Why contamination is keeping people out of homes

ALTADENA, Calif. — A mother started giving her son chelation therapy to remove lead from his blood. A geochemist will not enter his home without a respirator and full suit. A cinematographer spent thousands of dollars to have the land where his home once stood tested for heavy metals and remediated — work the government’s cleanup program failed to do.

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Sixteen months after the Eaton Fire, here are the extreme measures Altadena residents are taking to deal with a multitude of toxic compounds, including arsenic and asbestos, plaguing their families and properties. The contamination is a result of the unprecedented nature of this urban fire, during which thousands of homes and cars became fuel for the fire, releasing heavy metals into the smoke.

Even after charred debris was removed from the lots where the homes burned and after the remaining homes were remediated, tests found lead concentrations high enough to make children sick.

“I went and got one of those lead tests on Amazon for $75 and did some scanning and found lead everywhere,” said Jennifer Rochlin, a ceramic artist and single mother of two sons. Her insurance company, she said, did not approve lead testing for her Altadena home until she found the metal herself, including in her HVAC system.

Rochlin moved twice and had to replace absorbent items like mattresses twice.

Situations like hers are a big part of why so many residents still haven’t returned to Altadena, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, whether their homes burned down or not. Thousands of people — according to one report, nearly two-thirds of residents who lost their homes or suffered smoke damage in the Eaton Fire — remain displaced and stuck in temporary housing, often at enormous cost to their insurers and themselves as coverage expires.

Uncertainty about when it will be safe to return or rebuild has prompted a range of academics, independent scientists and grassroots advocacy groups to conduct their own research into the contamination. What follows is the story of these discoveries and the conflicts that followed, based on interviews with more than a dozen Altadena residents, six scientists working on contamination issues, workers involved in debris cleanup, local politicians, and representatives of the insurance industry.

Together, their experiences make clear that the systems designed to respond to fire – insurance and sanitation companies, local governments and environmental agencies – were not designed for such an event.

“This was an urban fire and the contamination we were dealing with was unlike anything you would normally see,” said Dawn Fanning, executive director of Eaton Fire Residents United, a nonprofit recovery group.

Aside from lead and asbestos, California does not have safety standards regarding contamination of indoor residences with many of the hazardous substances found in Altadena. This makes it difficult for landlords and insurance companies to determine when the risk is low enough to move back in. Even companies that test for contaminants do not use consistent methods. Meanwhile, on properties where homes burned, FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to require soil testing, leaving residents in the dark about potential dangers.

Two whistleblowers who worked on the Corps cleanup said they feared the community would face soil contamination for a long time.

The two men, who asked that their names not be published for fear of reprisals, described their work as rushed and inconsistent. One said they saw more debris left behind than after previous wildfires.

“It’s so incomplete. For other fires, we’re going from fence to fence, scraping, taking everything away,” he said. But not this time: “There are still contaminants. »

A spokesperson for the Army Corps said the scope of its cleanup efforts — including decisions on what would be removed — was established by FEMA and agreed to in advance by California and Los Angeles County.

“The assigned mission covered the removal of ash and structural debris, as well as the top six centimeters of soil in the ash footprint and structural foundations,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Soil testing was not part of FEMA’s USACE mission.”

Threats hidden in the earth

Altadena is where wilderness meets the city.

The area is nestled against the San Gabriel Mountains, which glow the color of warm terracotta at sunset. From here, the skyline of downtown Los Angeles can appear distant and abstract in the haze.

The Eaton Fire destroyed 9,400 homes and structures in Altadena in January 2025, causing lithium in electric vehicle batteries, arsenic in old wood, and asbestos in attic insulation to become part of the smoke. The swirling winds that spread the flames topped 90 mph.

During the fire, Alireza Namayandeh, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, collected smoke samples in a Pasadena park, inside the plume, using a device that filters and separates particles. His subsequent research, Namayandeh said, shows that the majority of the particles were actually nanoparticles about a thousandth the width of a human hair — a size at which they can easily enter the lungs, bloodstream and brain.