California
Homeowners spared by California fires grapple with returning home amid toxic debris:
Lynn McIntyre is supposed to feel like one of the lucky ones. When a series of wildfires devastated Los Angeles in January, her Pacific Palisades home was among those inexplicably spared. But with every single home around her burned to the ground, McIntyre calls herself something different: “one of the left behinds.”
“I don’t feel as lucky as people think,” she said. “Because I don’t have the same set of issues that all of my neighbors have. They’re cut and dried.”
Cut and dried, she says, because their homes are total losses in the eyes of insurance companies. They don’t have to figure out how to clean up a home that’s standing in a sea of toxic ash, soot and debris, the remnants of all the synthetic stuff that makes up modern life – appliances, clothing and carpets — after it all burned at high heat.
“There’s no guidelines for what you should be looking for. There’s no guidelines telling you who to call or regulate testing,” she said. “It’s a Wild West out there with the testing, with the remediation companies. People are just grasping at straws with no guidance from government.”
Tests, which McIntyre says she spent more than $5,000 of her own money on, showed arsenic was present inside her home as well as lead levels 22 times higher than what’s considered safe by the EPA.
Still, McIntyre’s insurer has told her it will not cover the cost of cleaning up her home because it does not constitute a “direct physical loss.” She also won’t get help from the agencies tasked by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with cleaning up from the fires – the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The first phase of cleaning up Los Angeles
The EPA started its portion of the cleanup, known as Phase 1, first by removing all the hazardous waste – things like propane tanks, cleaning supplies and paint cans – and combing the burn zones for electric vehicles, the newest challenge when cleaning up after an urban fire.
Electric vehicles are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which can explode, emit toxic gasses or re-ignite even weeks or months after they’ve been damaged. Just one electric vehicle contains thousands of those batteries. Chris Myers, who leads the EPA’s Lithium-Ion Battery Emergency Response team, said leaving those “uncontrolled out in the field” poses a danger to the public.
“They are delicate, they are fragile, they’re unstable,” he explained. “In the public, access is very, very dangerous for anyone who is onsite, right, not just our workers, but the public at large.”
EPA teams found about 600 electric vehicles, most of them in McIntyre’s Palisades neighborhood.
But just identifying incinerated electric vehicles has been a challenge, according to Myers. So, the EPA conducted reconnaissance, sending dozens of teams across Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, searching for the skeletons of electric vehicles in the debris and calling power companies and manufacturers to locate the power walls, which were often attached to homes, to charge them.
The instability of these damaged batteries means extracting them from a single electric vehicle can take a six-person team up to two hours. It’s a delicate surgery performed with heavy machinery. First, the top of the car is sawed off and then flipped over, exposing the battery underneath. The thousands of cells that make up the battery are scooped out and placed into steel drums which are transported to a temporary processing site. Once at the processing site they’re plunged into a saltwater solution for three days, a process that allows any trapped energy in the battery to dissipate, making them far less likely to reignite. Lastly, the batteries are shoveled onto a tarp and steamrolled, ensuring that what’s left, according to Myers, can no longer be considered a battery.
Handling California’s hazardous waste
So where does all that battery waste end up? 60 Minutes found the answer 600 miles away.
Despite no longer being considered “batteries,” what’s left is still technically considered a hazardous material under California’s strict environmental regulations. We learned that this battery waste was being trucked hundreds of miles away to a hazardous waste landfill – in Utah.
For years, the state of California has struggled to keep up with the amount of hazardous waste it generates. California only has two operating landfills certified to take hazardous materials and, even before the fires, those two sites couldn’t hold all of the state’s hazardous waste. Instead about half of it is trucked hundreds of miles away to nearby states, mostly Utah and Arizona, which rely on more lenient federal waste standards.
Removing billions of pounds of debris
After the EPA finished clearing more than 9,000 properties of hazardous debris and while that battery waste was still being hauled out of state, the second phase of the cleanup was getting underway. The second phase involves removing all the rest of the debris – about nine billion pounds’ worth – including everything from concrete foundations to furniture and contaminated soil.
This phase is being overseen by the U.S. Army Corps Engineers under the leadership of Col. Eric Swenson, who anticipates their work will be done by the first anniversary of the fires.
It’s a task that’s being carried out parcel by parcel, dump truck by dump truck. Swenson said the time it takes to clear one property can take up to 10 days depending on the complexity of the structure and the terrain it sits on.
