Newsletter: Essential California Week in Review: Strongest tornado in L.A. County in 40 years

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It is Saturday, March 25.

Here’s a look at the top stories of the last week

The strongest tornado in Los Angeles County in 40 years hit 110-mile-per-hour winds. The National Weather Service said the EF1 tornado in Montebello was the strongest in the county since a tornado struck South Central Los Angeles in 1983.

More:

• Southern California tornadoes damaged dozens of structures, snapping beams and tearing the roof from a building in Montebello.
• As historic storms fill once-dry Tulare Lake and submerge prime California farmland, tensions are building over how to handle the swiftly rising floodwaters.
• A deadly “bomb cyclone” storm slammed California, causing intense winds, blackouts and havoc.
• After days of rain, the latest storm to drench Southern California is expected to exit the region, leaving the weekend dry and mostly sunny.
• On the heels of one of California’s wettest winters on record, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he will roll back some of the state’s most severe drought restrictions and dramatically increase water supplies for agencies serving 27 million people.

LAUSD schools open Friday as the strike ends and labor talks continue with Mayor Karen Bass’ mediation. The involvement of Bass is a major step but won’t necessarily lead to a quick settlement of issues between the school system and SEIU Local 99.

Related stories:

• A sweeping three-day strike that shut down L.A. public schools — led by support staff and backed by teachers — ended Thursday, clearing the way for students to return to class, but the unsettled labor dispute continues to threaten the stability of the nation’s second-largest school district.
• For many L.A. Unified workers who are on strike, the crux of the fight is the ability to live decently in L.A., where the cost of housing imposes a brutal burden.
• Here’s why these teenagers stand behind LAUSD’s essential workers.

California wants Medicaid to cover six months of rent. Gov. Gavin Newsom is making a bold push for Medicaid health plans to provide more housing support. He argues it’s cheaper to pay for rent than to allow homeless people to fall into crisis.

Scientists uncover startling concentrations of pure DDT along the seafloor off L.A.’s coast. In a sobering update, researchers shared their latest findings on the legacy of DDT ocean dumping off the L.A. coast — which turned out to be even more widespread than expected.

The Week in Photos

Members of Service Employees International Union Local 99 picket at Los Angeles State Historic Park on Thursday.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

See the photos behind this week’s biggest stories: A small tornado wreaked havoc in Montebello; Trump did not get arrested but wants protests if they come for him; and LAPD goes on a “watch list.”

A potentially deadly fungus is spreading rapidly across California, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The drug-resistant fungus is spreading across the United States, with California seeing the second-most cases of any state in the last year, according to the CDC.

Unions and environmentalists push for California referendum reform. California’s influential labor unions, government watchdogs and environmental advocates repeatedly accuse corporations of lying to voters in campaigns to reverse state laws and thwart the progressive Democratic agenda at the state Capitol. Now they plan to do something about it.

When it comes to earthquakes, Republicans and Democrats agree on L.A. retrofitting, a poll finds. Los Angeles residents strongly back the city’s landmark earthquake retrofit law, a new poll has found, despite decades of conventional wisdom that such a rule would be politically unpopular because of its cost.

The California Senate advances a bill to punish oil companies for gasoline price gouging. A first-in-the-nation bill to punish oil companies for profiting from price spikes at the pump breezed through the California Senate at the urging of Newsom, the first major vote in an effort to pass the law by month’s end.

A California bill targets Skittles and other snacks with “toxic” chemicals. A proposed California law would ban the sale of foods, including Skittles and other snacks, that contain certain “dangerous chemicals.”

An unusual parasite is killing sea otters off the California coast, scientists warn. Four sea otters that washed ashore on the California coast died from an unusual parasite that scientists warn could possibly infect other marine wildlife and humans.

How immune are we? Why answering this question is essential for post-pandemic life. The pandemic’s formal end on May 11 marks neither victory nor peace: It’s a cessation of hostilities with a dangerous virus that is still very much with us. In order to move through a world where the coronavirus is endemic, we need a reliable way to assess our individual level of immunity. Here’s how we can.

COVID is still out there. Here’s what to do if you get it now. It’s 2023 and you just tested positive for COVID-19. Now what? Here are the latest CDC protocols, isolation recommendations, ways to treat it and ways to prevent long COVID.

Downtown L.A.’s Grand Park will be renamed in honor of longtime Supervisor Gloria Molina. Clad in Gloria Molina’s signature royal purple, Los Angeles County supervisors voted to rename Grand Park in honor of the longtime supervisor, who last week revealed she has terminal cancer.

Michelin adds six restaurants to its California guide — and three of them are in L.A. County. In a preview of Michelin’s 2023 update to its California-wide dining guide, the international gustatory compendium that ranks restaurants from one to three stars added six new restaurants to the state guide this month. Check them out here.

ICYMI, here are this week’s great reads

When everyone sounds like a weather forecaster, whom should you trust? Amateur weather forecasters tend to make more aggressive predictions, which can help residents quickly adapt to bad storms. But professional meteorologists worry that some try to grab attention by predicting massive storms when the chances are slim. Or try too hard to be first, issuing forecasts based on premature, unreliable information.

L.A.’s only Indigenous school helps return land to California’s Native population. By naming it the Chief Ya’anna Learning Village, a school official said, they will pay tribute to an Indigenous leader who offered refuge to Indigenous immigrants.

Can this Hollywood choreographer teach a journalist to dance? In Hollywood, it’s not only musicals and reality competitions that require dance expertise. Choreographers often need to teach non-dancers moves in less than an hour. Choreographer Chuck Maldonado gives a glimpse of what it’s like to choreograph for film and TV.

Today’s week-in-review newsletter was curated by Kenya Romero. Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com.