Gov. Gavin Newsom of California visited Altadena on Tuesday to praise the progress of the cleanup after the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, vowing to complete debris removal at “unprecedented, record-breaking speed.”
Catalina Pasillas has a problem with the debris, but her home is far from Altadena. She lives near one of the four federal staging areas where hazardous materials from the rubble are being stored.
Ms. Pasillas, a real estate agent who lives in Duarte, about a mile from one of the sites in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, said smoke from the fires had exacerbated her asthma. Now, she worries that the waste site, in Lario Park, will poison the air even more.
“I understand they need to put the toxic waste somewhere,” she said. “But it feels like they chose our city because they thought we wouldn’t say anything.”
Near the ruins of the Los Angeles fires, a new battle has been emerging over how to dispose of the toxic waste left behind.
Federal officials said the four temporary sites processing the debris pose no threat to public health or to the environment. But some local leaders and residents worry that their neighborhoods could suffer long-term environmental harm and accuse officials of selecting them because they are working-class Black and Hispanic communities.
The dispute over this phase of the Los Angeles cleanup — one of the most complex debris removal efforts in U.S. history — underscores the growing challenge of waste disposal as wildfires destroy more communities because of the effects of severe drought and climate change. The debris must go somewhere, but when it shows up, even temporarily, some residents and local officials wish that somewhere was somewhere else.
At a recent town hall in Duarte, emotions ran high as the mayors of four nearby cities sat opposite representatives from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies. Hundreds of residents attended.
An E.P.A. official assured the crowd that hazardous materials would be properly packaged and transported, an assurance that was met with shouts. When California’s top environmental protection official spoke, someone in the audience yelled, “Do the right thing!” Chants of “Find another place!” followed.
“We are a poor Latino community,” Mayor Robert Gonzales of Azusa, one of the officials onstage at the town hall, said in an interview. “Are we looked at with a different set of glasses, compared to Palisades or Pasadena?” He added: “Our hearts go out to the folks in Altadena and Pasadena. But in cleaning up one crisis, are we manufacturing a second one?”
The Eaton and Palisades fires destroyed roughly 12,000 homes last month and left behind millions of tons of debris. State and federal officials say the cleanup is unfolding in stages, the first of which focuses on the removal of hazardous materials.
In the first phase, E.P.A. crews are removing lithium-ion batteries, paint, ammunition and other hazardous materials from properties. The waste is being taken to temporary sites nearby for collection and processing. That is what has set off the uproar in the surrounding communities over contamination concerns. It’s unclear how long those sites will remain in use.
The next step was just beginning on Tuesday in both Altadena and Pacific Palisades: hauling away the ash, damaged foundations and other debris that remains and that constitutes the bulk of what was left behind by the fires.
Mr. Newsom told reporters that 65 percent of the E.P.A.’s initial hazardous-waste removal will be completed by the end of the week. Of the temporary federal toxic-waste sites, Mr. Newsom said on Tuesday, “They’re being monitored, they’re being assessed and we’re going to hold everyone to a level of accountability as it relates to those sites coming back cleaner than when they found them.”
Mr. Newsom said the pace of debris removal was twice as fast as after the 2018 Woolsey fire in Southern California, and faster than in the aftermath of the Camp fire, which was also in 2018 and devastated the town of Paradise in Northern California.
The governor declined to give a firm timeline of when all of the debris from the Palisades and Eaton fires would be removed, but he suggested it would be weeks, not months, before new construction could begin. “In a matter of weeks — six weeks, seven weeks — we hope folks are out there starting the construction phase,” he said.
Past cleanup efforts have been met with similar community opposition after major wildfires in California and other parts of the country.
After the Camp fire, the cleanup process was delayed by strong opposition from neighboring communities to the proposed locations for a temporary scrapyard.
More recently, after the fires in 2023 on the island of Maui in Hawaii, officials disposed of more than 400,000 tons of ash and debris in a temporary landfill at a site south of Lahaina on the West Maui coastline. Residents feared that it would become permanent. Now, construction of a permanent landfill is still beginning, and the debris has not been moved from the temporary site yet, according to Laksmi Abraham, a county spokeswoman.
The temporary federal hazardous-materials site at Lario Park is on a rocky lot owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Another one serving the Los Angeles area is along the Pacific Coast Highway, near Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Steve Calanog, the E.P.A.’s deputy incident commander for the wildfires, said crew members are taking precautions to prevent contamination, including lining the areas with plastic, using proper containers for each type of waste and testing the soil before and after processing. He stressed that the sites are temporary and could be gone within weeks.
“I’ve been doing this for over 15 years in California, Hawaii and other places,” he said. “We’ve never had a problem.”
Mike Stoker, the former administrator for the E.P.A. region that includes California, was even more direct. “When the E.P.A. says it is safe, it is safe,” he said.
Those statements have not eased community concerns.
Some residents cited an executive order issued by President Trump directing the E.P.A. to clean up hazardous waste from the fires as quickly as possible, arguing it led to a rush job. Mr. Calanog, the E.P.A. deputy incident commander, said the agency had already been working to complete the cleanup promptly, before the executive order.
At the Lario Park site last week, crew members unloaded scorched waste from a truck that had arrived from Altadena. Under a tent circled with lights, workers sorted paint, electronic waste and chemicals into drums and plastic-lined boxes. Nearby, a large tub had been set up to de-energize lithium-ion batteries by submerging them in a salt-and-bicarbonate solution.
Harry Allen, an on-scene coordinator for the E.P.A., said the operation was safe but was indeed running at an unusually fast pace.
“They’re going to start Phase II as soon as they can, even if Phase I isn’t completely done, which is a new thing,” Mr. Allen said. “We’ve never done it that way before.”
In Baldwin Park, a city roughly six miles south of the Lario Park site, Veronica Gelles watched her son’s soccer practice at a park on a recent afternoon and said she had not heard about the waste site, but was concerned about the potential environmental impact.
“It’s something worth worrying about,” she said in Spanish.
Ms. Gelles said the onus was on local leaders to inform residents about the possible dangers. “We’ll have to see what happens,” she said.
In the Topanga Canyon area, a petition to remove the site has garnered more signatures than there are residents in the community. Chad White, a 58-year-old business owner, joined a few dozen residents in protesting the site soon after it opened. Some wore personal protective equipment and held signs reading “No Toxic Debris.”
He said placing the site next to a creek that feeds into the ocean, with winds that could carry toxins into the area, didn’t make sense. “We don’t want to be NIMBYs in this area,” Mr. White added.
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