Column: Everyone wants fire cleanup to be fast. Will we regret it?

Hello and happy Tuesday. President Trump, as you probably know, visited Los Angeles on Friday, greeting Gov. Gavin Newsom on the tarmac.

Their handshake really said everything you need to know about the visit and the relationship. They grabbed. Trump pulled. Newsom resisted. Neither would let go.

It was the dominance hierarchy in living color. But they greeted, which is a good sign for California. As my colleagues Julia Wick and Taryn Luna reported, “until hours before Trump touched down, it was unclear whether he and Newsom would even meet face to face.”

What came next was a day of frenemies. Trump toured Pacific Palisades then sat for a town hall with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger and a bunch of other Democratic and Republican politicians — but not Newsom, who was not invited.

That roundtable focused on the most urgent question for Angelenos who were affected by the fires: When can they return?

Trump took the popular side, as he’s wont to do, and pushed Bass to allow people back to their property immediately, saying he knew there were people who would be more than willing to get a dumpster and do their own cleanup right away.

Bass pushed back.

“We are going to move as fast as we can, but we want you to be safe,” she said, estimating that it may take a week or so for federal, state and local emergency management folks to make sure areas are safe.

“A week is actually a long time, the way I look at it,” Trump said. “I watched hundreds of people standing in front of their lots, and they’re not allowed to go in. It’s all burned, it’s gone, it’s done. Nothing’s going to happen. ... It’s not going to burn anymore. There’s nothing to burn. There’s almost nothing to burn, and they want to go in.”

So who’s right?

President Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office.

(Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Everybody is wrong

Turns out everybody’s a little right, and mostly wrong — pretty much standard for every fire I’ve covered. The one fact no one disputes is that people are in pain and that often manifests as much in anger as grief. It is understandable that those who have lost homes, or whose homes are still standing but damaged, want immediate access to start putting their lives back together. That access began Monday in the Palisades, but it will still be months before many lots are cleared and ready to build on.

That’s where Bass gets it a bit wrong. There’s nothing she can say that will make any delay OK. People are going to be mad no matter what the explanation, and she needs to do a better job acknowledging that anger.

But what remains is dangerous. Not just future-health dangerous, but may-explode-at-any-moment dangerous. Trump is flat-out wrong when he says, “It’s all burned, it’s gone, it’s done.”

Steve Calanog, the EPA’s deputy incident commander for the Southern California wildfires, told me his crews — experienced from so many other urban-wildfires — are searching for all kinds of things that can cause immediate danger during this “phase one” of cleanup.

“Chemical containers, cleaners, solvents, pesticides, compressed gas cylinders, propane tanks, ammunition,” he rattled off. “You know, a lot of folks in other fires assume that everything burns up in the fire, but in actuality, there’s a lot of stuff that’s left behind.”

Calanog said one of the biggest threats, especially for the Palisades, is lithium ion batteries, including big ones — like those in electric cars or those used to store solar energy in homes. The Palisades had its share of both, and they aren’t destroyed by fire.

Instead, they can turn into ticking time bombs.

“They have the tendency to fail and can spontaneously combust or explode days, weeks, months after they’ve been damaged,” Calanog said. “We have to treat them like an unexploded ordnance.”

Those are the hazards we can see. Delphine Farmer is a professor of chemistry at Colorado State University who studies wildfire smoke. She warns that there are also dangers we can’t see, but ones that are “quite toxic to human health.”

The ash and the air

Like Farmer, Joost de Gouw has put in a lot of time studying air pollution after urban fires. He’s a professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a fellow with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, who studied homes after the Marshall fire in Colorado in 2021. That urban conflagration burned more than 1,000 homes.

He points out that unlike a wildfire, fires in urban areas largely feed off things that contain chemicals, and often metals. Plastic spatulas, couches with treated fabric and coils, decks with treated wood. Start thinking about your average home, never mind the garage, and you’ll see his point that this isn’t nature burning.

“Given that most of what burned was was really homes and vehicles, there is legitimate concern that there are things like heavy metals inside that,” he said. “And we did see that in dust samples that we collected in homes after the Marshall Fire.”

He and his colleagues found that the homes that were left standing after the Marshall fire acted like sponges, soaking the pollutants up into every surface. Even after airing them out and cleaning, the pollutants remained.

“It’s very clear that a lot of these compounds stick to surfaces,” Farmer cautioned. In her work, she found that even after cleaning, when windows were closed, the indoor air quality would drop as those contaminants seeped back out of their hiding places.

“You can clear the air all you want,” she said. “Then you close your door and then all of these compounds slowly start coming out of the surfaces and into the air you are breathing.”

Shantanu Jathar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State, and the head of the Laboratory for Air Quality Research, has another caution. He and his team are working with the South Coast Air Quality Management District on a four-week project to study the air quality after the fires, and they now have monitors in five locations. He suspects that air pollution could spike, at least a bit, as cleanup begins to “loft” some of that ash back into the air.

What does all that mean for folks who just want to go back?

“If I were to give someone else advice, I would say, wait for the cleanup activities that significantly reduce your exposure to the dust and toxic ash that might be released as part of the cleanup, and then go in after some of these activities have subsided,” he said.

An army of help

Calanog, the EPA incident commander, said there will be upward of 1,000 people working on that phase one cleanup by this weekend. This, he said, will be one of the fastest operations he’s ever overseen — potentially done in a matter of weeks.

“As you can appreciate, the level of attention that these fires have received has been a contributing factor to the speed in which we are operating under,” he said.

Having covered fires across California, I can honestly say I have never seen an effort like this. Though it is little consolation for those left to wait, the speed and resources being put into recovery in L.A. are extraordinary.

So for all the politics and finger-pointing that have so quickly filled our public space, here’s one more thing that everyone I spoke with can agree on: The science doesn’t lie.

The burn areas are dangerous right now, and though patience feels like another trauma, it is better than regret.

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: L.A. fire updates: Flooding, mudflows after bouts of heavy rain prompt road and school closures‘
The what happened: Trump Administration Live Updates: Prosecutors Who Aided Special Counsel Investigations Are Fired
The L.A. Times special: Palisades fire victims vent frustration as town hall on debris removal becomes a free-for-all
Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. I was never a huge Paris Hilton fan until I saw her lobby at the Capitol last year on a bill to protect kids in treatment centers. Since then, she pops up on my social media feed with great frequency. So I’m sharing this bit of good news and kindness from her. Hilton has been fostering pets since the fire, and here’s one family picking up their lucky pup.

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