LADWP says substance causing ‘earthy odor' in drinking water is not harmful
Some residents in the San Fernando Valley have reported an 'earthy odor' coming from their drinking water, but officials say the cause of the smell is not harmful.
In a statement issued Monday, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said they had received 'inquiries and reports' from some customers regarding the smell and that they began testing which revealed the 'musty' odor is attributable to Geosmin.
Geosmin is a natural compound created from algae, LADWP explained.
'Geosmin can be a nuisance to our customers but it is not harmful,' officials said. 'It is an occasional and seasonal occurrence caused by changing water temperatures and sunlight.'
Narco-terrorists charged with exchanging cocaine for weapons in war against Colombian government
In Monday's statement, LADWP said it began increasing its water quality monitoring, sampling and testing through the Los Angeles Aqueduct System earlier this month. Elevated Geosmin levels were detected on May 13, and 'immediate adjustments' to treatment and operations were made to control the situation, LADWP said.
Residents can remove the odor at home by running their water through a carbon filter pitcher or a carbon filter in their refrigerator water line, the department of water and power advised.
Questions or concerns surrounding water quality should be directed to LADWP's Water Quality Hotline: 213-367-3182.
While not harmful in drinking water, the American Chemical Society says Geosmin (C12H22O) can cause serious eye damage or irritation. Studies have shown that Yellow fever mosquitos (Aedes aegypti) are attracted to Geosmin, and the substance can be used as bait for mosquito traps.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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‘These are not numbers – they are people': what ex-communist Slovenia can teach the world about child poverty
Much of the world doesn't have a clue what to do about child poverty, or even when to do it. In the UK the Labour government recently delayed its flagship policy on tackling the issue until the autumn. But if you're looking for inspiration, it might be worth asking what Slovenia has been getting right. The country has the lowest rates of child poverty in Europe. Why? The glaringly obvious reason is that Slovenia is a very economically equal country. 'The heritage of the social state, from communist times, is still here,' says Marta Gregorčič, a professor at the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, which addresses household distress and poverty. However, this is more than a broad-spectrum equality story. There is a deep, stated commitment to eradicating child poverty in Slovenia, and you can read that in various and sometimes counterintuitive ways. There is a national action plan for children across all kinds of metrics: affordable early years care; educational inclusivity, particularly for Roma children; protective measures on mental health; access to housing – which is transparent and prioritised. The country has 'very strong humanitarian and civil organisations,' says Gregorčič, but Slovenians also take as given that it is everyone's job to make sure kids don't get siloed by social class. And then, seeing one of those organisations up close, one driver of the country's success surfaces constantly: they are never satisfied; one child in poverty is too many. The numbers speak for themselves – the amount of children at risk of deprivation in Slovenia is 10.3%, just under half the EU average of 24.4%, according to Eurostat. The UK is no longer included in these figures, but for comparison, a separate Unicef study found that the UK was third from bottom of the OECD in 2021, and that only Turkish and Colombian children were more likely to be living below the poverty line. Slovenia, in that study? Still first. I'm here to visit Zveza Anita Ogulin & ZPM (ZPM for short), a children's charity in the east of Ljubljana, in a set of low-rise municipal buildings on a tidy, grass-banked street whose name translates as Proletarian Road. Doris Rojo, its head of communications, is annoyed that it gets these buildings rent-free from the state, but has to pay rent on the larger site opposite, which houses a community centre and food bank. Rojo refers frequently to the 'socialism that is left from the past', to explain many features of a Slovenian childhood: the custom of cooked meals at school that lots of children don't pay for, for instance, or the idea that kids have a right to a holiday, by the sea or in the mountains, and no one would think of organising a group trip that didn't include a cross-section of social classes. 'This was considered part of life,' Rojo says. 