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Seventy percent of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state history have occurred since fall 2017, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

To understand the pace and extent of rebuilding in the most significant of these fires, The Times relied on data from state and local governments.

The Times obtained data in February from the Cal Fire Damage Inspection Database, known as DINS, which documents buildings burned in wildfires. We filtered for residential structures — single-residence, multiple-residence and mixed-use commercial/residential — that were destroyed.

We limited our reporting to fires that destroyed 1,000 or more residential structures during this period — aside from January’s Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County. There were five: Tubbs (2017), Carr (2018), Camp (2018), Woolsey (2018) and North Complex (2020).

The Times analysis showed 22,438 residential structures burned in the five fires. About 75% were single-family homes, 23% were mobile homes and fewer than 2% were apartment, condominium or other multifamily buildings. Because of data limitations, a multifamily building was counted as one residential structure no matter how many units it had. In its reporting, The Times used “residential structure” and “home” interchangeably.

The fires destroyed homes across 16 local jurisdictions. To determine when and how many homes were rebuilt, The Times in March and April collected certificate of occupancy data from building departments in each community. Additionally, The Times accessed data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which regulates mobile home parks.

Using GIS software, The Times plotted coordinates in the Cal Fire data to match each destroyed structure to the city or county responsible for issuing a permit to rebuild it. From there, The Times merged assessor parcel numbers of destroyed homes from the Cal Fire data with those of rebuilt homes from local and state building data obtained from each jurisdiction. Finally, The Times summarized certificates of occupancy issued by day to plot the reconstruction timeline for each fire. For uniformity, the results are limited to homes approved prior to April 1.

The Times deviated from its methodology for a specific situation. The Tubbs fire destroyed a 162-lot mobile home park in Santa Rosa. Two apartment buildings for low-income senior citizens together comprising 132 units have been built on the site. Given that the Times analysis designated 162 mobile homes as destroyed, the analysis was adjusted to count the 132 replacement apartment units.

Overall, the analysis concluded that 8,420 homes have been rebuilt, 38% of those destroyed in the five fires.

The Times results could differ from reports published by some jurisdictions for two reasons: Local jurisdictions may have conducted more rigorous inventories of destroyed buildings than detailed in the Cal Fire DINS data and their rebuilding numbers can be continuously updated.

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that would allow hugely popular social video app TikTok to continue to operate in the United States.

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, had been under pressure to divest its ownership in the app’s U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban, due to security concerns over the company’s ties to China.

Congress passed legislation calling for a TikTok ban to go into effect in January, but Trump has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the country.

Under an agreement that Trump said was approved by China’s President Xi Jinping, TikTok’s U.S. operations will be operated through a joint venture run by a majority-American investor group. ByteDance and its affiliates would hold less than 20% ownership in the venture.

About 170 million Americans use TikTok, known for its viral entertaining videos.

“These safeguards would protect the American people from the misuse of their data and the influence of a foreign adversary, while also allowing the millions of American viewers, creators, and businesses that rely on the TikTok application to continue using it,” Trump stated in his executive order.

Trump, who years ago led the push to ban TikTok from the U.S., said at a press event that he feels the deal satisfies security concerns.

“The biggest reason is that it’s owned by Americans … and people that love the country and very smart Americans, so they don’t want anything like that to happen,” Trump said.

Trump said on Thursday that people involved in the deal include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Dell Technologies Chief Executive Michael Dell and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Vice President JD Vance said the new entity controlling TikTok’s U.S. operations would have a value of around $14 billion.

Murdoch’s involvement would probably entail Fox Corp. investing in the deal, a source familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly told The Times. Fox Corp. owns Fox News, whose opinion hosts are vocally supportive of Trump.

The algorithms and code would be under control of the joint venture. The order requires the storage of sensitive U.S. user data to be under a U.S. cloud computing company.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last Saturday that the app’s data and privacy in the U.S. would be led by Oracle.

Ellison is a Trump ally who is the world’s second-richest person, according to Forbes.

TikTok already works with Oracle. Since October 2022, “all new protected U.S. user data has been stored in the secure Oracle infrastructure, not on TikTok or ByteDance servers,” TikTok says on its website.

