A state environmental oversight board voted unanimously to rescind a controversial proposal that would have permitted California municipal landfills to accept contaminated soil that is currently required to be dumped at sites specifically designated and approved for hazardous waste.

Earlier this year, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) released a draft of its first-ever Hazardous Waste Management Plan, a document intended to guide the state’s strategy on dangerous waste.

The draft plan included a recommendation to weaken California’s disposal rules for contaminated soil — typically the largest segment of hazardous waste produced each year. The potential change would have allowed contaminated soil from heavily polluted sites to be dumped at landfills that were not designed to handle hazardous waste.

Environmental advocates and community members expressed concerns that the rollback could result in toxic dust blowing into communities near local landfills or dangerous chemicals leaching into groundwater. State officials countered by saying that contaminated soil would only go to landfills equipped with liners that would prevent toxic substances from seeping into local aquifers.

At a public meeting on the plan held on Thursday evening, the Board of Environmental Safety — a five-member panel established to provide oversight of DTSC — unanimously voted to remove that recommendation from the state’s draft plan. That followed months of intense scrutiny from residents and environmental groups directed toward the plan. DTSC officials present at the meeting also signaled that they would support the board’s decision to nix the revision.

“I heard you talk about the pollution burdens you already face,” DTSC deputy director Mandi Bane said to the crowd of a few dozen who had gathered at the department’s offices in Cypress. “The worry that DTSC is taking steps that will endanger your community by making that pollution burden worse, and [the] outrage that these steps will be taken without consultation and discussion. As a public health professional, the stress, the fear, the anger that I heard from folks was very concerning … and I do want to apologize that this plan had that impact.”

Heavily polluting industries have tainted soil across California. More than 560,000 tons of hazardous soil are produced each year in California as environmental regulators endeavor to prevent residents from coming in contact with chemical-laced soil and developers build on land in industrial corridors.

However, the vast majority of this soil is not considered hazardous outside of California. The state has hazardous waste regulations that are more stringent than the federal government and most states in the country.

There are only two waste facilities in California that meet the state’s rigorous guidelines for hazardous materials, both in the San Joaquin Valley. Any hazardous dirt in California must be trucked there, or exported to landfills in neighboring states that rely on the more lenient federal standards.

State officials argued the current rules make it difficult and expensive to dispose of contaminated soil, noting that the average distance such waste is trucked right now is about 440 miles, according to the draft plan.

Ahead of the board vote, environmental advocates rallied outside of the DTSC offices in Cypress, calling on state officials to uphold California’s hazardous waste standards for contaminated soil. Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the proposal would effectively forgo California’s regulatory authority and rely on the federal environmental rules — at a time when the Trump administration is repealing environmental policy.

“This plan is a travesty, and I’m calling on DTSC to be better than this,” Johnson Meszaros said at Thursday’s meeting. “If we don’t draw the line with this massive deregulatory effort, there is no line. We will be swept up in the insanity we see at the national level.”

The discussion of hazardous waste disposal has been thrust into the public spotlight recently as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues to remove toxic ash and contaminated soil from properties destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades wildfires. Because disaster debris is traditionally considered not hazardous, federal contractors have been hauling this material to several nonhazardous local landfills without testing it.

In response to the federal cleanup plans, residents in unincorporated Agoura and the Granada Hills neighborhood in Los Angeles staged protests near local landfills.

Melissa Bumstead, an environmental advocate and San Fernando Valley resident, urged the Board of Environmental Safety to consider factoring disaster debris into the hazardous waste plan. With climate change fueling increasingly destructive wildfires, this will continue to be an issue for years to come, she said.

“This is an opportunity, not just with hazardous waste that is manufactured,” Bumstead said, “but also hazardous waste that is created by wildfires on how to create a plan that is going to protect Californians in the future.”

It seems like a straightforward question: Do the tons of toxic material the Los Angeles County fires sent spewing into the ocean pose an ongoing threat to human health?

For nearly five months, public agencies, advocacy groups and scientists have analyzed samples of seawater and sand in an attempt to determine whether January’s catastrophe has made it less safe to swim, surf or sunbathe at the region’s famous beaches.