'Everyone went on holiday, at least once a year. The state even owned apartments by the sea, available for workers on reduced terms.' Somehow, capitalism never attained the status of inevitability or modernity in Slovenian policy discourse – just a different way of doing things, that is only sometimes better. When they call a street after the proletariat, they don't mean that in a bad way. 'Social protection policy in Slovenia has always quite strongly supported families and children,' Gregorčič says, noting that female workforce participation has a long history, going back to the second world war. 'All these policies for women in the labour market, all the subsidies for parental leave, I believe contribute to a lower risk of poverty.' She goes on to list these assistances and allowances: 'maternity and paternity leave at 100% pay; the right to reduced working hours; a childbirth grant; breastfeeding breaks; allowances for large families; allowances for childcare if you have children with disabilities; quite a significant child allowance – €115 a month for the first child in low income households'. Policy, history and social cohesion interact in subtle ways. Female workforce participation has also created a tradition of grandparental childcare, but family help is only part of the picture. Peter Wostner, a policy expert at the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and Development, describes this geographically. 'We're a very small country, which internally is very diverse. To give you a flavour – there are 33 or 34 regions within Slovenia by which people principally identify themselves – a similar number of different dialects, different cuisines, different everything. Why am I mentioning that? Because of that element of community, the networks within these areas are strong.' Perhaps more generous attitudes created the conditions for a solid social safety net, or perhaps the security creates more generosity, or more likely they're in a feedback loop. Covid triggered a scramble for emergency support common to many European nations, but its aftermath brought on a deeper consideration of the struggles many working families faced here. In 2021, a new child welfare advisory group was formed made up of NGOs, the local Unicef branch and the government-funded Social Protection Institute. Among other things, it consulted 37 children aged 12 to 15 from all over Slovenia, who made proposals on a draft child guarantee action plan. It had fast, concrete results – 13,000 of the most deprived children were guaranteed computer access by 2024 – and the overall finding was that they needed a 'social protection system for the entire family, not only for the child in need within the family. After all, a child is part of a family and shares the same fate as its other members.' Maybe that sounds obvious, that you can't get serious about children's dignity and life chances if you're not also serious about their parents' wages and rents. Economists like Gregorčič will acknowledge the 'strong social protections for families', but she immediately moves on to stubborn pockets of deprivation: 'the migrants, Roma, the homeless, the erased'. (When Slovenia declared independence in 1991, 25,000 people were removed from the registry of permanent residents, thereby losing social and civil rights, and disappearing from the statistics). 'There were 5,000 children among them, and now they are grown up,' Gregorčič continues, 'but it is still a huge problem, the marginalised groups who are missing from the statistics.' The assembled team at ZPM – Rojo, plus Tea Dorić, a social worker, Julija Mišič, the communications lead, and Živa Logar, programme coordinator – also give short shrift to the child-poverty rankings, because the numbers are going in the wrong direction. 'We still have 41,000 children living under the poverty line,' Rojo says, 'and these are not just numbers, they are people.' Slovenia's population is small – two million; if that were scaled up to a UK-sized population, it would equate to 1.5 million kids. In fact, in the UK there are 4.5 million children living in poverty, almost a third. It's almost as if our runaway numbers have washed away our seriousness of purpose. Dorić is technically not a social worker but a social pedagogue – a more holistic form of careworker, concerned with equality and relationships as much as material needs. A lot of European countries practise social pedagogy (Poland, Hungary, Spain, Germany), which if you describe it conceptually sounds kind of: 'Meh, don't we all do that?' You need examples to really get it. Yvalia Febrer, an associate professor of social work at Kingston University, offered this: 'In the UK, you'll get a social worker who will say, 'I'm little Jonny's social worker, I'm not your social worker, even though you're his mum. I'm not interested in your housing issues … I'm just looking at his needs, and whether they're being met. If you're not able to meet them, then that's neglect.' A social pedagogue will say: 'If the problem is housing, let's fix the housing.'' Dorić is the first social pedagogue I've met in real life, and she is everything about that model you would dream of: fierce, imaginative, indefatigable, humane. 