Elliot, 24, bottom left, who began using heroin at age 12 and is addicted to fentanyl, hangs out with Raul, 29, and Kie, 28, in an alley in MacArthur Park on June 7, 2023 where people go to smoke fentanyl. “I thought kicking heroin was bad, uh-uh, no. I could kick heroin; kicking this, not going to happen. Quitting cold turkey would physically kill me,” Elliot says.

A person wakes up and leaves a Los Angeles alley in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles where people gather to use fentanyl on June 7, 2023.

Elliot loads up a cart at the 99 Cents Only Store in Long Beach as he “boosts” to buy a day’s supply of fentanyl on June 15, 2023. Elliot says he must come up with $50 a day to avoid fentanyl withdrawal.

While riding the Los Angeles Metro on a “boosting” trip, Elliot sheds tears on June 15, 2023 as he talks about his brother he says he hasn’t seen in over a year and who is missing in Los Angeles. “It scares me he’s the last one I have.”

Los Angeles Police Department officers stop and check the pulse of a man suspected to be under the influence of fentanyl in an alley in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on June 7, 2023. LAPD now brings officers from all over the city to MacArthur Park to train as drug recognition experts. During training officers arrest people who appear to be under the influence of a controlled substance and test them to ensure they correctly identify the intoxication.

A young woman wakes up in a shipping box on June 15, 2023 in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the epicenter of fentanyl use.

Matthew, 30, who uses fentanyl on May 19, 2023 in an alley in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, says he first got hooked on oxycodone at his Pennsylvania high school. Most users say they need to smoke fentanyl every two to three hours or they get sick.

John modifies his guitar bridge pins with syringe caps seen on July 13, 2023 near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. He has played the guitar since his teens and started using opioids in his early 20s to numb anxiety and depression. John wants to get off fentanyl but says, “It’s like they made it to be addictive; it tastes good, it smells good, it feels freaking awesome.”

Denver smokes fentanyl in an alley in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on August 10, 2023 as he begins using the drug again after being housed.

People pass a young man with a suicide note as he sleeps along Alvarado Boulevard in MacArthur Park on July 13, 2023.

Corcoran, CA, Monday, June 5, 2023 - PG&E crews work to remove one of hundreds of power line transformers at a flooded pistachio orchard. The field was flooded after a makeshift levee built during a 1983 flood, broke nearly a mile away. Crews in airboats and helicopters worked over the course of a month to mitigate the potential for shock and environmental damage from flooded units.

Corcoran, CA, Monday, June 5, 2023 - Farmworker Jose Pineda pauses while tending to a dying pistachio orchard. Days after a nearby levee broke, flooding more than 800 acres of Pistachios owned by Markham Hanna, he was left to salvage a few hundred acres that remain dry. “It’s a disaster,” Hanna said, standing with arms crossed beside rows of inundated pistachio trees. “Huge losses.”The return of Tulare Lake after this year’s major storms has left Hanna and his family with a costly ordeal — and many questions about how they might be able to recover from the loss.“To see everything we worked for going down the drain, it’s very hard,” he said. “We have to think about the future, and where we get funds to rebuild our farm. It’s very difficult.”

Stratford, CA, Thursday, May 11, 2023 - Tons of dirt lays piled up along 14 1/2 Ave. serving as a temporary guard against possible flooding from the nearby surging Tulare Lake. Following years of drought, farmers and ranch owners went to extreme measures to protect their land from floodwaters. This berm surrounds a large cattle ranch. Had it flooded, toxic levels of polluted water could render the lake unsafe for wildlife and residents alike.

Stratford, CA, Tuesday, May 2, 2023 - Farmers Charles Meyer Sr. and Charles Meyer Jr., survey the condition of a berm/road lining an irrigation channel near the Tulare Lake Canal. Charles Meyer Sr. is proud to be one of the few family farmers left in Kings County in a valley dominated by industrial-scale operations.He is a third-generation farmer, taking on land that his grandfather once tilled. But times have hit the Meyer family hard. Once the proud owner of 3,500 acres, his holdings have been whittled down to 1,000, having sold off the rest due to years of drought, market fluctuations and now inflation. Many family operations have been ground down one by one, until they have been forced to sell the land they once hoped would keep their bellies full.Now, 600 acres are useless, swallowed in the lake’s return. Three hundred acres of land prepped for cotton and another 300 acres of alfalfa on the lake’s northern edge — gone. He estimates his losses at about $600,000, $1,000 for every acre.Asked about the loss of the land, Meyer said it’s like losing a best friend.“There’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s no use getting upset,” he likened.