Their collective results point to two broad truths.

The first is that neither government agencies nor privately funded groups have found levels of fire-related contamination in sand or ocean water likely to pose health risks to beachgoers. While visible fire debris still occasionally washes up on shore and should be avoided, public health officials and advocates say, there is little evidence of fire-related toxins high enough to sicken visitors through casual recreational exposure.

The second is that the unprecedented amount of ecological damage January’s firestorms caused simply dwarfs the tools we have available to measure beach pollution.

The seawater safety testing that informs the county’s beach water quality advisories is designed to look for hazards posed by sewage, not fire debris.

State and federal regulators have clear guidelines on the maximum amount of heavy metals and chemicals that can be in our drinking water before it is deemed unsafe, but no similar standards for how much of this stuff it is safe to be exposed to when swimming.

This lack of preexisting health guidelines has made it hard for public health officials to describe the situation at the coast in simple, declarative terms. That, in turn, has frustrated a public that just wants to know if it’s safe to get back on a surfboard.

“There are no human health standards for recreating in water or on sand that has been contaminated, potentially, by these pollutants … and so there’s no straightforward way to test for contaminants and then [say] this exceeds the risk threshold, or it doesn’t,” said Tracy Quinn, president of the environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay. “And that has presented a lot of challenges.”

The Palisades and Eaton fires incinerated more than 40,000 acres and countless tons of plastics, electronics, building materials, batteries and other potentially hazardous materials. Because of the region’s geography, much of that toxic ash and residue eventually flushed into the ocean.

County health officials closed several miles of coastline entirely in January and February, citing spiking levels of bacteria caused by destroyed sewage systems and dangerous amounts of hazardous debris clogging up the shore.

In the meantime, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board began collecting samples of ocean water to assess contaminant levels.

The board soon had reams of public data for beaches from Las Flores Creek in Malibu to Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey, showing results for dozens of different contaminants, including heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenol and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

But, again, there are no established regulations for how much of these contaminants a surfer or swimmer can be safely exposed to. There also isn’t much historical data with which to compare the current amounts of pollutants such as plasticizers, fire retardants and other modern chemicals to pre-fire conditions.

As a result, county health officials struggled to translate their findings into recommendations the public could use.

“This is not business as usual with ocean water testing,” said Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor with the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

County health officials spent hours plugging the numbers into a publicly available Environmental Protection Agency tool that helps evaluate safe environmental exposure levels to various substances. They also invited experts from other agencies to weigh in.

No matter how they ran the numbers, they didn’t see evidence that the levels of contaminants present in January and February would threaten human health.

Heal the Bay tested seawater around the same time. The group found enough lead and other heavy metals in some samples to potentially build up over time in the tissue of marine life, but not high enough to sicken a human swimming in those waters.

The county now has an online dashboard for post-fire environmental data that includes ocean water testing.
But by the time it went live this spring, many members of the public were already frustrated by the lack of clear-cut answers and the confusing pile of data online, said Eugenia Ermacora, Los Angeles chapter manager for the Surfrider Foundation.

“It creates this anxiety,” she said. “Everybody wants an answer right now: Is it safe? Me too! I’m a surfer. My fins are drying. But we’re trying to be patient at the same time.”

L.A.’s coastal ecosystem is now the subject of a massive real-life science experiment. As in all sweeping studies, it will be a while before clear answers emerge. In the meantime, advocates are hopeful that L.A.’s experience now will help communities respond to disasters in the future.

“This is not the last time we’re going to see an urban megafire in a coastal city. It may not be the last time we see an urban megafire in Los Angeles, and we need to be better prepared,” Quinn of Heal the Bay said. “My hope is that we take the information that we’re learning here and we create protocols and standards for what to do next time.”

A group of environmental researchers is calling on the Newsom administration to step in and pay for soil testing at thousands of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades wildfires.

