Residents in the Eaton burn area and downwind can now send in soil samples from their yard to test for lead, a potent neurotoxin that’s especially dangerous for kids, thanks to a new program from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health that launched this week.

The program is free for residents, who can check their eligibility and review detailed instructions for soil collection on the department’s soil-testing program website. The county also sent more than 25,000 postcards to eligible addresses.

If eligible, participants can wear gardening or nitrile gloves and use a trowel to scoop no more than three inches deep of soil into a gallon plastic zip bag. The department recommends collecting four samples total — two from the front yard and two from the back, each at least 10 feet apart — and mixing them together in the bag.

Residents can then drop off the sample at the county’s one-stop permit center in Altadena. The county will then email results directly to the participant in seven to 10 business days, listing the lead concentration in milligrams per kilogram of soil.

Both residents with standing homes and those who have completed the debris-removal process for their destroyed home are eligible for the program.

While no amount of lead exposure is considered safe, the state recommends taking action if levels exceed 80 milligrams per kilogram — a level that can result in noticeable brain and nerve damage in children who are exposed over long periods of time.

Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor for the Department of Public Health, said the primary exposure concern is ingestion. Kids playing in the soil or adults gardening without gloves who then touch their face or eat can accidentally consume contaminated soil.

Quick said residents can protect their health while collecting samples by wearing gloves and thoroughly washing hands after the collection process.

The county recommends residents with elevated levels of lead in their soil get a professional assessment to determine steps for remediation.

Experts generally advise residents with potentially contaminated soil to cover contaminated soil with a new layer of topsoil. Additionally, planting grass and other vegetation can lock the soil in the ground and act as a barrier. For those who can afford it, scraping a layer of soil off the yard before adding a new layer can add additional protection.

Residents can also take shoes off before entering the house, routinely wash their hands, wipe down pets coming indoors and invest in air filters to reduce the risk of inhaling or ingesting contaminated soil.

The Department of Public Health is also offering free lead blood testing for anyone worried about their exposure during or after the fires.

The residential soil testing program was first created in April, after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $3 million for soil testing from a $134-million settlement between the county and lead paint manufacturers in 2018.

The 4-0 vote came just days after an environmental consulting firm hired by the county found elevated levels of lead and other heavy metals in and downwind of the burn zone. In some Pasadena areas, as many as 80% of samples at intact properties had lead levels above the state’s health-based standard.

The Department of Public Health based eligibility on the firm’s results and expects the funds to cover all interested residents. The program will run until December 2025. The department may consider expanding eligibility as the program progresses.

Right now, the Palisades burn area is not eligible.

The department is prioritizing the Eaton burn area, Quick said, “because we did not see the same lead impacts in the Palisades — which is a great thing.”

A crew of 10, many sporting bright orange National Day Laborer Organizing Network T-shirts, funneled out of a Mexican restaurant on the edge of the Eaton burn scar.

Four months — to the day — after winds smashed a tree into a car next to NDLON’s Pasadena Community Job Center and soot blanketed the neighborhood, a University of Illinois Chicago professor, NDLON staff and volunteers sorted into cars under the midday sun and began discreetly traveling every road in fire-stricken Altadena.

They watched nearly 250 crews — working long hours (for good pay), many under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — remove the toxic debris covering the landscape in the wake of the fire.

Of the over 1,000 workers they surveyed in the burn area on May 7 and 9, only a quarter wore gloves, a fifth wore a protective mask, and a mere tenth donned full Tyvek suits, as required by California’s fire cleanup safety regulations, the group’s report, released Thursday, found.

For Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director and co-founder of NDLON, the results aren’t surprising.

NDLON — a Pasadena-based, national network of day laborer organizations, focused on improving the lives of day laborers, migrant and low-wage workers — has been responding to post-disaster worker safety issues for decades. Alvarado couldn’t help but remember the laborers he and NDLON supported during the cleanup following 9/11 over 20 years ago.

“Those workers are no longer alive. They died of cancer,” he said. “These are workers I’d known for decades — their sons, their cousins.”

Smoke rises from the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center after hijacked planes crashed into the towers, Sept. 11, 2001, in New York.

(Richard Drew / Associated Press)

As Alvarado watches a new generation of laborers get to work in the aftermath of the L.A. fires, his call to action is simple: “I just don’t want to see people dying.”

“We are committed to protecting all workers, regardless of immigration status,” a California Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson said in a statement to The Times.

The Department of Industrial Relations houses the Cal/OSHA program, which is responsible for enforcing worker safety requirements.

