Elliot Copen, 17, was worried the Scouting America camp he had visited dozens of times in an undeveloped canyon of the Santa Monica Mountains would feel empty.

The Palisades fire roared down the canyon 11 months ago, destroying the historic lodge and its Hogwarts-like interior (albeit without the “flying balls,” Copen noted), a smattering of cabins and the trading post where Scouts would buy candies and memorabilia. Weeks later, heavy rains sent mud and debris careening into the canyon, burying sections of the camp in feet of dirt.

Copen, an Eagle Scout with Troop 67 in Santa Monica and a leader in the Scouts’ honor society Order of the Arrow, had seen the videos online of what the disasters had done to the camp where he had made so many memories. “It was just weird,” he said. “It felt wrong.”

On Saturday, he was one of about four dozen Scouts, parents and regional Scouting leaders that headed to camp for the first time since the fire, picked up some tools and got dirty. It was a humble and cautious start: remove some of the invasive species that were taking advantage of the open soil and dig out the camp’s veterans memorial that the mudslides had partially covered.

It was also a much-needed moment for the Scouts to mourn their loss, spend time with their peers and give back to the land that has given them so much.

Camp Josepho is one of three camps Scouting America’s Western Los Angeles County Council owns and operates. While their Catalina and Sequoia sites are certainly breathtaking, Josepho — which is just minutes from the city — was an accessible haven from the hustle and bustle of algebra tests, essay deadlines and school drama.

Since the 1940s, the 110-acre camp has served as a second home in the wild for thousands of Scouts. The land was gifted by Ganna and Anatol Josepho — a silent film star and the inventor of the photo booth, respectively. Its centerpiece was a hangar-like lodge built out of redwood by the aircraft manufacturer Donald Douglas, which is listed as a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument. Over the years, the camp has hosted the Scouts’ Order of the Arrow induction ceremonies, service weekends focused on projects like brush removal and many good old-fashioned camping trips.

Eagle Scout Ryan Brode, 21, with Troop 50, tries to read the fire charred plaque that lies at the foot of a hiking trail.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

When Copen entered the camp, he felt relieved. It was no longer the fire-stricken wasteland he saw in the videos, but in fact quite green. Yes, some of the green was invasive species, but some was made up of native grasses and shrubby chaparral plants. Many of the towering sycamore trees and elder oaks — probably far older than even the adult Scout leaders — still blot out the midday sun with new, green leaves sprouting from their charred trunks.

Noah Rottner, an Eagle Scout with Troop 777 in West Hills who is also in the Order of the Arrow, said he had hoped to “help rebuild most of the stuff that’s been burnt and get most of the memories back.” But as Rottner, 15, talked with his peers, “we were just deciding, maybe we could start new memories in it, and start a new journey.”

The Scouting council likely won’t try to reconstruct all of the camp’s facilities. Lee Harrison, 54, chief executive of the council, acknowledged that since the Palisades fire likely won’t be the last to burn through the land, a smaller footprint at the site is ultimately more sustainable.

Scouting America member Nolan Ironhill, 18, spends a moment with his thoughts while taking a breather from clearing mud from the base of a World War II Memorial.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Copen fondly remembers a weekend before the fire, when his group spent the entire time at a fairly isolated campground on site. They played cards, cooked by the fire and learned how to whittle.

“When I look back on it, it brings me joy,” Copen said. “I’ll always look at the camp as a very happy place, because practically all my memories here are happy.”

More than 100 Scouting families lost their homes in the January fires, Harrison said. Scouts from the burn areas are now scattered across L.A. and beyond. The fires destroyed Scouts’ uniforms and alumni’s Eagle awards. Malibu’s Cub Scout Pack 224 lost its pinewood derby track — the testing grounds for a highly anticipated annual Scouting tradition.

But in an organization built on service and community engagement, second nature quickly kicked in.

“Leadership, citizenship — that is built into the structure of the program,” Harrison said. “Even the Scouts that lost pretty much everything, many of them went out and helped other families.”

The Scouting council replaced all of its members’ lost uniforms and awards and dished out gift cards to pay for new camping equipment. It also hosted a Catalina trip for those who lost their homes to help families take a breath and experience a few days of normalcy. One troop that was significantly affected by the fire provided counselors to help kids work through the trauma. Culver City’s Cub Scout Pack 18 hosted a pinewood derby workshop for the Malibu pack and brought its brand-new track out to a Malibu elementary school so the Scouts in that area could still experience the competition.