Corcoran, CA, Tuesday, July 18, 2023 - Dead and dying pistachio trees remain on a Hanson Farms ranch near 4th Ave. According to a county tally, roughly 94,000 acres of orchards, row crops and pastureland were drowned by the lake, and another 16,000 destroyed by floods elsewhere in the county. A full recovery could take years.

Lemoore, Wednesday, April,12, 2023 - Hundreds of concerned residents attend a town hall meeting hosted by the Island Property Protection Association looking for information regarding potential flooding from the record Sierra snowmelt. The IPPA is an organization that the community activates during a natural crisis where neighbors are called upon to support those requiring assistance.

Lemoore, CA, Sunday, June 11, 2023 - Helena Jones attends Sunday service at Mt. Olive Baptist church. Helena Jones’ daddy traveled by bus to California from Idabel, Okla., in search of work and a better life, part of a wave of Black farmworkers who migrated to California’s Central Valley in the 1940s to work in the fields.Her family lived in a labor camp, sleeping in milk barns before eventually moving into a shotgun house in Lemoore. By the time she was 4, she had joined her parents in the fields, running ahead of her mother and placing the cotton she picked in neat piles for collection. When she was stung by wasps, her mother spread turpentine on her injury and they pushed on. When she was exhausted, she collapsed on a sack of cotton, worth $3 for every 100 pounds.When the warnings came that flooding would be bad in Lemoore, she placed sandbags around her home. With flood insurance, she knew she could rebuild. But photos of her husband, now deceased, and her late mother’s personal effects, she could not replace. She packed everything in yellow-lid crates, placing them high on her closet shelves. She wanted to be ready.“I just prayed,” Jones said. Because she knew if she did have to leave, there might be no road back.

Corcoran, CA, Thursday, May 25, 2023 - California Conservation Corps member Javier Puga casts a long shadow as Samuel Sanchez, left, assists while the crew reinforces miles of levees. Their first day working the levees, Samuel Sanchez and Javier Puga baked on the towering dirt mounds as temperatures hit 101. Just below them, Tulare Lake spread out on the horizon as far out as they could see.“We weren’t expecting the type of weather we were gonna be in,” Sanchez said. “I had family from back home [in San Diego] texting us, ‘Oh, it’s 60 degrees outside.’”As members of the California Conservation Corps, the two were among more than 100 workers who spent 24 days in May and June fortifying an eight-mile stretch of levee protecting Corcoran and adjacent farmland. The crews, who came in from Norwalk, San Diego and Fortuna, worked 12-hour days, straining against deadline to strengthen the barrier before Tulare Lake drank in what was expected to be epic runoff from a record Sierra snowpack.They employed a technique called wave wash protection, which involves blanketing the levee with a plastic liner secured with sandbags. The process would help the levees resist the powerful forces of water erosion. In all, they filled up 70,000 sandbags.Sanchez and Puga, both San Diegans, were fascinated with Tulare Lake’s ghostly presence. It was Puga’s third flood emergency and his second time fortifying a levee. The lake, he said, was unlike anything he’d seen.“Once you get to the top of the levee, everything you see is water,” he said. “It’s like an ocean. You don’t see nothing but water.”

Corcoran, Lemoore, CA, Monday, June 5, 2023 - Marilyn Nolan, 79, estimates she’s zipped closed about a million ziplock bags in her 40 years as a volunteer at Corcoran Emergency Aid and Thrift store. You can find Marilyn Nolan most days among piles of clothes and toys and food boxes in a warehouse behind Corcoran’s Emergency Aid Thrift Shop. She has run the shop for 40 years, her hands ever in motion, sorting through donated clothes and shoes and household wares, carefully wrapping each item in a plastic bag.

Corcoran, CA, Thursday, May 11, 2023 - An aerial view of the surging Tulare Lake looking North to Corcoran. At it’s peak, an estimated 120,000 acres of farmland was flooded by the rebirth of Tulare Lake.

The Star Ballroom Dance Studio where 11 people died and nine were wounded in a mass shooting is seen through a window on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 in Monterey Park after the lights were left on.

Mourners leave blessings for the victims of the mass shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio at a candlelight vigil at Monterey Park City Hall on Tuesday, January 24, 2023.

People gather at a community candlelight vigil at Monterey Park City Hall on Monday, Jan. 23, 2023, to honor the victims of the mass shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio that left 11 people dead and nine others wounded.

A woman is overcome with grief at the Monterey Park mass shooting memorial at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio on Wednesday, January 25, 2023.

Dancer Adelle Castro, 68, of Temple City, left, hugs on Thursday, January 26, 2023 a woman at the memorial for the victims of the Monterey Park mass shooting at Star Ballroom Dance Studio where 11 of her friends were killed. “They were my family for 30 years. I traveled with them. I did tai chi with them,” said Castro, who also said they taught her the Taiwanese Tango.