Ellison is also preparing a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the media company that owns HBO, TNT and CNN, after already completing a takeover of Paramount, one of Hollywood’s original studios.

“The most important thing is it does protect Americans’ data security,” Vance said at a press gathering on Thursday. “What this deal ensures is that the American entity and the American investors will actually control the algorithm. We don’t want this used as a propaganda tool by any foreign government.”

TikTok, which has a large presence in Los Angeles, did not respond to a request for comment.

Terms of the deal are still unclear. Trump discussed the TikTok deal with China’s Xi Jinping in an extended phone call last week. Chinese and U.S. officials have until Dec. 16 to finalize the details.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — America’s public health system is headed to a “very dangerous place” with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team of anti-vaccine advisors in charge, fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Susan Monarez warned senators on Wednesday.

Describing extraordinary turmoil inside the nation’s health agencies, Monarez and former CDC Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry described exchanges in which Kennedy or political advisors rebuffed data supporting the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Monarez, who was fired after just 29 days on the job following disagreements with Kennedy, told senators deadly diseases like polio and whooping cough, long contained, are poised to make a comeback in the U.S.

“I believe preventable diseases will return, and I believe we will have our children harmed by things they don’t need to be harmed by,” Monarez said before the Senate health committee.

Monarez describes her firing by RFK Jr.

Monarez said she was ordered by Kennedy to resign if she did not sign off on new vaccine recommendations, which are expected to be released later this week by an advisory panel that Kennedy has stocked with medical experts and vaccine skeptics. She said that when she asked for data or science to back up Kennedy’s request to change the childhood vaccination schedule, he offered none.

She added that Kennedy told her “he spoke to the president every day about changing the childhood vaccination schedule.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who chairs the powerful health committee, listened intently as Monarez and Houry described conversations with Kennedy and his advisers.

“To be clear, he said there was not science or data, but he still expected you to change schedule?” Cassidy asked.

Cassidy carefully praised President Trump for his commitment to promoting health policies but made it clear he was concerned about the circumstances surrounding Monarez’s removal.

Houry, meanwhile, described similar exchanges with Kennedy’s political advisors, who took an unprecedented role in preparing materials for meetings of the CDC’s advisory vaccine panel.

Ahead of this week’s meeting of the panel, Houry offered to include data around the hepatitis B shot that is administered to newborns to prevent spread of the deadly disease from the mother. She said a Kennedy advisor dismissed the data as biased because it might support keeping the shots on the schedule.

“You’re suggesting that they wanted to move away from the birth dose, but they were afraid that your data would say that they should retain it?” Cassidy asked.

Critical vaccine decisions are ahead

During the Senate hearing, Democrats, all of whom opposed Monarez’s nomination, also questioned Kennedy’s motives for firing Monarez, who was approved for the job unanimously by Republicans.

“Frankly, she stood up for protecting the well-being of the American people, and for that reason she was fired,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats.

Monarez said it was both her refusal to sign off on new vaccination recommendations without scientific evidence and her unwillingness to fire high-ranking career CDC officials without cause that led to her ousting.

Kennedy has denied Monarez’s accusations that he ordered “rubber-stamped” vaccine recommendations but has acknowledged he demanded firings. He has described Monarez as admitting to him that she is “untrustworthy,” a claim Monarez has denied through her attorney.

While Senate Republicans have been mostly loath to challenge Trump or even Kennedy, many of them have expressed concerns about the lack of availability of COVID-19 vaccines and the health department’s decisions to scale back some childhood vaccines.

Others have backed up Kennedy’s distrust of the nation’s health agencies.

Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, a doctor, aggressively questioned Monarez about her “philosophy” on vaccines as she explained that her decisions were based on science. Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville said Trump was elected to make change and suggested Monarez’s job was to be loyal to Kennedy.

“America needs better than this,” Tuberville said.

The Senate hearing was taking place just a day before the vaccine panel starts its two-day session in Atlanta to discuss shots against COVID-19, hepatitis B and chickenpox. It’s unclear how the panel might vote on the recommendations, though members have raised doubts about whether hepatitis B shots administered to newborns are necessary and have suggested COVID-19 recommendations should be more restricted.

The CDC director must endorse those recommendations before they become official. Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, now serving as the CDC’s acting director, will be responsible for that.

