Updated January 18, 2025 at 07:00 AM ET
In Los Angeles, crews from the Environmental Protection Agency have started showing up in hazmat suits and digging through all the potential hazardous waste that the wildfires have left behind.
Typical household items have been transformed into potential hazards by the searing heat, says Steve Calanog, the EPA's deputy incident commander for the Southern California wildfires. These include pesticides, fertilizers, paint solvents, cleaning fluids and propane tanks, along with detritus from hobbies such as auto repair and pottery kilns.
"There's always a plethora of damaged ammunition from sporting rifles," he says.
All of these items, compromised by the high heat and destruction of the wildfires, could catch fire, react, explode, or leak toxic and corrosive chemicals.
The Los Angeles-area wildfires have burned more than 12,000 structures and 40,000 acres. They've left behind a huge, dangerous, problematic mess. While some of the fires continue to burn, California governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order clearing the way for hazardous waste crews to start the cleanup "as soon as it is safe."
"Rebuilding efforts cannot commence until hazardous debris is removed from affected properties," he noted in the order.
Hazmat cleanup crews, coordinated by the federal and state EPAs, have started sifting through the destruction left by the Eaton and Palisades wildfires.
In recent wildfires, a major source of hazardous waste has been lithium ion batteries. They're commonly used in e-bikes, solar panels — and electric cars.
"Those battery packs are large, and pose a great risk to human health and the environment," says Calanog, who has worked on post-wildfire cleanups for more than fifteen years, "When they're damaged by a fire, they can catastrophically catch fire days, weeks, months after."
A chief cleanup priority is the electric vehicles that were abandoned by the road as people fled the fires. Each car battery must be treated as "an unexploded ordnance," Calanog says, requiring great care to remove and dispose of safely.
Then there are the invisible dangers. The hazmat crews come with air monitors to look for explosive or toxic compounds, and radiation detectors. While it's "extremely rare" to find radiation sources after a wildfire, they were detected after the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California. They're presumed to be coming from damaged medical equipment, Michael Alpern, an EPA spokesperson, said in an email to NPR.
Calanog's message to the general public is: Don't try to clean it up yourself.
"All of our team are outfitted with air purifying respirators, hardhats, head to toe Tyvek and other protective gear," he says, and they're trained to deal with materials like asbestos, used to fireproof old homes, which can contribute to lung disease and cancer risks if inhaled.
Calanog says this first hazardous waste cleanup phase could take a few months. But even after it's done, the properties will still be littered with "so many slip, trip and fall hazards," he says. "There's partially destroyed structures where walls can collapse, and plenty of broken glass and nails that folks can injure themselves on."
After the hazardous waste removal, the cleanup gets turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers, recycling agencies and contractors for debris removal.
It's hard to say how much longer people will have to wait before returning to their properties, says Yana Garcia, California's secretary for environmental protection.
"Right now, we're in the phase of identifying what the hazardous waste profile looks like," she says, given the "extraordinary, unprecedented nature of the devastation that we're facing across the Los Angeles area.
"We are maintaining the sense of urgency and the priority to get everyone back onto their properties as soon as possible," she says, adding that they hope people can approach the situation with patience and understanding for the tasks ahead.
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