“If we have a house that’s pinned on the side of a mountain, pinned on the side of a coastline, those properties could take us six, eight, 10 days to do, because we’re gonna need some specialized equipment to get in there,” Swenson said.
The Army Corps and its cavalry of dump trucks is also responsible for removing six inches of topsoil from the charred properties once the debris is cleared. Swenson’s confident six inches is enough to make the soil safe again and worries that further excavation makes it difficult for homeowners to rebuild.
“All we’re doing is economically disadvantaging that owner, and delaying their ability to rebuild, ’cause now they’re gonna have to replace all of that soil we excavated– from– from that property,” Swenson said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn’t think removing six inches of soil is enough. His office asked FEMA, which determines the scope of work for the Army Corps, to test the remaining soil for toxic contaminants as it’s done after previous wildfires. FEMA says the agency changed its approach to soil testing in 2020 because it found that contamination deeper than six inches was typically pre-existing and not necessary for public health protection.
The long road home
But residents like Matthew Craig, who lived in Altadena, aren’t eligible for help from the Army Corps or EPA cleanup crews. Craig’s home, like Lynn McIntyre’s, is still standing, but the strong winds that fueled the wildfires pushed smoke and soot inside, leaving a fine layer of ash on everything. It’s that ash that worries him.
“The house is filled with the ashes of thousands of homes that are hundreds of years old,” he said. “These houses are filled with asbestos. They’re filled with lead.”
Craig’s insurance company has agreed to test the inside of his home for toxins and he’s waiting to hear whether they’ll cover his clean up costs. Until testing can show that his home is safe, Craig says that he, his wife and young son won’t return.
McIntyre shares Craig’s concerns. She signed an 18-month lease on an apartment out of town, anticipating the road home for her, and her neighbors, will be a long one.
A prominent California farmer was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of murder in the shooting death of his estranged wife in a remote mountain community in Arizona, the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office said.
Michael Abatti, 63, was arrested in El Centro and booked into jail on a first-degree murder charge. He is awaiting extradition to Arizona.
Authorities say they believe he drove to Arizona on Nov. 20 and fatally shot Kerri Ann Abatti, 59, before returning home to California. She was found dead in her family’s tree-shrouded vacation home in Pinetop, Arizona, where she moved after splitting with her husband.
An attorney for Michael Abatti didn’t immediately respond to an email and text message seeking comment.
Authorities searched his home in far Southern California on Dec. 2 as part of the investigation into his wife’s death.
El Centro is a city of 44,000 people just minutes from the Mexican border in the crop-rich Imperial Valley, which is the biggest user of Colorado River water and known for growing leafy greens, melons and forage crops.
Michael Abatti comes from a long line of farmers in the region bordering Arizona, and his grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was among the region’s early settlers. His father, Ben, helped start the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, and the Abatti name is known throughout the region and tied to farming enterprises, scholarship funds and leadership in local boards and groups.
Water sits in a ditch Friday, Dec. 12, 2025, in El Centro, Calif. Credit: AP/Gregory Bull
Michael Abatti has grown onions, broccoli, cantaloupes and other crops in the Imperial Valley and served on the board of the powerful Imperial Irrigation District from 2006 to 2010.
Michael and Kerri Abatti were married in 1992 and had three children.
Kerri Abatti is a descendant of one of the first Latter-day Saints families to settle Pinetop in the 1880s. The community, located 190 miles (305 kilometers) northeast of Phoenix in the White Mountains, was briefly called Penrodville after Kerri’s forbearers before adopting the Pinetop name.
The couple split in 2023 and Kerri Abatti filed for divorce in proceedings that were pending in California at the time of her death.
Water droplets from sprinklers cover an irrigated field Friday, Dec. 12, 2025, in El Centro, Calif. Credit: AP/Gregory Bull
The Abattis were sparring over finances with Kerri telling the court the couple had lived an upper-class lifestyle during more than three decades of marriage. They owned a large home in California, a vacation home in Pinetop and ranch land in Wyoming and vacationed in Switzerland, Italy and Hawaii while sending their children to private school, she said.
After the split, Kerri was granted $5,000 a month in temporary spousal support but last year asked for an increase to $30,000, saying she couldn’t maintain her standard of living as she quit her job as a bookkeeper and office manager for the family farm in 1999 to stay home with the couple’s three children. Kerri, who previously held a real estate license in Arizona, also asked for an additional $100,000 in attorney’s fees, court filings show.