'We are trying to say to the wider public, children are not inherently bad. They're amazing, they're so loving and smart, they are doing regular things.' Mišič chimes in: 'Society is bad, not the children. Our parents can't pay the bills, they can't buy food, they can't go on holiday, they are alone.' ZPM started as a charity providing holidays, nearly 70 years ago, but it has expanded its mission to provide a range of services – extra tuition, financial support, therapy, youth groups, food parcels (particularly during Covid) and financial advice. 'It's hard to tell someone how to better manage their finances if you know that they don't have enough. Families will spend a long time walking the line of just about meeting their family's needs, and then one crisis, and the debt keeps on growing. It snowballs,' Mišič says. That collective memory of a socialist past cuts two ways. 'There is a perception that people who are employed cannot be poor. People find it hard to imagine even when it's happening to them,' Mišič continues. Rojo says the stats are lagging the reality: 'But what we are facing really, is that the children we're working with, who are now in poor families, are mainly those where one or both parents work.' Across the road from ZPM, at the youth and community centre, Nuša Lesar, a well-known TV presenter, is running a workshop for teenagers; behind that, there's a food bank, crates of identical flour and supplies, plainly corporately donated; in a third room, I met Vedran Jovanovski, 14, and Tamara Grozden Mirosavlejevič, 11. Vedran is a migrant from North Macedonia; his father is a barber, his mother was a social worker but has to retrain to work in Slovenia. They moved two and a half years ago. His English is excellent, as is his Slovenian. 'For older people, like my mum, it's more difficult. But it's not that hard.' He wants to be an engineer or an architect, and already dresses like one – natty skinny trousers and a blazer. 'We had our own house in Macedonia; my dad had his own barber shop. We had everything, but the situation there is not good,' he says. (The country is politically turbulent and riven with corruption.) 'We didn't come here with friends – we just decided on our own to move and got here, didn't know anything. But we kind of fitted in with people, and with society.' Tamara is quieter. Her mother is a doctor, her father died a few years ago. She loves to dance and teaches younger children traditional Slovenian moves, but both of them come to the children's centre for extra tutoring. She doesn't want to be a doctor because she can't stand the sight of blood, but that's as far as she's got on the career planning, which is fair enough. She's only 11. A core principle of the children's centre, the holidays, the third sector overall, is that kids shouldn't be excluded from anything because of their income or class, whether that's TV workshops or computers or holidays by the sea. In so many ways, the Slovenian story traces that of western democracies everywhere: welfare states have been contracting since the financial crisis. That might show up immediately as a direct impact – Gregorčič describes 'restrictive measures straight after the financial crash, which stopped child allowances being a human right; they became a social right. At that time, childhood poverty rose a lot.' Or it might show up over time as wage erosion and underfunded public services, and that arc would be familiar across a large number of countries. But where Slovenia differs is in the amount of child deprivation it will tolerate. 'We know they are not hungry at school,' Gregorčič says. 'We have free meals in school. 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Chicago's new FBI boss touts new squad focused on fentanyl and says immigration enforcement is a ‘sustained effort'
As a newly minted special agent for the FBI in the early 2000s, Douglas DePodesta cut his teeth on a squad that went after Colombian and Mexican drug cartels that used the city as a hub for trafficking thousands of tons of narcotics every year. Two decades later, DePodesta has taken over the reins of the FBI's Chicago Field Office amid a push from the Trump administration to go after a new generation of cartel bosses and the dangerous drugs they import, particularly the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl. 'It's killing an American every seven minutes,' DePodesta said, adding fentanyl has been cited routinely as a source for an epidemic of overdoses and deaths across the nation. 