Community members attend a buddhist service on Friday, January 27, 2023 with monks from the Dieu Phap Temple for the 11 killed in the Monterey Park mass shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio.

After a buddhist ceremony at Star Ballroom Dance Studio for those killed in the Monterey Park mass shooting owner Maria Liang comforts on Friday, January 27, 2023 Tina Tai as she cries for her friend Mymy Nhan, who was killed. Liang’s partner was killed and her brother was wounded in the shooting.

Brandon Tsay, who disarmed the Monterey Park mass shooting gunman as he tried to enter a second dance studio, the Lai Lai Ballroom in Alhambra, is welcomed to the Monterey Park City Council meeting on Wednesday, February 15, 2023 where he received certificates of appreciation.

Emily Wu Truong, of Arcadia, leaves a heart she made out of wilted rose pedals at the makeshift memorial for the Monterey Park mass shooting victims on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at Star Ballroom Dance Studio.

People dance during a class at the Langley Senior Center in Monterey Park on Friday, March 10, 2023. Some students did not return to classes right away after the Monterey Park mass shooting at Star Ballroom Dance Studio.

Emily Wu Truong, of Arcadia, leaves a heart she made out of wilted rose pedals at the makeshift memorial for the Monterey Park mass shooting victims on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at Star Ballroom Dance Studio.

Cars sit abandoned on roads as floodwaters from the Tule River inundate the area after days of heavy rain in Corcoran, California, U.S., March 21, 2023.

A home on agricultural land is seen amid flooding from the Salinas River in Salinas, California, U.S., January 13, 2023.

Melissa Foley clears debris and helps in her neighborhood as the San Lorenzo River rises with emergency evacuation orders in Felton Grove, California, U.S., January 14, 2023.

Several people had to be rescued after two vehicles fell into a sinkhole in Chatsworth, California, U.S., January 10, 2023.

An SPCA worker rescues and abandoned dog as floodwaters from the Pajaro River inundate residents after days of heavy rain in Pajaro, California, U.S., March 15, 2023.

A vehicle passes next to a break in a levee as floodwaters inundate roads after days of heavy rain in Alpaugh, California, U.S., March 29, 2023.

Water fills the Tulare Lakebed after floodwaters inundate residents after days of heavy rain in Corcoran, California, U.S., March 29, 2023.

Mehrdad Azim helps swipe mud away from a neighbor's driveway after the San Lorenzo river flooded in Felton Grove, California, U.S., January 14, 2023.

Floodwaters from the Pajaro River inundate residents after days of heavy rain in Watsonville, California, U.S., March 16, 2023.

A man fishes in the floodwaters as a train passes after days of heavy rain in Corcoran, California, U.S., March 29, 2023.

Thousands of demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and signs denouncing "Israeli apartheid" march in support of Palestinians in Los Angeles on October 14, 2023. Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on October 14 after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest attack in Israeli history.

Supporters of Israel demonstrate with national flags in Beverly Hills, California on October 10, 2023, after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel. The death toll in Israel has surged to more than 800 after a surprise attack by Hamas, while about 150 "prisoners" were being held by the militant group, the Israel government said October 9, 2023. The death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to 687 on October 9, 2023, the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said, as Israel pounded Hamas targets for the third consecutive day.

Two men scuffle after an American-Israel flag was grabbed as pro-Palestinian supporters disrupt shoppers during Black Friday sales at The Grove, a high end shopping center, in Los Angeles, on November 24, 2023. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in response to the October 7 attacks which Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians in southern Israel, and saw about 240 people taken hostage. Hamas on November 24 freed a first batch of hostages seized in the deadliest attack in Israel's history under a deal that saw a temporary truce take hold in war-ravaged Gaza

A LAPD helicoper flies over demonstrators waving Palestinian flags during a march in support of Palestinians in Los Angeles on October 14, 2023. Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on October 14 after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest attack in Israeli history.

Israel counter protesters taunt pro-Palestinian protesters gathered during the "Black & Palestinian Solidarity for a Ceasefire this Xmas" by the Beverly Center shopping center in Los Angeles on December 23, 2023. More than 200 people were killed in 24 hours of Israeli strikes, Gaza officials said December 23, and Israel announced the death of five soldiers after the UN failed to call for a ceasefire. Eleven weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, Israeli forces pressed on with their offensive, a day after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution for more aid to flow into the besieged Gaza Strip.