“I am barely scraping by each month, am handling all of the manual labor on our large property in Arizona and continuing its upkeep,” she wrote in court filings earlier this year, adding she was living near her elderly parents. Kerri said she also needed to buy a newer car because her 2011 vehicle had more than 280,000 miles (450,600 kilometers) on it and sorely needed repairs.
Michael Abatti said in a legal filing that he couldn’t afford the increase after two bad farming years took a toll on his monthly income. He said European shifts in crop-buying to support war-plagued Ukrainian farmers and rising shipping costs were to blame along with an unusually cold and wet winter.
He said in mid-2024 it cost $1,000 to grow an acre of wheat that he could sell for $700, and that he was receiving about $22,000 a month to run the farm as the business struggled to pay its creditors in full.
“The income available at this time does not warrant any increase in the amount to which the parties stipulated, let alone an increase to $30,000 per month,” Lee Hejmanowski, Michael Abatti’s family law attorney, wrote in court papers.
Days later, Michael Abatti agreed to increase temporary spousal support payments to $6,400 a month, court filings show.
He studied in the agricultural business management program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins before returning to California, according to a 2023 book about water issues written by his college friend, Craig Morgan, titled “The Morality of Deceit.”
In 2009, Michael Abatti almost died from an infection caused by a flesh-eating bacteria and was hospitalized and placed in a medically induced coma for treatment, Morgan wrote in the book.
Melodee Buzzard, the 9-year-old whose disappearance was reported by Santa Barbara County educators in October, has been found dead, a relative confirmed to The Times on Tuesday.
Melodee vanished during an unusual road trip with her mother earlier this year, sparking a months-long investigation.
Her disappearance captivated and confounded true crime watchers around the nation as FBI investigators and armchair detectives alike tried to solve the puzzle of what happened.
On Tuesday, Melodee’s paternal grandmother confirmed to The Times that her body has been found by investigators.
“The detective called me this morning to let me know that they found the baby and the baby is with her dad,” said Melodee’s grandmother Lilly Denes. “I knew he was telling me that the baby is dead.”
Melodee’s father, Rubiell “Pinoy” Meza, died in a motorcycle accident in 2016.
Local TV news station KSBY captured video of Melodee’s mother Ashlee Buzzard being taken into custody shortly before 7:45 a.m. Tuesday. During the road trip earlier this year, Buzzard changed out the license plates on her rental car and wore wigs in what detectives described as possible attempts to avoid detection, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has planned a 2 p.m. news conference to provide updates on the case. Here is what we know about the events that led up to Tuesday’s tragic discovery.
Ashlee Buzzard’s ‘hard knock’ childhood
When Ashlee Buzzard was just 9 years old — the same age as her daughter Melodee when she went missing — she and her mother, Lori Miranda, became homeless after fleeing Buzzard’s abusive father, Miranda told the Santa Maria Times in 1995.
The article, titled “Lessons From the School of Hard Knocks,” describes how Miranda and her daughter arrived on the streets of Santa Maria with no job, home or car and only $40 to support them.
They had previously moved from place to place to get away from Miranda’s husband, who she said struggled with substance use and episodes of violence. In June 1994, Miranda decided to take her daughter from Orange County to the Central Coast to be farther away from him, and they briefly lived at the Good Samaritan Shelter in Santa Maria before moving into an apartment.
“I was so scared,” Ashlee told the paper, describing her early days in Santa Maria. “I knew no one [here]. I felt very uncomfortable.”
According to Melodee’s paternal relatives, Buzzard had a contentious relationship with her mother.
When Buzzard was in the 11th grade at Santa Maria High School, she filed a petition to be emancipated from Miranda, according to court records. The judge rejected the petition, noting that Buzzard was still living with her mother and had not submitted adequate information pertaining to her income and expenses.
A birth and a sudden death
Melodee was born Feb. 10, 2016, to Buzzard and Meza. Six months later, Meza died.
In Melodee’s early years, Meza’s family continued to have a relationship with the girl, according to Denes. She was a lovable child, always smiling and well-behaved, Denes said.
Lilly Denes, the paternal grandmother of missing California girl Melodee Buzzard, in her home in Orcutt on Nov. 6.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
In 2021, another of Denes’ sons took care of Melodee while Buzzard was hospitalized for several weeks, she said.
During this period, Denes said she was working with social services to gain custody of Melodee as she was concerned about Buzzard’s ability to care for the child. But before Denes had finished the background check process, Buzzard was discharged from the hospital, picked up her daughter from school and left Santa Maria, Denes said.