“Our outreach services participated in numerous events to ensure safety information is clear, accessible, and widely shared across impacted communities,” the spokesperson said. “Our enforcement team has also been actively providing compliance assistance. To date this team has provided nearly 500 site visits to educate both employers and employees.”

In a statement to The Times, the Army Corps said it mandates every corps employee and contractor to wear proper PPE.

“USACE’s number one priority is public health and safety — of our employees and contractors, and of the survivors and the community,” the corps said. “No workers are ever allowed on USACE sites without proper PPE.”

Yet NDLON has seen lax PPE use time and time again following disasters. Since 2001, NDLON has dispatched to countless hurricanes, floods and fires to support what the organization calls the “second responders” — the workers who wade through the rubble and rebuild communities after the devastation. Eaton was no different.

“We always respond around the country to floods, fires, no matter where it is,” said Cal Soto, workers’ rights director for NDLON, who helped survey workers in the burn area. For the Eaton fire, “we just happen to be literally in the shadow of it.”

When wildfires push into developed areas like Altadena, they chew through not just trees but also residents’ cars, plastics, batteries and household goods such as detergents and paint thinners, releasing hosts of toxic chemicals.

They include heavy metals such as lead and mercury, capable of damaging the nervous system and kidneys, as well as arsenic and nickel, known carcinogens. Organic materials like wood and oil that don’t fully burn can leave polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — or PAHs — which can harm the immune system and cause sickness in the short term and cancer in the long term.

Their primary opportunities to enter the body are through the inhalation of toxic air or through ingestion, after collecting on the hands of a person who then touches their face or uses their hands to eat. They can also, to a lesser extent, absorb directly through the skin.

Masks and disposable head-to-toe coverall suits act as a barrier against the dangerous contaminants.

The responsibility to ensure workers are using those protective barriers on the job ultimately falls on the employer, said Soto.

However, the breakdown of the safety standards can happen anywhere in the chain: The state’s OSHA division can fail to communicate rules to companies and enforce them. Employers can fail to educate their employees or provide the correct PPE. Workers themselves — despite it all — can choose to remove their PPE on long, hot days where a plastic suit and heavy duty mask feel suffocating.

“Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to wear all of that crap — particularly when it’s hot,” said Alvarado, who was a day laborer before founding NDLON. “Sometimes you feel like you’re suffocated.”

NDLON and its Pasadena Community Job Center, within hours of the Eaton fire, became a hub for the community’s response. Its volunteers handed out PPE, food and donations to workers and community members. By the end of January, it had hundreds of helping hands clearing Pasadena’s parks and streets of debris to assist overwhelmed city employees.

At the same time, day labor, construction and environmental remediation workers quickly rushed into the burn zone along with the donations, media attention and celebrities. Like clockwork, so did the labor safety violations.

How to keep a worker safe

In a dimly lit Pasadena church in late January, dozens of day laborers watched as Carlos Castillo played the role of an impatient boss, barking directions at three workers standing before them.

“Hurry up,” Castillo told them in Spanish, handing out boxes of protective suits and masks. One woman, standing in front of the room, fumbled with the straps of a respirator.

Debora Gonzalez, health and safety director NDLON, eyed the day laborer’s efforts before asking the crowd: “What is our friend missing?”

“Gloves!” someone called out.

Debora Gonzalez, middle, teaches fire cleanup workers safety training such as proper fitting and use of a respirator and proper wearing of protective clothing for cleaning disaster sites through the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in Pasadena on Jan. 31.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Gonzalez and other volunteers called on the crowd, who quickly pointed out more problems with the equipment that the three workers had hastily donned. One had a mask that wasn’t sufficient for toxic cleanup; Gonzalez also pointed out that his beard would allow dust to infiltrate.

Castillo, a volunteer trainer and president of the D.C.-based immigrant worker-support nonprofit Trabajadores Unidos de Washington D.C., reminded them that when they are cleaning up an area after a wildfire, there could be a range of noxious chemicals in the ash. Gonzalez said she wanted them to be prepared.

“Tomorrow we’ll practice again,” she told them.

NDLON set up the free trainings for any day laborers interested in supporting fire recovery after some laborers began picking up work cleaning homes contaminated with smoke and ash near the fire zones.

Employers are supposed to provide protective equipment to workers and train them on how to use it, but “many times employers want to move quickly. They just want to get the job done and get the job done as quickly as possible,” said Nadia Marin-Molina, NDLON co-executive director. “Unfortunately, workers’ health goes by the wayside.”

As NDLON worked to educate day laborers, another group of workers moved in: The Army Corps of Engineers’ contractors and private debris removal crews. Alvarado quickly noticed that many of the corps’ workers were not wearing the required PPE.

