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This MORALFI AM six forty more stimulating talk. Didn't want to talk fire for just a moment. You heard the Conway's promo that some of the firefighters are showing high levels of lead and mercury, the ones that fought the eating in the Palisades fires, which makes you wonder how they got that. What's where did it come from? They
were breathing into smoke. The smoke obviously had levels of lead and mercury in it, and it makes you wonder what contained it that burned and then what's the word a rated that I guess not aer rated, vaporized it and then put it into the smoke. But we are seeing calfires come out, and they said fire risk is higher in far more areas than what we have said in the past. KTLA was reporting on the new fire.
Map well three minutes after wildfires ravaged our region. Cal Fire has released updated fire maps for southern California.
This marks the first.
Time they have been updated in more than a decade. The maps are piled by the State Forestry and Fire Protection Department and designate three levels of fire hazards. Moderate high, and very high. This is based on variables like vegetation, terrain, and recent burn history. Updated maps for fifteen counties in central California were released two weeks ago and more than one point two million acres were added into the hazard zones.
All right, and a total of three and a half million acres statewide.
Now here's where this gets interesting.
According to Orange County Register, new fire hazard zones appear to leave out at least half of the neighborhoods that were burned during the Eton fire. So you have people that live in areas that were decimated by fire, and cal Fire has not added those neighborhoods to any sort of even moderate risk area. The State Forestry and Fire Protection Department compiled the maps. They indicate where the probability of the fire is the greatest of the next thirty
to fifty years. And then with that you have to consider the different potential implications for rebuilding, and some of the homes and businesses that are rebuilding are we're gonna have new building codes because of the new hazards that would extend the hazard map, extend some of the susceptible areas a little bit.
Further into the communities.
And again when you talk about the new building codes, I think there need to be some changes. Some changes have been entered into the new building codes, including some of the fire or what is it, the ember resistant vents, that sort of thing. You have to wonder about some of the building materials. Again, talking back on the firefighters that inhaled lead and mercury.
Will there be.
Will there be codes that address materials that are being used to make sure that they don't have any of those happiness metals that are a part of those I have to wonder how much this is going to delay some of the rebuilding efforts, how much additional cost this may put on some of the additional building efforts in Altadena.
Hazard maps released at least fourteen years ago designated just three to six blocks along the northern edge of the neighborhoods as being a very high fire severity zone, and the previous map on they had a very small strip along the foothills in the bottom of the mountains. They've extended those a bit further, but as we know, the fire moved further into Altadena than even what these.
Maps had projected in the past.
If we were to equate this to a different natural threat. You know that when you buy a house, you have to determine whether or not it's in a flood zone. Some areas are high, you know, high flood risk areas. Others are not high flood risk areas. So imagine if you have a home that's in a moderate flood risk area, and and so you have to have certain codes, you have to have certain selance along the foundation of your home,
whatever that might be. And then all of a sudden, you have this massive flood that comes through and it decimates a home, and it creates all kinds of havoc and you have to be evacuated. And then they come out with a new flood risk map and they go, yeah, but this home that was just deemed to be a flood loss, that's not really in a dangerous area. Imagine if after Katrina, evaluators went through New Orleans and they said, well, this whole ninth Ward that was underwater, that's not really
a high risk area. We would say, we're still draining. How do you say it's not a high risk area. We're still draining the water from the flood. In the same way we're saying, how do you say this is not a high risk area. We're still shoveling ashes. How is this not high fire risk. I'm still sifting through the remains of what used to be my house, and you're telling me there isn't a high fire risk.
There is a high fire risk. And so some people are saying swing and a miss. Okay, if I.
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Okay, if I AM six forty, more stimulating talk, Chris Merril. Yesterday I was talking with you about this twenty three and Me filing for bankruptcy.
Maybe you remember the story ABC seven was reporting.
On aenetic testing company. Twenty three and Me has now filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. The firm, valued at fifty million dollars, is pushing for a buyout. So far, the board has rejected all offers, now saying a court supervised sale is the.
Best path forward.
Twenty three and Me will continue operations during this process. This, of course, comes just one day after California Attorney General Rob Bonda issued a consumer alert about the potential of this very thing happening, reminding customers consider invoking their rights to have twenty three and meter delete their data and destroy genetic sampler.
Yeah, destroy genetic examples. That means rinse. You're spitting down the sink, because what happens is you spit in the tube, you mail it to them, and then they keep it and they've got a big safe.
