The Los Angeles fires began on January 7, killing at least 29 people and destroying more than 17,000 structures, primarily homes and businesses. The fire destroyed entire blocks and neighborhoods, leaving countless people homeless and total economic losses estimated to exceed $50 billion. Now that the smoke has cleared, environmental risks remain. These are far different from those from traditional wildfires that occur in California every year.
The Los Angeles fires destroyed homes, businesses, and vehicles, most in residential areas with low-rise structures. This differs from traditional wildfires, which primarily destroy vegetation, and from this country’s worst scene of urban destruction, New York City, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 - where high-rise buildings were destroyed and fires smoldered for months on end. However, some of the challenges of clean-up are the same: ensuring the safety of the clean-up crews, balancing residents’ desire to return to their homes with environmental risks, and effective communication with the public.
The EPA is in charge of the first phase of the clean-up from the Los Angeles fires, cleaning up hazardous waste from hazardous materials stored in homes, offices, and vehicles. This will be the most extensive fire clean-up in the history of the EPA, and they pledge to carry it out quickly and efficiently. This is central to rebuilding the area because residents cannot begin rebuilding their homes until this is complete.
Traditional smoke from wildfires consists primarily of particulate matter, a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets in the air. Smoke from the Los Angeles fires contains particulate matter, along with toxic chemicals including hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, isocyanates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins, furans, benzene, toluene, xylenes, formaldehyde, lead, chromium, cadmium, and arsenic from the burning of products found in homes and businesses.
Health Effects
The health effects from these chemicals in smoke depend on the amount and type of chemicals in the air and the length of exposure. The human body has natural mechanisms to handle air pollutants: mucus and tiny filaments can filter out harmful particles, and white blood cells in the lungs can attack invading substances. However, when the body gets overwhelmed, short-term (acute) effects such as respiratory problems, including asthma attacks, coughing, and breathing difficulties, can occur, particularly in sensitive individuals.
Cardiovascular risk also increases with acute exposure to high levels of smoke. One study found that exposure to heavy smoke during wildfires increased the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests by up to 70%, and another study found an increase in emergency room visits for heart attacks (42%) and ischemic heart disease (22%) within a day of exposure to dense wildfire smoke.
Long-term (chronic) exposure to smoke can result in effects such as immune dysfunction, including skin allergies and inflammation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer. Residents of the Los Angeles fire areas should not experience these effects because they were not exposed to the smoke for extended periods.
Firefighters are the subgroup at most risk for long-term effects from smoke exposure. In the case of the Los Angeles fires, the firefighters were given N95 masks and specialized respirators attached to oxygen tanks. However, the N95 masks filter out only 11 to 15 percent of the toxic chemicals and restrict breathing, making them difficult to use for long durations. Cancer is currently the number one cause of death for firefighters, and firefighters need to be adequately protected against environmental hazards.
The Clean-up Process
Once the fire is out, there is a complex clean-up process. In traditional wildfires, nature and time will eventually rebuild, but in the Los Angeles fires, clean-up is the lynchpin to beginning to rebuild communities.
The EPA has been assigned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with the first phase of the overall clean-up and recovery, consisting of removing lithium-ion batteries, and disposing of hazardous materials from properties burned by wildfires. The US Corps of Engineers will carry out the second phase, debris removal, which begins automatically at a property once phase 1 is finished.
Removing lithium-ion batteries is critical because they can spontaneously re-ignite, explode, and emit toxic gases even after a fire is extinguished. Lithium-ion batteries are found in electric vehicles, with California having more electric vehicles than any other state, accounting for 35% of all registered vehicles nationwide. However, electric vehicles are not the only products that contain lithium-ion batteries. Others include electric bikes, hoverboards, wheelchairs, digital cameras, home alarms, power banks, personal mobility devices, scooters, and power tools.
The second part of the phase 1 clean-up involves EPA’s disposal of tons of hazardous material. This hazardous material includes paints, cleaning supplies, automotive oil, pesticides, batteries, propane tanks and other pressurized gas containers, pool chemicals, fertilizers, aerosols, ammunition, and items thought to contain asbestos.
The EPA has chosen two “staging areas,” one at Lario, on property owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and one at Topanga Canyon Blvd., on a California State Park, to temporarily process, sort, and package hazardous materials from the Los Angeles fires. The EPA will then send the materials to permitted hazardous waste facilities across California. The EPA says that they will ensure the staging areas are left as they found them, with all areas being highly controlled, consisting of lining processing areas with plastic, putting spill control measures in place, continuous air monitoring, and using a water truck to suppress dust emissions.
Constant communication with the public and key stakeholders will be essential and ongoing because we already see public concern. Some residents near the Lario site feel they were blindsided by the EPA when their town was chosen to store the waste and are taking their concerns to the media.
Cleaning up hazardous waste is an area that the EPA knows well. However, the EPA is used to conducting long-term clean-ups, taking years and sometimes decades to complete. This is not feasible in this situation because people can’t begin to rebuild their homes and lives until the EPA gets this phase done. For Lee Zeldin, the new Administrator of the EPA, this will be a central test to show that the EPA can produce tangible results in a timely fashion.