Never one to let the “Day Laborer” in NDLON’s name limit his compassion, Alvarado reached out to a longtime collaborator, Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies labor standards enforcement, to do something about it.

Neglected in the burn zone

A week later, Juan Pablo Orjuela, a labor justice organizer with NDLON, made sure the air was recirculating in the car as the team drove through the burn zone, surveying workers for the NDLON and University of Illinois Chicago report in early May. He watched an AllTrails map documenting their progress — they’d drive until they had traced every street in northeast Altadena.

Orjuela spotted an Army Corps crew working on a home and pulled the car to the curb. “Eight workers — no gloves, no Tyvek suit,” he said.

Nestor Alvarenga, a day laborer and volunteer with NDLON, sat in the back, tediously recording the number of workers, how many were wearing protective equipment and the site’s address into a spreadsheet on an iPad with a beefy black case.

The Army Corps said it requires all workers on-site to wear a hard hat, safety glasses and reflective vests. Workers in the ash footprint must also wear Tyvek suits, gloves and a respirator, the corps said.

One worker walked up to the car; Orjuela slowly lowered the window.

“Do you guys need anything?” the worker asked.

“No, we’re OK,” Orjuela said, “we’ll get out of your way.”

Debora Gonzalez, left, teaches fire cleanup workers safety training such as proper fitting and use of a respirator and proper wearing of protective clothing for cleaning disaster sites through the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in Pasadena on Jan. 31.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Orjuela rolled up the window and pulled away. “I don’t really have to tell anybody what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m not being antagonistic, but you know … I’m just not saying anything to anybody.”

Theodore and NDLON hope the window survey, spanning 240 job sites with more than 1,000 total workers, can raise awareness for safety and health concerns in the burn areas, help educate workers, and put pressure on the government to more strictly enforce compliance.

“This was no small sample by any means,” Theodore said. “This was an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible and the patterns were clear.”

For Soto, the results are a clear sign that, first and foremost, employers are not upholding their responsibility to ensure their workers’ safety.

“It’s the responsibility of the employer,” he said. “I want to be clear that we have that expectation — that demand — always.”

Yet the window survey found even job sites where the PPE requirements are explicitly listed by the employer on a poster at the site, usage was still low. The reality, NDLON organizers said, is that the state must step in to help enforce the rules.

“I understand that the disaster was colossal, and I never expected the government to have the infrastructure to respond immediately,” said Alvarado, “but at this point, making sure workers have PPE, that’s a basic thing that the government should be doing.”

Former Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report.

A growing coalition of HIV prevention organizations, health experts and Democrats in Congress are sounding the alarm over sweeping Trump administration cuts to HIV/AIDS prevention and surveillance programs nationally, warning they will reverse years of progress combating the disease and cause spikes in new cases — especially in California and among the LGBTQ+ community.

In a letter addressed Friday to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) and 22 of her House colleagues demanded the release of HIV funding allocated by Congress but withheld by the Trump administration. They cited estimates from the Foundation for AIDS Research, known as amfAR, that the cuts could lead to 143,000 additional HIV infections nationwide and 127,000 additional deaths from AIDS-related causes within five years.

Friedman said the effects would be felt in communities small and large across the country but that California would be hit the hardest. She said L.A. County — which stands to lose nearly $20 million in annual federal HIV prevention funding — is being forced to terminate contracts with 39 providers and could see as many as 650 new cases per year as a result.

According to amfAR, that would mark a huge increase, pushing the total number of new infections per year in the county to roughly 2,000.

“South L.A. and communities across California are already feeling the devastating impacts of these withheld HIV prevention funds. These cuts aren’t just numbers — they’re shuttered clinics, canceled programs, and lives lost,” Friedman said in a statement to The Times.

As one example, she said, the Los Angeles LGBT Center — which is headquartered in her district — would likely have to eliminate a range of services including HIV testing, STD screening, community education and assistance for patients using pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a medicine taken by pill or shot that can greatly reduce a person’s risk of becoming infected from sex or injection drug use.

A list reviewed by The Times of L.A. County providers facing funding cuts included large and small organizations and medical institutions in a diverse set of communities, from major hospitals and nonprofits to small clinics. The list was provided by a source on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about the funding of organizations that have not all publicly announced the cuts.

The affected organizations serve a host of communities that already struggle with relatively high rates of HIV infection, including low-income, Spanish speaking, Black and brown and LGBTQ+ communities.

According to L.A. County, the Trump administration’s budget blueprint eliminates or reduces a number of congressionally authorized public health programs, including funding cuts to the domestic HIV prevention program and the Ryan White program, which supports critical care and treatment services for uninsured and underinsured people living with HIV.