Aaron Kupferman, chair of Natural Resources with Camp Joseph Task Force, stands on concrete steps next to fire ravaged pine trees. The steps, which led to cabins at the camp, were the only thing that remained.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

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One Scout used her Eagle Scout service project to create ash sifters, which the Scouts donated to fire stations in the Palisades and Altadena to help homeowners find valuables in the rubble. Others assembled care packages for families who lost their homes.

At lunchtime, Copen admired the work his group had accomplished. Large piles of ripped-out invasive plants dotted the campground; the sunlight finally hit the memorial’s foundation, which the adults there noted they hadn’t seen in decades.

“The Scouting program and this camp makes a difference in so many people’s lives,” Copen said, with dirt smeared on his face.

“We might not have the physical structure, but this is still that camp,” Copen added. As far as he’s concerned, “that legacy is going to keep moving forward.”

A new hospital at UC Irvine opens Wednesday and it will be all-electric — only the second such medical center, and the largest, in the country so far.

People live through some of the toughest moments of their lives in hospitals, so they need to be as comfortable as possible. Hospitals traditionally connect with natural gas lines several times bigger than those connected to residential homes, to ensure that rooms are always warm or cool enough and have sufficient hot water.

But burning that natural gas is one of the main ways that buildings cause climate change. The way we build and operate buildings is responsible more than one-third of global greenhouse gases.

UCI Health–Irvine will include 144 beds, and will be entirely electric.

The difference is manifest in the hospital’s new kitchen.

Yes, said principal project manager Jess Langerud on a recent tour, people are permitted to eat fried food in a hospital. Here, the fryer is electric. “After all, you still have to have your crunchy fries, right?”

He moved over to an appliance that looked like a stove but with metal zigzagging across the top instead of the usual burners. “I can still put your sear marks on your steak or burger with an infrared grill that’s fully electric,” said Langerud. “It’ll look like it came off your flame-broiled grill.”

The kitchen, though, is relatively minor. One of the real heavy hitters when it comes to energy use in any new building, and especially in hospitals, are the water heaters. At UCI Health–Irvine, that means a row of 100-gallon water heaters 20 feet long.

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1. Four electric water heaters service the hospital building. It’s a 144-bed facility, with no natural gas or fuel. (Gary Coronado/For The Times) 2. Art lines the hallways near the nurses’ station. (Gary Coronado/For The Times)

“This is an immense electrical load we’re looking at right here,” said Joe Brothman, director of general services at UCI Health.

The other heaviest use of energy in the complex is keeping rooms warm in winter and cool in summer. For that, UCI Health is employing rows of humming heat pumps installed on the rooftop.

“The largest array I think this side of the Mississippi,” Brothman said.

A floor below, indoors, racks of centrifugal chillers that control the refrigerant make him smile.

“I love the way they sound,” Brothman said. “It sounds like a Ferrari sometimes, like an electric Ferrari.”

While most of the complex is nonpolluting, there is one place where dirty energy is still in use: the diesel generators that are used for backup power. That’s due in part to the fact that plans for the complex were drawn up six years ago. Solar panels plus batteries have become much more common for backup power since then.

The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care building, left, with the San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, right, next to the UCI Health–Irvine hospital.

Blackouts are bad for everyone, but they are unacceptable for hospitals. If an emergency facility loses power, people die.

So four 3-megawatt diesel generators sit on the roof of the facility’s central utility plant. Underground tanks hold 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel to supply them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Fire Protection Associates have codes that require testing the generators once a month at 30% power for half an hour, Brothman said.

The emissions from burning that diesel that are real, he conceded. But “it’s not something that you want to mess around with.”

Normally a central utility plant for a large facility like this would be “very noisy. It’s grimy. Usually there’s hazardous chemicals,” Brothman, who has manged physical plants for many years, said. “Here there’s no combustion. No carbon monoxide.”

Tony Dover, Energy Management & Sustainability Officer at UCI Health, said the building project team is currently applying for LEED Platinum certification, the highest level the U.S. Green Building Council awards for environmentally sustainable architecture.

Most of the energy and pollution savings at the hospital come from the way the building is run. But that only tells part of the story. The way the building is constructed in the first place is also a major consideration for climate change. Concrete is particularly damaging for the climate because of the way cement is made. Dover said lower carbon concrete was used throughout in the project.

Jess Langerud, principal project manager for the hospital, stands inside a tunnel leading from the hospital to the central utility plant.

Alexi Miller, a mechanical engineer and director of building innovation at the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that gives technical advice on climate and buildings, said the new UCI hospital is a milestone and he hopes to see more like it.

There are things Miller think they could have done differently. He’s not so much worried about using diesel generators for backup power, but he did suggest that a solar-plus-storage system might have been better than what UCI ended up with. Such systems, he said, “refuel themselves.” They would be “getting their fuel from the sun rather than from a tanker truck.”

