments across the nation get projects moving in areas that have been hit hard by job losses. Los Angeles County’s allocation is nearly $181 million in economic development bonds and $271.5 million facility bonds, which can be made available to private entities for projects in the recovery zone.

To support the case for a countywide recovery zone designation, county analysts pored over economic data and found that more than 83% of Los Angeles County census tracts have “directly experienced significant levels of poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, or general distress,” according to a letter to supervisors from the Chief Executive Office.

Since the rest of the county falls within an average worker’s 31-minute commuting range, that means all areas of the county have a “reciprocal impact” on each other and should be included in the designation, the letter said. The countywide designation would also give supervisors more flexibility in coming up with a final list of projects to be funded with the bonds.

The only project specifically mentioned in the board letter is the Martin Luther King Jr. Multi-Service Ambulatory Care Center. The CEO’s office said it has identified more than $1.1 billion in project proposals that meet the basic bond criteria—far more than the county’s bond allocation could cover. It currently is working with each supervisor’s office to develop a priority list of projects to be funded. The final list must be compiled by Aug. 15, 2010, and the bonds issued by Dec. 31, 2010.

The recovery zone economic development bonds come with a federal subsidy covering 45% of the interest. There is no federal subsidy with the facility bonds, which are tax-exempt and can be issued by the county and the funds loaned to private borrowers developing projects within the recovery zone.

The county also is authorized to issue $27,312,584 in Qualified Energy Conservation Bonds for energy-reducing or renewable energy projects in public governmental projects, with an additional $11,705,393 allocated to bonds for such projects in the private sector.

[Updated 1/26/10]: The supervisors, at their weekly meeting, approved the “recovery zone” designation. The CEO’s office will prepare quarterly briefings for the board on the project’s progress.

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