I'm not joking.
They have a big vault filled with little samples of spittle and they hang on to that stuff, and then they have the analysis comes out, and then that data is stored on their servers. And what happens is you can access the data, you can download that data, you can save your data. So while Rob Bonta says you should delete the data, exercise your right to delete the data, you can download your data so that you will still have access to it. But it does get a bit
more complicated than that. And I talked about this yesterday and I said, I wonder what's gonna happen with all these you know, what's gonna happen with the samples, what's gonna happen with the with the data? With everybody's portfolio of of of their information. Because twenty three and meters will like other genetic testing companies. They you can use that information and twenty three meters the second largest beyond ancestry. You can use that information to evaluate some of your
health risks. That's twenty three and meters. Big thing is that they do the genetic testing, so you can see do I have a higher risk of, say, breast cancer, do I have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's, whatever it might be, and then you can use that accordingly so that you can plan your life out and then make sure your funeral plans are in place. You don't have to rely on your terrible children because they stopped loving you the minute that they moved out. So what
happens with your info? Though, even if you download it, if you're someone that uses it for genetic testing, right, you've got it. If you're somebody that uses that for piecing together, say a family tree, you're going to lose the tree what you can do.
You're gonna lose the connections.
You're gonna lose the details on it because as everyone is deleting their information from it, all of a sudden it no longer connects on their database. So suppose that I'm gonna use a simple example here. Suppose that it's you and your sibling and you've both spit in a tube and you mail it in, and then you've got a profile that says here's your profile, and you you say, am I matching with anyone else who's made their profile available for potential mask matching? And it says, actually, your
your profile matches your siblings. So your your brother or your sister here it is.
Now.
Imagine that your brother or your sister deletes their profile, all of a sudden, it no longer matches you.
See.
So what some people are doing right now is they're taking screenshots of those matches. Because even if you if you download your profile, it is not showing any connections because your profile on your your computer, your cloud, whoever you say it, if it is not tied with theirs, then it doesn't it doesn't show that connection any longer.
So some people are taking some screenshots ahead of time to say, oh, I want to make sure I don't lose my great great great great uncle and find out you know that they came over on a boat from Norway. So they're they're taking screenshots before a bunch of data gets deleted. You don't necessarily need to delete it quite yet. Bonta is warning you you could take you could take advantage of this. You should do it. If the sale goes through and you're concerned about where that data might go,
you can delete it. You can't take care of it right now if you want, you can take care of it in the future. But there are there are some questions and if they end up going dark, then you can delete it also. That'll be part of any bankruptcy filing, is to make sure that the eyes are dotted.
And the t's are crossed.
Don't know if they're going to actually liquidate though, because the co founder, who owns forty nine percent of the stock, she's part of the group that keeps blocking the sale because she wants to buy it. Twenty three meters used
to be worth, by the way, six billion dollars. Now it's only worth fifty million because they had a data breach in twenty twenty three and people freaked out as well they should, because not only would you be losing your social security information and things like that, but all of a sudden, people aren't literally seeing what your DNA is.
Made up of.
You talk about identity theft. Okay, if I AM six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeart rad app.
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AM sixty on demand anytime the iHeartRadio App. For those of you that want the death penalty back, good news. It sounds like the district attorney says, yep, we need to have the death penalty. Remember Hakman ran on this. He says, we're gonna bring that death penalty back. We're going to make sure that the consequences for the most severe crime are in fact the most severe of penalties.
And so he says, it is back. Baby. The thing is, is it.
Probably not here ABC seven was talking about this. We'll let them sort of explain it and we'll we'll dive into it here.
This, of course, is a major policy change, and it is effective immediately meeting when appropriate, LA County prosecutors could once again receive the go ahead to seek the death penalty. I just spoke to DA Nathan Haffman this afternoon about his announcem, and he explained the exceedingly rare cases when something like this might come into play.
Let me give you two examples. If we were to have a Sandy Hook type of situation and over twenty school kids got murdered by a vicious murderer, or we had a Las Vegas situation and over fifty people were to be gunned down by a sniper. In those situations, the death penalty would be back on the table for consideration.
I know, I'm a problem with that.
I actually kind of like the way California does it, where the only way you can have the death penalty is if it is murdered with some special circumstances. I know some states are trying to put the death penalty on the table for you know, kitty diddlers and things like that, but I just feel like that when it comes to the death penalty, that is the most severe of all penalties and it really needs to be reserved
for the most severe of all cases. Feel free to disagree, but I kind of like the way that the California does it. It's not off the table, but it is it is exceedingly rare. Serial killers, mass killers, that kind of thing feels more appropriate to me. That said, are we really going to see it?