'That is scary, one poor individual takes a pill and it kills them.' Larry Hoover 'deserves to be in prison,' Chicago FBI boss says of Gangster Disciples founder as lawyers praise Trump choice 'This was an act of cowardice': Charges filed against Chicago man in the fatal shooting near DC Jewish museum DePodesta's comments came in an exclusive interview with the Tribune on Thursday, several months after he started his role as special agent in charge in August. To help combat the growing fentanyl problem, he told the Tribune he recently created a 12-member squad with agents from various jurisdictions to focus on trafficking by the cartels in an attempt to disrupt a complex network that spans from Central and South America to Asia. 'We are looking to cut off the supply of fentanyl and also the precursors to fentanyl, the chemicals,' DePodesta said. 'It's really interesting. It's a little different problem than just the cartels, but it's also the same, right? Because it's a chemical we're trying to cut off. So we're working with our international partners (because) a lot of it comes from China. … I'm very excited about it.' Taking over the nation's fourth-largest FBI field office has been a sort of homecoming for DePodesta, 54. Though he's a Detroit-area native, he spent 14 years as a special agent in Chicago, where he rose to head the office's Technical Program that mines digital and multimedia evidence to support investigations. Though initially tasked to investigate cartels, DePodesta eventually had a hand in some of the era's biggest investigations, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and its connections to financiers in Chicago, and the corruption probe that same year that felled then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, he said. DePodesta said that while he only assisted in the Blagojevich probe, it stood out in his mind 'just how rampant the corruption was in that investigation.' 'It was crazy, right?' he said. 'Anything to get a dollar.' DePodesta was selected for the plum Chicago position by then-Director Christopher Wray, and landed here a week and a half before the Democratic National Convention. Though it was a bit of a trial by fire, DePodesta said he was fortunate to inherit a 'great team' that had spent years planning how to mitigate security threats while still leaving room for protests and other events. 'It really showcased how great this city is and the law enforcement partnerships we have here,' DePodesta said, sitting in his corner office at FBI headquarters on West Roosevelt Road with views of the downtown skyline. 'And the great people, right? At the end of the day it was about the people, everyone from the hotel workers, the bus drivers. It really showed what Chicago is and what it can be.' In January came the change in administrations and with it a new boss in Washington, FBI Director Kash Patel. DePodesta acknowledged there have been shifting priorities for the bureau since, but said that's typical whenever there's a change in leadership. 'This is my fourth director. And each time a new director comes in there are new priorities and new shifts, so we are seeing a little bit of a shift in priorities now,' he said. 'But I can tell you our core mission is the same: Uphold the Constitution and protect the American people.' In addition to cartels and fentanyl trafficking, DePodesta said his agents have had a hand in one of the Trump administration's other hot-button issues: immigration enforcement. DePodesta said the Chicago FBI, which has more than 1,000 total employees, has partnered locally with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, embedding some of the FBI's 450 agents on the street 'helping them effect arrests.' The targets, DePodesta said, 'are people that have removal orders that have a criminal history — murderers, rapists,' adding that the effort was 'ongoing' and had no timetable for a conclusion. 'It is not a surge; it is a sustained effort,' DePodesta said. He said no new agents have been added to fulfill the FBI's role in immigration enforcement — instead, agents from other squads have rotated and worked overtime. DePodesta said that despite the new priorities, the FBI will continue to focus on its bread-and-butter areas of operation, including terrorism, gang and gun violence, crimes against children, drug trafficking and public corruption. 'The great thing about Chicago is we have about 1,100 employees here, so we have the ability to concentrate on a lot of things,' he said. 'Although we're getting pulled in different directions … we are big enough we can do a lot of stuff really well.' As always, the bureau has had to adapt with the times. As gangs have fragmented, he said, the FBI has learned to deploy resources more strategically, with agents assisting Chicago police and other local authorities in targeting violent offenders on the street. One of the FBI's biggest assets, he said, is time, with the agency having the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture of who is driving violence. 'We have to look to see where we can make the most impact, get the most bang for our buck,' he said. 