After that, Buzzard relocated to the nearby neighborhood of Vandenberg Village and refused to let the girl’s paternal relatives see her. She did, however, occasionally visit Denes to ask for money over the years, Denes said.
Federal court records show that Buzzard filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2017. She’s also had five collections and one small claims lawsuit for alleged unpaid debts filed against her in Santa Barbara County Superior Court, the most recent of which was filed by Capital One Bank in May.
In August, Buzzard enrolled Melodee in an independent study program at the Lompoc Unified School District. Sheriff’s detectives believe that she had previously been homeschooling the girl for several years, but the California Department of Education has no record of her submitting the required paperwork to do so, according to a department spokesperson.
A strange cross-country road trip
Melodee Buzzard was captured on surveillance camera apparently wearing a wig at a car rental location in Lompoc on Oct. 7.
(Santa Barbara County Sheriff)
On Oct. 7, Buzzard and Melodee left their Vandenberg Village home and traveled to Nebraska, according to the Sheriff’s Office. During the trip, Buzzard switched out the California license plates (9MNG101) on the car with New York plates (HCG9677). When she returned home Oct. 10, the original plates were reaffixed, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Both Melodee and Buzzard were apparently wearing wigs during the journey and the mother reportedly changed wigs throughout, according to the Sheriff’s Office. The last confirmed sighting of Melodee was on Oct. 9, when she was seen on surveillance video near the Utah-Colorado border.
The investigation
On Oct. 14, school administrators reported Melodee’s prolonged absence from her independent study program to the Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators then visited Buzzard’s home, where the mother refused to answer questions about her daughter’s whereabouts, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
On Oct. 30, the FBI joined the case and assisted the Sheriff’s Office in serving search warrants for Buzzard’s home, the rental car and a storage locker.
Detectives then mapped out Buzzard’s road trip route and focused on the return route, from where Melodee was last seen in Utah to Vandenberg Village.
Investigators believe that Buzzard traveled through the following areas on or around Oct. 9: Green River, Utah; Panguitch, Utah; Northwest Arizona; Primm, Nev.; Rancho Cucamonga.
(Santa Barbara County Sheriff)
During October, relatives and concerned community members often gathered around Buzzard’s home, chanting, “Where is Melodee” and leaving posters with messages such as “Bring her home.” The investigation became a national sensation, with videos produced by true crime sleuths racking up thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram.
Buzzard arrested following accusations of false imprisonment
Buzzard was arrested Nov. 7 in an incident unrelated to the investigation into her daughters disappearance, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
She was accused of unlawfully violating the personal liberty of Tyler S. Brewer after disclosing sensitive information to him.
Brewer, a paralegal and acquaintance of Buzzard, said in a statement that he visited Buzzard at her home to offer assistance in the search for the missing girl, and that the situation quickly escalated.
But at a hearing in November, a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge dismissed the case after new evidence came to light that called his version of events into question.
“After the initial report to law enforcement and the filing of the complaint, further investigation yielded additional evidence that was contradictory to the information that was initially provided to detectives,” said Amber Frost, a spokesperson for the Santa Barbara district attorney’s office.
“That evidence was brought out at the hearing and inconsistencies were examined by both sides. Ultimately, it was determined that the evidence was not sufficient to move this case forward to trial,” Frost said.
Times staff writer Terry Castleman contributed to this report.
PLACER COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) — Heavy rain and flooding impacted Northern California over the weekend, leading to rescues and evacuations throughout the region.
In Placer County, emergency crews carefully and slowly rescued a baby in a carrier, sliding it on a ladder over a rushing river.
The raging South Yuba River overtook the home, where nine people were rescued by the Truckee Fire Protection District.
As of Monday morning, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office said an evacuation warning continues to be in effect for areas along the South Yuba River between Donner Pass Road and Cisco Road.
The storm is also swamping parts of Humboldt County, where the sheriff’s office shared pictures of goats stranded on someone’s doorstep.
This is near the Freshwater area – near Arcata, where high water forced several evacuations.
Crews arrived in jet skis to assist residents.
In Redding, one person died after major flooding.
Water took over streets and entire neighborhoods.
Several people had to be rescued, and Interstate 5 was also flooded, impacting holiday drivers.
LIVE UPDATES: Storms flood parts of NorCal with heavy rain as alerts expand to entire Bay Area
In Mendocino County, Willits received more than 6 inches of rain in 48 hours, flooding parks in the area.
With more rain in the forecast, rescue crews are prepared and people are reminded not to ever drive through standing water.
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