The county said the cuts would have “an immediate and long-lasting impact” on community health.

Dozens of organizations and hospitals, such as Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, are bracing for the disruption and potential vacuum of preventative services they’ve been providing to the community since the 1980s, according to Claudia Borzutzky, the hospital’s Chief of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine.

Borzutzky said without the funding, programs that provide screening, education, patient navigation and community outreach — especially for at-risk adolescents and young adults — will evaporate. So, too, will free services that help patients enroll in insurance and access HIV prevention medications.

Patients who “face a variety of health barriers” and are often stigmatized will bear the brunt, she said, losing the “role models [and] peer educators that they can relate to and help [them] build confidence to come into a doctor’s office and seek testing and treatment.”

“We are having to sunset these programs really, really quickly, which impacts our patients and staff in really dramatic ways,” she said.

Answers to queries sent to other southern California health departments suggested they are trying to figure out how to cope with budget shortfalls, too. Health officials from Kern, San Bernardino and Riverside counties all said the situation is uncertain, and that they don’t yet know how they will respond.

Friedman and her colleagues — including fellow California representatives Nancy Pelosi, Judy Chu, Gilbert Cisneros Jr., Robert Garcia, Sam Liccardo, Kevin Mullin, Mark Takano, Derek Tran and George Whitesides — said they were concerned not only about funding for programs nationwide being cut, but also about the wholesale dismantling or defunding of important divisions working on HIV prevention within the federal government.

They questioned in their letter staffing cuts to the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as “the reported elimination” of the Division of HIV Prevention within that center.

In addition to demanding the release of funds already allocated by Congress, the representatives called on Kennedy — and Dr. Debra Houry, deputy director of the CDC — to better communicate the status of ongoing grant funding, and to release “a list of personnel within CDC who can provide timely responses” when those groups to whom Congress had already allocated funding have questions moving forward.

“Although Congress has appropriated funding for HIV prevention in Fiscal Year 2025, several grant recipients have failed to receive adequate communication from CDC regarding the status of their awards,” Friedman and her colleagues wrote. “This ambiguity has caused health departments across the country to pre-emptively terminate HIV and STD prevention contracts with local organizations due to an anticipated lack of funding.”

The letter is just the latest challenge to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to federal agencies and to federal funding allocated by Congress to organizations around the country.

Through a series of executive orders and with the help of his billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and other agency heads, Trump in the first months of his second term has radically altered the federal government’s footprint, laying off thousands of federal workers and attempting to claw back trillions of dollars in federal spending — to be reallocated to projects more aligned with his political agenda, or used to pay for tax cuts that Democrats and independent reviewers have said will disproportionately help wealthy Americans.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office has repeatedly sued the Trump administration over such moves, including cuts and layoffs within Health and Human Services broadly and cuts to grants intended to make states more resistant to infectious disease specifically — calling them unwise, legally unjustifiable and a threat to the health of average Americans.

LGBTQ+ organizations also have sued the Trump administration over orders to preclude health and other organizations from spending federal funding on diversity, equity and inclusion programs geared toward LGBTQ+ populations, including programs designed to decrease new HIV infections and increase healthy management of the disease among transgender people and other vulnerable groups.

“The orders seek to erase transgender people from public life; dismantle diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives; and strip funding from nonprofits providing life-saving health care, housing, and support services,” said Jose Abrigo, the HIV Project Director of Lambda Legal, in a statement. The legal group has filed a number of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration cuts, including one on behalf of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and other nonprofits.

Trump has defended his cuts to the federal government as necessary to implement his agenda. He and his agency leaders have consistently said that the cuts target waste, fraud and abuse in the government, and that average Americans will be better served following the reshuffling.

Kennedy has consistently defended the changes within Health and Human Services, as well. Agency spokespeople have said the substantial cuts would help it focus on Kennedy’s priorities of “ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy has said. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

Kennedy has repeatedly spread misinformation about HIV and AIDS in the past, including by giving credence to the false claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

As recently as June 2023, Kennedy told a reporter for New York Magazine that there “are much better candidates than H.I.V. for what causes AIDS,” and he has previously suggested that environmental toxins and “poppers” — an inhalant drug popular in the gay community — could be causes of AIDS instead.

None of that is supported by science or medicine. Studies from around the world have proven the link between HIV and AIDS, and found it — not drug use or sexual behavior — to be the only common factor in AIDS cases.

Officials in L.A. County said they remained hopeful that the Trump administration would reverse course after considering the effects of the cuts — and the “detrimental impacts on the health and well-being of residents and workers across” the county if they are allowed to stand.