One area Miller believes UCI could have done better: the hot water heaters, which despite being new, utilize an older and relatively inefficient technology called “resistance heat,” instead of heat-pump hot water heaters, which are now being used used regularly in commercial projects.

“It’s a little surprising,” he said. “Had they chosen to go with heat-pump hot water heaters, they could have powered it roughly three times as long, because it would be 3-4 times as efficient.”

But overall, “I think we should applaud what they’ve achieved in the construction of this building,” said Miller.

There are other all-electric hospitals are on the way: in 2026, UCLA Health plans to open a 119-bed neuropsychiatric hospital that does not use fossil fuels. An all-electric Kaiser Permanente hospital is set to open in San Jose in 2029.

When scores of dead and dying sea animals began washing up on L.A.-area beaches just weeks after January’s devastating fires, the timing seemed suspicious.

Harmful algae blooms had sickened marine life in each of the three years prior. But the especially high number of animal deaths this year prompted several research teams to investigate whether runoff from the fires may have accelerated algae growth to particularly dangerous proportions.

The evidence available so far suggests that this year’s algae bloom would have been just as deadly if the catastrophe on land hadn’t happened, multiple scientists said this week.

“Some of the fire retardants have nutrients in them, like ammonia or phosphate, that can fuel the growth of phytoplankton and the growth of organisms in the ocean. And we do see some spikes in those nutrients early on, immediately post-fire,” said Noelle Held, a University of Southern California microbiologist and oceanographer who has tested ocean water along L.A.’s coastline regularly since January. “But those increases are completely dwarfed by the major shift that happened in the ocean between the end of February and the beginning of April — the upwelling event.”

Upwellings occur when winds push warmer surface waters from the coastline out to sea, allowing colder, nutrient-rich waters from deeper in the ocean to rise up and take their place. These surges occur naturally in Southern California in winter and spring and contain elements like nitrogen and phosphorus that feed microbes (algae included). They often precede harmful algae blooms, though scientists are still trying to figure out the precise balance of factors that lead to sudden explosions in toxin-producing algae species.

Four different algae species were present in this year’s bloom. The two most dangerous produce powerful neurotoxins that accumulate in the marine food chain: Alexandrium catenella, which produces saxitoxin, and Pseudo-nitzschia australis, which produces domoic acid.

The toxins accumulate in filter-feeding fish, and then poison the larger mammals who eat them.

Scientists have known from the beginning that the fires didn’t initiate this year’s bloom. This is the fourth harmful algae bloom in as many years, and levels of toxin-producing species were rising before the Palisades and Eaton fires began. But the acceleration of marine wildlife deaths in the weeks after the fires led some to wonder whether L.A.’s disaster on land was also worsening the crisis in the sea.

However, based on the data available, fire pollution appears to have influenced the ocean’s chemistry far less than this year’s upwelling effect did.

“The only thing we could say is that [the fires] added some nutrients to an already nutrient-rich environment,” said Dave Bader, a marine biologist and the chief operations and education officer for the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. Runoff from the fires added fewer nutrients over the course of the bloom than sewage treatment facilities did, he said.

Beginning in February, hundreds of dolphins and sea lions started washing up on California beaches, either dead or suffering from neurotoxin poisoning symptoms such as aggression, lethargy and seizures. A minke whale in Long Beach Harbor and a gray whale stranded on Huntington City Beach also succumbed to the outbreak. Scientists believe countless more animals died at sea before the outbreak abated in May.

The year’s bloom was the deadliest for marine mammals since a 2015-16 outbreak that killed thousands along the Pacific coast between Alaska and Baja California.

Similarly, this year’s outbreak stretched from Baja California in Mexico to Bodega Bay in Northern California. The sheer geographic extent of the damage suggests that L.A.’s fires played a minimal role, said Clarissa Anderson of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She directs the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System, or SCCOOS, which monitors algae blooms.

The only sign that L.A.’s waters could be unhealthier than other coastal stretches this year was an unusually high spike of Pseudo-nitzschia in March at the Santa Monica Pier, Anderson said. But even that wasn’t significantly higher than readings elsewhere along the coast.

Just as January’s firestorms occurred outside of Southern California’s typical fire season, this harmful algae overgrowth appeared earlier in the year than have previous blooms. As climate change has shifted the timing and intensity of the strong wind events that drive upwellings, “we’re coming into a future where we unfortunately have to expect we’ll see these events with recurring frequency,” Bader told Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in June. “The events that drove the fires are the events that drove the upwelling.”