Anita Ghazarian and Simon Penny live in a house on the westernmost edge of Altadena—missed by the flames from the catastrophic Eaton Fire, but still close enough to be blanketed in ash. Farther east, in the burn zone, they own a house they rent out, which was minimally damaged.
As soon as the electricity comes back on, Ghazarian’s insurance adjuster told her, the rental house is considered habitable.
“How can I tell my tenants to move back into a house where the entire backyard is filled with ash and broken stuff and the houses around it are all burn zones? Are the kids going to play in that backyard?” Ghazarian asked.
In a maze of online maps, residents can find themselves in an uncertain space: Their house might be in an EPA “normal” zone, meaning it has been repopulated after evacuations, and also marked green on a county map (showing no or minimal damage), and yet surrounded by obliterated structures and covered in ash.
Such intact structures risk being cross-contaminated by nearby burned structures, according to research from the University of Colorado at Boulder that looked at health impacts from smoke in homes after the Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in 2021.
After Colorado’s Marshall Fire, more than half of the hundreds of people surveyed experienced symptoms from wildfire smoke six months after the fire, and continue to report symptoms even after extensive remediation.
Homes untouched by the fires had high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including benzene and toluene, carried in by ash and smoke from the homes that did burn.
In scope and scale, the Los Angeles disaster dwarfs the tragic Marshall Fire, and threatens a commensurate environmental crisis.
Los Angeles County’s two major fires, in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, burned through 40,000 acres, about 60 square miles, and killed 25 people, destroying more than 16,000 structures and reducing whole neighborhoods to rubble.
In total, five concurrent fires burned more than 55,000 acres—around three times the size of Manhattan.
“We’re now in the disaster after the disaster,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the nonprofit California Communities Against Toxics.
“And exactly the same thing that happened at 9/11 is happening here, where everyone just wants to return to normal, and they put pressure on public officials to say everything is safe, and everybody goes back to drinking the water and breathing the air,” she told The Epoch Times.
At the same time, nearly three weeks in, some residents had not been allowed back to see the ruins of their homes, search for memorabilia or fully process what had happened.
That tension—between the need to rebuild, and the untold hazards left by the fires—will shape the largest disaster recovery in California history.
Williams, who has worked with governments and communities in the aftermath of some of the largest disasters in recent memory, including the 2023 Maui fires in Hawaii, expects that even in environmentally conscious California, advocating for caution will be difficult.
“You’re going to see workers in scuba gear with Tyvek suits and booties over their shoes and gloves, removing hazardous waste. And across the street, you’re going to see kids playing in a playground,” she said.
Federal agencies in charge of the cleanup have outlined enhanced safety protocols for collection and disposal of hazardous waste and debris, but there are critical blind spots.
In particular, questions remain about the habitability of structures left intact by the fires, and the safety of air, soil, and water in impacted areas.
This issue is likely to take center stage in areas impacted by the Eaton Fire, where destroyed homes are surrounded by thousands left intact but saturated with smoke and ash.
Appetites for risk vary. Some residents whose homes survived never left; others want to return immediately. But a lack of clear guidance or standards in the federally led cleanup has left many more in limbo.
As displaced residents face the challenges ahead, many are wondering who is ultimately responsible for protecting their health and safety—and why the burden of proof appears to be on their shoulders.
As for the ash-covered soil, Ghazarian wonders if she’ll need to remove it herself.
The Army Corps of Engineers, in the second phase of a two-part federal cleanup plan, will remove six inches of soil from damaged and destroyed properties. That process may take up to a year or longer, and it is unclear if it will apply to intact structures like Ghazarian’s rental property. The first phase, currently underway, involves mandatory hazardous material removal by the EPA.
At a recent town hall meeting for the Eaton Fire recovery, the county Department of Public Works (DPW) said it has no plans to test soil. The EPA has said that testing air, soil, and water is the responsibility of local agencies.
Insurance companies are not lining up to spend thousands of dollars on the effort, either, Ghazarian said. “They say, no, that’s not our problem.”
Her partner, Penny, who grew up accustomed to wildfires in Australia, said he was amazed there was no organized response from authorities to test ash for a baseline before the expected rains came.
“There’s no county, state, or apparently federal agency that has the responsibility for testing toxic ash fallout from fires. There’s no one who is responsible,” Penny said. “The Army Corps of Engineers is telling us it’s L.A. County DPW [Department of Public Works], and DPW is saying it’s [L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Kathryn] Barger’s responsibility, and Barger is saying it’s the EPA. They’re backing this thing around and it’s like, where is the regulation?”
Penny spoke with an industrial hygienist about doing work on the house, and the hygienist told him, “It’s the wild, wild West out here.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and its Department of Public Works did not respond to requests for comment.
In this vacuum, exiled neighbors have turned to social media to organize. In Facebook pages, group emails, Zoom meetings, and text messages, they are posting results of heavy metal tests from private contractors and thinking about how to map their data.
They also share tips—for example, if you request soil testing and your insurance denies it, go ask FEMA in person.
In a Reddit forum on the subject, one Altadena resident posted results from an inspector who tested dust samples in her home for lead and asbestos. The results showed lead up to 33 times federal and state regulated levels—in areas where there was no visible dust, in a house outside the burn zone.
“While I know I can get the interior cleaned up, what worries me is that all of this stuff is also on the street, in the soil, on our yards,” the resident wrote.
Altadena residents have reason to be concerned about asbestos, which is blamed for much of the post-9/11 public health crisis.
In the case of the Eaton Fire, the vast majority—35,543 out of 41,128—of structures in the burn zone were built before 1979. That means they are more likely to contain asbestos, the cheap, fire-resistant material that was used widely in construction starting in the 1930s before being phased out in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“This is the largest cleanup in California’s history,” Williams said.
The largest before it, created by decades of contamination from the former lead-battery giant Exide in Los Angeles, was a fraction of the size and had third-party monitors, air monitoring, extensive worker safety, and community safety protocols, Williams said.
“All those protections we already have in place are going to go by the wayside here. And you’re talking about 50 square miles of ash and debris and toxic waste that have to be removed.”
Even at Ghazarian’s home outside the burn zone, there is heavy ash residue.
“Can you garden? Can you eat off it? Can you have kids play in that backyard?” Ghazarian asks. “What is going to happen in three, five, 10, 20 years to people who inhabit that house?”
She is having a hard time finding companies equipped to test for a long list of contaminants known to be in play after the fires.
“We’re just going to be left to our own devices and we’re not sure when we can move back. Is it safe? What about our tenants? And who is going to be in charge of all this?”
Residents grappling with these questions have created a petition to demand clear standards for remediation and testing, claiming the lack of guidance is putting them at risk.
“The goal here is not to keep people from their homes. Instead we demand official guidelines clarifying for homeowners and insurers what is safe when,” the petition reads.
“Choice ultimately should lie with the homeowner if they want to return early, but we don’t want homeowners to be forced home sooner than is safe.”
Known Hazards, New Territory
Nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, more than twice the number of people have died of exposure to contaminants released in the fall of the Twin Towers than in the attack itself—of respiratory, cardiac, and digestive disorders, as well as cancers.
In the days immediately after 9/11, the former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the public the air was safe to breathe—a statement for which she later apologized. Subsequent investigations revealed officials intentionally downplayed dangers amid insufficient data.
As of 2021, 24,000 people have been diagnosed with a 9/11-related cancer, including mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive malignancy caused by asbestos exposure that can take decades to manifest.
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