Nearly a dozen university professors wrote a letter Wednesday to Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Yana Garcia, imploring state officials not to abandon California’s wildfire-recovery protocols, namely the long-standing policy to conduct soil sampling at destroyed homes after cleanup crews finish removing toxic ash and a layer of topsoil.

Because federal disaster agencies have repeatedly refused to conduct soil sampling to ensure burned-down homes do not contain unhealthy levels of toxic substances, the researchers argue it is imperative for the state to intervene in the ongoing recovery efforts for the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.

“At present, no parcel-specific soil testing is required or recommended by the State for residential properties impacted by the Eaton Fire and Palisades Fire,” the letter reads. “In our view, this poses a serious risk to public health and the economic recovery of the communities.”

The letter was signed by faculty members from nine universities, including USC and UCLA, many of whom are currently involved in conducting free soil testing for homeowners in and around the burn zones of the January wildfires. Among them, Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor who has investigated contamination following wildfires, said comprehensive soil testing was paramount to the health and safety of the fire-affected communities.

“The decision not to conduct soil testing the way it has been in the past — without any advanced warning — has really thrown personal safety and the ability of the community to rapidly recover up in the air,” Whelton said.

State officials said federal authorities are in charge of the wildfire recovery effort, including the decision on soil testing and remediation. State officials had asked FEMA to reconsider paying for soil testing, but the request was rejected within hours.

“The State continues to push for our federal partners to conduct comprehensive soil sampling as part of the debris removal process,” said Nefretiri Cooley, a spokesperson for CalEPA.

The university researchers highlighted recent soil testing efforts by the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health that found elevated lead and arsenic levels at destroyed homes cleared by federal debris removal crews in Altadena.

The Army Corps of Engineers, the agency supervising debris removal crews, declined to comment on the county results. A FEMA spokesperson said the agency still maintains that its cleanup approach — removing wildfire debris and up to 6 inches of topsoil — is sufficient to remove immediate public health risks.

The L.A. County Health Department has allocated up to $3 million to pay for soil testing, mostly for homeowners who showered in toxic smoke and ash downwind of the Eaton fire. But Whelton said these efforts on their own are not sufficient to analyze the risk.

“One soil sample will be analyzed that a homeowner submits to a commercial laboratory, and then the homeowner will have to interpret the data on their own and decide what to do,” Whelton said. “So that is not going to get people [back] to safe properties again.”

A worker clears debris from a home destroyed in the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades in April.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Local officials continued to emphasize the need for a speedy recovery, in part because they are worried about the precipitous drop in tax revenue. Federal, state, and local governments could experience tax revenue losses from roughly $730 million to $1.4 billion due to the wildfires, according to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit focused on economic growth.

At a meeting earlier this week, L.A. County officials announced that a new program is expected to allow licensed architects and engineers to “self-certify” that residential rebuilds meet building code requirements, with the assistance of artificial intelligence software that reviews building plans. The initiative aims to significantly speed up the timeline for issuing building permits.

More than 10,000 properties were signed up to be cleaned by federal debris removal crews. So far, they’ve cleared around 4,700 properties, which are now eligible for rebuilding permits without soil testing.

In the past, disaster agencies soil testing at cleaned-up properties to ensure toxic substances did not exceed California’s standards for residential properties. At properties where toxic substances were found above state standards, disaster agencies ordered cleanup crews to return to remove more soil and perform additional testing.

If state officials walk away from their soil-testing policy, some environmental experts say hundreds of homes in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades will still be contaminated, potentially exposing returning residents to toxic metals, like lead. But perhaps more worrying, it could also set a precedent for California communities devastated by wildfires in the future.

In California, where 30% of the state’s population lives in high-risk fire zones where buildings intermingle with wilderness, destructive wildfires are inevitable. But after the Eaton and Palisades fires, many homeowners are confused about federal and state agencies’ responsibilities during disaster cleanup.

“It is certainly appropriate to have discussion about who’s responsible for soil testing and soil remediation after these wildfires,” Whelton said. “But because there was an abrupt decision by multiple government agencies to just not do it, that’s left a whole bunch of property owners with anxiety and an unclear path to how they’re going to make their property safe again — or if they want to return.”