LAPD Police officers stand in formation by the Beverly Center shopping center as protesters rally during the "Black & Palestinian Solidarity for a Ceasefire this Xmas" in Los Angeles on December 23, 2023. More than 200 people were killed in 24 hours of Israeli strikes, Gaza officials said December 23, and Israel announced the death of five soldiers after the UN failed to call for a ceasefire. Eleven weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, Israeli forces pressed on with their offensive, a day after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution for more aid to flow into the besieged Gaza Strip.

Supporters of Israel demonstrate with national flags in Beverly Hills, California on October 9, 2023, after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel. The death toll in Israel has surged to more than 800 after a surprise attack by Hamas, while about 150 "prisoners" were being held by the militant group, the Israel government said October 9, 2023. The death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to 687 on October 9, 2023, the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said, as Israel pounded Hamas targets for the third consecutive day.

Guests walk on a driveway splattered with fake blood by demonstrators protesting in support of Palestinians in Gaza, amid the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at a fundraiser event expected to be attended by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, U.S., November 20, 2023.

Pro-Israel supporters gather gather and march in defense of the conflict with Palestine in Los Angeles, California.

Supporters of Israel demonstrate with national flags in Beverly Hills, California on October 9, 2023, after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel. The death toll in Israel has surged to more than 800 after a surprise attack by Hamas, while about 150 "prisoners" were being held by the militant group, the Israel government said October 9, 2023. The death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to 687 on October 9, 2023, the health ministry in the Palestinian enclave said, as Israel pounded Hamas targets for the third consecutive day.

The year 2023 was the hottest year on record. In July, the Coachella Valley experienced 16 days in which temperatures were 115 degrees or higher and 23 days with temperatures 110 degrees or above. These are extreme conditions for farm workers but they show up for work everyday. Even as the fall months arrived, the temperatures still hovered at 100 degrees so farm workers work in the evenings to beat the heat planting seedlings on October 18, 2023 in Thermal, California. These farm workers are planting cauliflower seedlings. The cooler night time temperatures are better for the workers and the plants.

In the Coachella Valley, farm workers plant seedlings at dusk to beat the October 100 degree temperatures on October 18, 2023 in Thermal, California. These farm workers are planting cauliflower seedlings. Their shift is 5PM -1AM.

With the temperature well over 100 degrees, farm worker Maria Chavez, 63, holds a water bottle containing a block of ice while working in the peach orchards on August 11, 2023 in Thermal, California.

In July, the Coachella Valley experienced 16 days in which temperatures were 115 degrees or higher and 23 days with temperatures 110 degrees or above. These are extreme conditions for farm workers but they show up for work everyday. With the temperature well over 100 degrees, farmworkers wait in the shade after a long hot day in peach orchards on August 11, 2023 in Thermal, California.

With temperatures in the triple digits, farm workers toil under the shade of date trees to box yellow Barhi dates on August 11, 2023 in Thermal, California.

With the temperature well over 100 degrees, farmworkers leave the fields after working a long hot day in peach orchards on August 11, 2023 in Thermal, California.

With temperatures well into triple digits, farm worker Jose Luis Arredendo, 50, wipes sweat from his brow while taking a break from using an axe to break up cement in his driveway late in the afternoon at the St. Anthony Mobile Home Park on August 1, 2023 in Mecca, California. Power outages happen frequently, especially on the hottest days, when every one in the park is running the AC, trying to stay cool. “When the power goes out it feels like you’re suffocating. It’s like an oven inside, he said.

Youngsters cool off in the 115 degree heat in the early evening outside their trailer on July 20, 2023 in Thermal, California. The children stay inside most of the day to avoid the extreme temperatures in the Coachella Valley. Their parents are farm workers.

Farm worker Leticia Jimenez, 61, wipes sweat from her forehead as her window air conditioner struggles to put out cool air during extreme hot temperatures at the Oasis Mobile Home Park on August 1, 2023 in Thermal, California. In July, the Coachella Valley experienced 16 days in which temperatures were 115 degrees or higher and 23 days with temperatures 110 degrees or above.The EPA found unsafe levels of arsenic in the water there, so the residents use bottled water.

As dusk settles over Coachella Valley, workers toil in the fields in the evening to avoid the 110 degree plus temperatures on August 1, 2023 in Coachella, California. In July, the Coachella Valley experienced 16 days in which temperatures were 115 degrees or higher and 23 days with temperatures 110 degrees or above.

As dusk settles over Coachella Valley, workers toil in the fields in the evening to avoid the 110 degree plus temperatures on August 1, 2023 in Coachella, California. In July, the Coachella Valley experienced 16 days in which temperatures were 115 degrees or higher and 23 days with temperatures 110 degrees or above.