Hawkmann says prosecutors may call for the death penalty in special circumstance murder cases and says it will only be pursued after an extensive and comprehensive review. Under the prior Da George Gascone, seeking the death penalty was off the table. Keep it to mind, the last execution in the state of California was back in two thousand and six, and since twenty nineteen, Governor Newsom has had a moratorium on executions.
And that's why.
So, yeah, it's back, you could prosecute, you're going to ask for it. But we've had courts that have said that our death penalty in California is effectively cruel and unusual because it is not actually a death sentence.
It is a little it's a little bit strange. It feels like.
It feels like there's some cognitive dissonance going on here because a judge said that the death penalty in California is cruel and unusual because we're not putting people to death. Well, here's the logic behind that. The logic is that when you condemn someone to death, but then you put them on death row and they spend twenty thirty forty years. The judge said that the death sentence in California is more like life in prison with the possibility of execution.
In other words, you are being told that your penalty is one thing, but then it just looms over you for the next few decades. Now, imagine you're somebody who was sentenced to death in the mid nineties or even perhaps the mid eighties, and you have gone through the appeals process, and that appeals process can take decades in and of itself, So then you get to Okay, well that's it.
You've exhausted all of your Now you really are on death row.
We haven't had an execution since two thousand and six, which means we've got people on death row that have been there for forty plus years. I mean, the majority of people on death row in California will die of natural causes before they die from lethal injection.
It's just that's a fact.
So even when you've got Hawkman saying we're going to bring the death penalty back, what it is is merely an argument in the penalty phase of the of the trial. Because Newsom says, moratorium that's been going on for the last six years. We are almost twenty years since the
last actual execution. And again, even if you are sentenced to death, you're probably going to go through an exhaustive appeals process that is going to take decades, and by then will we even still have the death penalty in California? By then, will we have another governor who wants to put a moratorium on it. I just it feels very political to me. It doesn't feel like it's practice.
Newsom's saying it's a moral and costly the tax payers. I also spoke this afternoon to our legal expert. I asked him about the true impact if and when a new death penalty sentence is reached in La County.
And again this is from ABC seven.
End of the day, Newsom's moratorium is still in effect.
So it is.
Call it a political move, call it whatever you know. I know that there are other counties that are still sentencing people to death, but there, you know, nothing's being done as far as the actual application, you know, enforcement of that penalty in California.
All right, So is it political? Yeah, of course he's fulfilling a campaign promise. But there may be a long game here.
So imagine, if you've got.
The the top prosecutor in the biggest county in the West. I just hear the biggest population wise in the right massive and now imagine that you've got to prosecute and says we're not gonna do the death penalty, okay, which we had with gascon all right, so is there any is there any push for it, Is there any momentum? No,
that stalls the momentum. So while it may be political, and you may have Hawkmann following through and saying, yeah, listen, this was my promise, and now a promise has made promises, cap blah blah blah, it does add to the growing list of counties that have said we want to bring the death penalty back, and it does put pressure on a future governor to maybe hold off on another moratorium like Newsom has even and I don't think anybody believes that we're likely to see a GOP rising in California
anytime soon.
I'm just saying it can't happen.
Of course, We've seen that happen in a number of different states, but I'm not saying it's probably not gonna happen anytime soon. However, is it possible that the next governor is someone who may want.
To end that moratorium.
Maybe they're liberal on some issues, but when it comes to the death penalty, they go. Yeah, I can see it being practical, and I've got the support of the DA in Los Angeles. I've got the support of the DA in and I'm not gonna I don't know which other counties have it. I would assume more of the more conservative counties have have.
Sentences for death penalty.
So while it may seem political now, the political impact could have practical impacts in the future.
That's all I got on that one.
K I AM six forty Chris Merril live everywhere in the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand k if I AM six forty.
More E Stimulating Talk Chris Merrill.
The people who are cleaning up from the fires are finding that they've got another kind of infestation.
Kykel was talking with one of the homeowners there.
Betsy CON's dipping pool is not massive, but it could still be a massive problem, as the once clear water has now turned green and bubbly filled with who knows what, since it can't be maintained.
The machinery burnt down, there's no electricity, there's no water source to change out the water that's in it now that's full of all the toxicity that just fell in as the house.