“I’m very nervous about it,” Monarez said of the meeting.

Seitz and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mike Stobbe in New York and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.

Los Angeles County is moving to add more checks on how federal immigration officials can access data collected by the Sheriff’s Department that can be used to track where people drive on any given day.

County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve a motion, introduced by Supervisor Hilda Solis, to beef up oversight of data gathered by law enforcement devices known as automated license plate readers.

It’s already illegal in California for local law enforcement agencies to share information gleaned from license plate readers with federal agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant.

But after a summer of ramped-up deportations, the county supervisors decided to impose more transparency on who’s requesting license plate data from the Sheriff’s Department — and when the agency provides it.

The change will create a clear policy that the data cannot be “disclosed, transferred, or otherwise made available” to immigration officials except when “expressly required” by law or if they have a warrant.

“In a place like Los Angeles County, where residents depend on cars for nearly every aspect of daily life, people must feel safe traveling from place to place without fear that their movements are being tracked, stored, and shared in ways that violate their privacy,” the motion states.

Supervisor Kathryn Barger cast the sole no vote. Helen Chavez, a spokesperson for Barger, said the supervisor voted against the motion because it calls for the county to support a bill that would limit the amount of time law enforcement can keep most license plate data to 60 days. Law enforcement has opposed that bill, she said.

Across the country, law enforcement agencies use cameras to collect data on millions of vehicles, poring over the records for clues to help find stolen vehicles, crime suspects or missing persons.

A sheriff deputy’s patrol car is equipped with a license plate scanner. The plate numbers are instantaneously processed and if the registered vehicle owners are wanted for felonies or certain types of misdemeanors, if they are registered sex or arson offenders or if an Amber Alert has been issued, an alarm will sound to alert the officer.

(Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement it has roughly 366 fixed licensed plate readers from Motorola Vigilant and 476 from Flock Safety in contract cities and unincorporated areas. An additional 89 mobile systems from Motorola are mounted on vehicles that patrol these areas.

The department said its policy already prohibits it from sharing data from plate readers, known as ALPR, with any entity that “does not have a lawful purpose for receiving it.”

“LASD shares ALPR data with other law enforcement agencies only under an executed inter-agency agreement, which requires all parties to collect, access, use, and disclose the data in compliance with applicable law,” the statement read. “LASD has no current agreements for ALPR data sharing with any federal agency.”

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the agency has multiple resources at its “fingertips to ensure federal law is enforced in Los Angeles, and throughout the entire country.”

“These sanctuary politicians’ efforts to stop the Sheriff’s Department from cooperating with ICE are reckless and will not deter ICE from enforcing the law,” McLaughlin said.

Southern California law enforcement departments — including LAPD and authorities in San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties — have been accused of routinely flouting state law by sharing license plate data with federal agents. A recent report from CalMatters cited records obtained by the anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy that showed more than 100 instances in a single month when local police queried databases for federal agencies.

“When you collect this data, it’s really hard to control,” said Catherine Crump, director of UC Berkeley’s Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “It’s no different from once you share your data with Meta or Google, they’re going to repackage your data and sell it to advertisers and you don’t have any idea which of the advertising companies have your data.”

Even with the board cracking down on data sharing, advocates say it’s nearly impossible to ensure federal agents are barred from license plate data in L.A. County.

Dave Maass, the director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said private companies that operate in California still collect and sell data that ICE can use.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has its own license plate readers around Southern California, he said.

Maass said even if a county bars its local sheriff’s department from sharing data with ICE, it’s difficult to guarantee the rule is followed by the rank-and-file. Immigration officers could informally pass on a plate number to a deputy with access to the system.

An L.A. County Sheriff’s Department patrol car equipped with a license plate reader can scan somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 plates a day.

(Los Angeles Times)

“Maybe they run the plate,” Maass says. “Unless there’s some public records release from the Los Angeles side of things, we just really don’t know who accessed the system.”

Under the motion passed Tuesday, the sheriff department would need to regularly report what agencies asked for license plate data to two county watchdogs groups — the Office of Inspector General and the Civilian Oversight Commission.

“Having somebody who is somewhat independent and whose role is more aggressively overseeing reviewing these searches is actually quite a big deal,” Maass said.