
Cleaning up Los Angeles neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires will take at least a year. Here’s why.
Cleaning up Los Angeles neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires will take at least a year. Here’s why.

Sue Pascoe left her house in the Pacific Palisades with not much more than a change of clothes. She expected to be back home quickly.
“‘We’ll go out tonight and we’ll be back tomorrow.’ So you throw a few things in, threw the dogs dishes in, just packed a couple pairs of underwear, and that was it,” she said.
Everything else she left behind. After the smoke cleared, when she visited her property, she found a ceramic duck and a vase. The rest is ash.
Pascoe said the very first thing that she and her neighbors need to do in this cleanup process is find acceptance.
“People need to go in. They need the closure. They need to go in and say, ‘OK, it is gone. There’s nothing I’ve got here. I’ve got to get started.'”
These homes burned nearly four weeks ago. But some of her neighbors still haven’t seen just how bad the damage is yet. Pascoe said just waiting in line to get into the neighborhood can take up to three hours.
“You have to have the police check your ID and make sure you belong,” she said.
Her husband had to do that to show the insurance adjustor their burned out property.
“People work. They’re taking time off work to do this,” she said.

But getting started on rebuilding is still months away, because there are still countless truckloads of ash and debris that need to be carted away from the more than 16,000 properties that got damaged or destroyed.
The homes of Pascoe and her neighbors are in phase one of the clean up process, which is all about removing hazardous waste.
“This is a matter of protecting public safety and the environment,” said Deputy Incident Commander Karl Banks at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is clearing hazardous materials like batteries, cleansers, paints and ammunition.
All told, the EPA is sending out more than a thousand people in hazmat suits to comb through the wreckage by hand.
Banks said it’s EPA’s largest wildfire response in its history. “The only thing that any of us who’ve been doing this for a couple decades now can compare this to is Katrina.”
President Donald Trump ordered the EPA to finish the process in 30 days. Banks said the agency is doing everything it can to follow those marching orders, but won’t give an official end date.
Once the EPA has given its blessing to enter a house, phase two can begin.

“Phase two is the general debris removal,” said Director Mark Pestrella with Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works. “Our role is essentially as an administrator of the program.”
Phase two concerns everything that is not hazardous, including dead trees, cracked house foundations and lots of ash. The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of handling that part. It’ll do the job free of charge, though it will take insurance coverage residents have for debris removal. And residents have to sign up through LA County.
“We go on that property to do debris removal without your permission, we’d be trespassing,” said Pestrella. “To relieve that, we have a program called the right-of-entry program the property owners need to enroll in.”
To sign up, residents have to fill out a 12-page form and send it in to LA County by the end of March. Residents get to be higher up in the line if they convince their neighbors to fill it out fast too, because the Army Corps is prioritizing blocks where it can do lots of properties at once to speed up the process.
And then they wait. Because Banks said the Army Corps expects the debris will be gone from 80% to 90% of the properties within a year or less.
Homeowners can pay for private debris removal instead, but that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s just to turn the property into a blank slate. Fire victim Sue Pascoe is expecting to live in her temporary apartment for a while after that.
“Our insurance adjuster, when we were looking for a place to rent, said it’s going to be a year and a half to two years at a minimum if we’re lucky,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”
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