Was burning in short time. Experts say pools in the fire zones have turned into natural ponds full of murky, stagnant water, perfect condition for mosquitoes to grow.
Ah come on man as insult to injury.
They are worried about more than twelve hundred swimming pools and the Eaton fire burn area alone, maybe fourteen hundred more nearby also filled with ash and debris.
All right, so you've got all those pools and what is it.
You can have about sixty billion mosquitos in one teaspoon of water, and so that means that we will have wet a quadrillion, sextillion, septilian to.
Deca trillion, deca jillion. It can be a lot of mosquitoes.
Jason Farnett is with the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District.
Well, one swimming pool can breed up to a million mosquitos or grow up to a million mosquitos in one month. So with thousands of swimming pools in that area, we think that it could could be a significant.
Increase millions more mosquitoes that could spread diseases like westnole virus or dan gay Oh yeah, or.
Just irritate you and fly around your ear when you're trying to fall asleep.
Twenty twenty three, we got the very first locally transmitted case of dangay fever in Pasadena, and we had more cases last year the following year.
Okay, so you just lost your house.
You had this devastating fire come through, you were evacuated, you had to stay in some sort of temporary housing, be it a hotel, a motel, a friend's place, a backyard, a tent, an RV, I don't know, but you're staying in some sort of a temporary place and you're trying to sort things out with the your insurance company, and the insurance company is trying to say, well, you know, we didn't start the fire. It was always burning since
the world's been turning. And then you are trying to argue with them over who's going to replace it, And then you're trying to get ahold of contractors, and contractors are not available because everyone else is contacted a contractor, and so they're getting their places rebuilt. And then if you do go back to your place, you're gonna get ding gay fever. I'll tell you what If there's anything that causes a calexit, it's gonna be things like this.
And so we expect to see some local transmission in dan Gay this year, and so we're working hard to make sure that that any mosquito activity as a result of the eating fire doesn't contribute or increase that risk.
All right, speaking of insects that are breeding in Alta Dina, did you see who else is descending on Alta Dina right now? It's it's the other bugs, little lawyers. Oh, it's another group of parasitic, parasitic blood set Aaron Brockovich Benjamin Crump descending on the charred ruins of Altadena. As the aftermath of the deadly eaten fire shifts to the courthouse and southern California, Edison is in the crosshairs. So it's not just these two high profile attorneys, it's everybody
that can get that can get attention. With some homeowners, you're talking billions of dollars at stake.
So consider this. Have you ever ever had to deal with lawyer?
I have maybe been in a car accident, or or maybe you've gone through a divorce or something I had to deal with a lawyer. If you if you've dealt with a lawyer where there's damages involved, the lawyer takes a cut that's usually around a third.
All right.
So for instance, I had a I had a lawsuit, I was I had some issues a few years back. I had a lawsuit, we settled out of court, and I was due some money.
My lawyer happily took cut.
And at one point I did the breakdown on how much he got paid per hour, and it was something ridiculous like he was making I think he made over one thousand dollars an hour just based on just based on the settlement amount, right, and he him taking a third of the settlement. So if you're talking billions of dollars at stake, we'll make the math simple. Let's say you're an attorney that is able to recoup three billion
dollars worth. You have a bunch of clients in this neighborhood and that neighborhood, and that neighborhood, and uh and and most of the work is duplicated because you're basically able to say, here's what I found about so cal Edison's responsibilities, and then you take that knowledge and you apply it to all of your different clients say you collect three billion dollars, you're taking home a billion dollar paycheck.
A billion dollar paycheck.
Now, I don't know that any one of these attorneys is actually going to clear a billion dollars, but there will be attorneys that clear millions. This is why I watch suits LA. I just love the drama. I just love it. Who doesn't love it? So anyway, the advice from the La Times is when you're trying to pick out an attorney, ask questions like have you ever done a wildfire case before? And how are you gonna do this? These are just basics when it comes to any attorney.
Have you addressed a case like mine or similar in the past, have you taken it to trial?
What's your track record? And what's your plan? What do you have for bullets in the barrel? Right now?
What are you ready to do here? Get bullets in the chamber? I should say, somebody's gonna ask me to be.
Like you more.
You don't know how guns work, because they'll completely miss the rest of the point. They'll just focus in on my analogy. Just be careful. If you are in titled with some money, I want you to get it to make sure You're not getting a bad attorney and just getting taken to the cleaners.
All right, great.
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