'So we determine which cases we should go after, if it's the most violent offenders, if it's the leaders of gangs, that's where we go.' One of Chicago's most notorious leaders, Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover, this past week had his federal life sentence commuted by Trump. Though Hoover is still serving a 200-year sentence for his state court conviction for murder, making him likely to stay behind bars for the time being, DePodesta said in his interview with the Tribune that Hoover 'deserves to be in prison.' 'The president of the United States has the authority to pardon whoever he wishes,' he said. 'I think Larry Hoover caused a lot of damage in this city and he deserves to be in prison and he will continue to be imprisoned in the state system.' DePodesta also noted that homicide rates were way below their high-water mark during the pandemic, and that non-fatal shootings were also down last year — drops he attributed in part to federal efforts, including the Crime Gun Intelligence Center recently established by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 'I think that's really shedding light on who's doing a lot of these shootings, and we've been able to bring those people to justice,' he said. While multinational terrorist threats such as Al Qaeda and ISIS have quieted somewhat in recent years, the bureau's counterterrorism efforts are 'not going away,' DePodesta said, pointing to the the assassination of two members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., last week, a crime allegedly carried out by Chicagoan Elias Rodriguez. DePodesta said that although Rodriguez was charged in Washington, the Chicago FBI, which conducted a raid on Rodriguez's Albany Park apartment on the morning after his arrest, is continuing to have a role in that investigation. 'As you can imagine we follow every thread, every lead to understand exactly everything that subject was going through, anyone he was talking to, figure out the whole thought process he was going through,' DePodesta said. 'And that's for two reasons. Obviously for prosecution, but also, we want to understand what someone like this is thinking to try to stop the next one.' As for public corruption, DePodesta noted the parade of political titans that have been felled in recent years in part due to the FBI's work, from former governors such as Blagojevich and George Ryan to ex-Chicago Ald. Edward Burke, who is currently in prison, and former House Speaker Michael Madigan, who will be sentenced in two weeks. 'Obviously our public corruption program is unfortunately still very busy,' DePodesta said. Asked if the most recent conviction of Madigan in February put an end to politicians with their hands out, DePodesta gave a slight smile. 'I don't think that's true,' DePodesta said. 'Unfortunately there is a culture of corruption in this city and it's my job to ensure that the taxpayers get honest service for their tax dollars.' DePodesta grew up in the Detroit area, where his father worked in the steel industry, and he still considers it home. He graduated from Ferris State University in Michigan with a degree in criminal justice. He began his career in law enforcement as a patrol officer in Cincinnati, where he eventually worked his way up to investigations and joined a multi-agency task force focused on cargo shipping. 'Back in the day it was baby formula. … A truck full of that, even back then, was like $250,000,' he said. 'So that kind of gave me the thirst to do something different.' He joined the bureau in 2002 and was assigned to Chicago, which he acknowledged was 'not my first choice.' But after settling in Wrigleyville, he said, he quickly grew to love the city — though his baseball loyalties still remain with the Detroit Tigers. 'It's different neighborhoods quilted together to make a community,' DePodesta said of Chicago. 'And I would say the law enforcement community is some of the strongest partnerships I've seen.' In 2016, DePodesta was promoted to chief of the Sensitive Operations Support Unit at FBI Headquarters in Washington. He later moved back to Detroit, where in 2019 he became assistant special agent in charge of the FBI field office there, responsible for managing all violent crime, gang, and drug investigations across Michigan. From there, DePodesta went back to headquarters to head up what he called 'the business side of the house,' the Finance and Facilities Division, where he was in charge of a $1 billion budget that included more than 650 field locations and 18 million square feet of office space. He was named interim special agent in charge of the Memphis Field Office in 2023 and spent about a year and a half there before finally landing back in Chicago. He now lives in Evanston with his wife and their 3-year-old golden retriever, Charlie. With three years to go before the FBI's mandatory retirement age of 57, DePodesta said he'd love it if he could call it a career here. But there still a lot to do. 'I think I have a lot left in my tank,' he said. jmeisner@
