Once the Fires Are Out, California Must Remove Tons of Dangerous Debris

When the flames in Los Angeles County are finally extinguished, the region will face the costly, time-consuming and heart-wrenching task of hauling away tons of toxic rubble. Given the scale of devastation in and around America’s second-largest city, that cleanup could become one of the country’s most complex debris removal efforts ever.

In each of the thousands of ash piles where homes once stood, there are remnants of lives upended. But the photo albums and football cards and family heirlooms are intermixed with a noxious cocktail of asbestos, gasoline and lead, a reality that will make cleanup extremely complicated.

“We kind of treat each of these properties as its own hazardous waste cleanup site,” said Cory Koger, a debris expert with the Army Corps of Engineers who has responded to several major wildfires, including the fire that destroyed much of Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023.

The immediate focus in Southern California is putting out the wind-fueled fires that have burned for days, destroying thousands of structures, scorching thousands of acres and killing at least 11 people. But once the threat has passed, attention will more fully shift to dealing with debris fields in hard-hit areas like Altadena and Pacific Palisades, where homes that stood for decades burned down in minutes and where the charred remains of Jeeps and Cadillacs line the streets.

“Recovery planning really begins as soon as the fire starts,” said Jenn Hogan, the deputy director for disaster debris recovery operations at CalRecycle, a state agency that focuses on waste management and climate. “Once the fire is contained, you’ll start seeing a lot of those recovery resources hit the ground.”

Mark Pestrella, the Los Angeles County public works director, described a “tremendous amount of debris” that had already made its way into local reservoirs and filtration systems, hurting water quality. He said the debris was being moved in some cases to help firefighters maneuver through hard-hit areas, but stressed that the most significant handling and removal of the detritus would take time.

The process will be at once familiar and altogether unique. Even in a calamity-weary state where destruction has become so common that officials now refer to a “fire year” rather than a “fire season,” there is no playbook for what happened this week, when several blazes roared simultaneously in dense urban settings.

It is too soon to know the extent of the damage or the cost of cleaning up, but recovery experts struggled to name a disaster analogous to the one unfolding in Los Angeles. There were parallels, some said, to the 2017 Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, Calif., or to a major earthquake or hurricane hitting an urban area, but nothing that seemed to provide a fitting model for the cleanup ahead. Some Californians said the destruction brought to mind a deadly 1991 fire in Oakland that destroyed more than 2,000 structures, or the Camp fire in 2018, which devastated the town of Paradise.

Unlike in some rural areas or mountain towns hit by fires, which might be hard to access with heavy machinery, recovery crews in Los Angeles will have the advantage of robust road infrastructure and a large local work force. But experts said they anticipated challenges in finding landfills to take the huge quantities of toxic material that will need to be “burrito-wrapped” in plastic and hauled away, as well as in managing the flow of high-bed dump trucks and other heavy equipment in a city already notorious for its traffic.

“If it takes two hours to dump a load, I mean, do the math on 1,000 properties,” said Alyssa Carrier, the founder and chief executive of AC Disaster Consulting, a private emergency management company that has worked on wildfire responses in Colorado, Florida and Oregon. “One house could be 15 loads,” she added, “so that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges.”

Cleanup generally occurs in distinct phases over several months. After an initial assessment of damage, workers wearing full hazardous material gear remove dangerous items in clear view. Later, crews return to haul away ash, burned trees and other remaining debris. Before rebuilding begins, officials test the soil to ensure that no toxins remain from the fire.

Ms. Hogan said it was not yet clear whether CalRecycle, which has helped manage cleanup from many of the state’s largest fires, would be part of the debris removal effort in Los Angeles. In fire cleanups where the state agency assists, homeowners are able to have their land cleared of debris for free, though some still choose to hire their own crews.

The cleanup process is filled with dangers. Bryan Schenone, the director of the emergency services office in Siskiyou County, Calif., a rural area that has seen a series of devastating fires, including the Mill fire in 2022, said common household items become an environmental threat when they burn. Propane tanks or loose ammunition can explode and present a safety risk.

“Imagine what’s in your garage: all the paint, all the chemicals underneath your sink,” Mr. Schenone said. “That leeches into the ground, and that all has to be cleaned up and becomes a toxic footprint.”

Another challenge, experts said, is securing landowner permission, parcel by parcel, for workers to enter the property and begin the cleanup. There can also be delays as officials line up work crews and dump sites, or when nesting season for birds requires work to be paused on certain properties. It can be painful, officials said, to tell residents that they should not return to search for mementos in the rubble.

As destructive wildfires become more common because of climate change, a muscle memory has developed among the government officials and private contractors who respond to calamity after calamity.

Each of those disasters has its own complexities, but many of the processes and lessons are the same. And no state has as much practical expertise in responding to wildfires as California, which even publishes a handbook on how to make fire-scarred parcels safe to inhabit again.

“This is probably the worst scenario but the best location,” Dr. Koger of the Army Corps of Engineers said of the Los Angeles fires. “Because the state of California has the resources and the knowledge and the historical knowledge to perform this safely and effectively.”