Federal officials have declared they will not order soil sampling after completing debris removal on Los Angeles properties that succumbed to the region’s devastating fires earlier this year, rebuffing concerns raised by state officials about potential contamination.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) administration last week appealed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in a bid to revive the once-routine testing.
“As practice on all past major fire recoveries, we urge FEMA to conduct comprehensive soil sampling as part of the debris removal process at affected properties,” Nancy Ward, director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), wrote in a letter to Curtis Brown, federal coordinating officer for FEMA Region 9. “Without adequate soil testing, contaminants caused by the fire can remain undetected.”
She warned that failing to implement such sampling could “expose individuals to residual substances during rebuilding efforts and potentially jeopardize groundwater and surface water quality.”
FEMA, however, has reaffirmed its decision to forgo the sampling and instead task the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) with eliminating waste and clearing the top 6 inches from ravaged properties without conducting follow-up soil tests.
“The mission assignment USACE was given does not include soil testing,” said Susan Lee, a spokesperson for the Army Corps, in an emailed statement. “The decision regarding soil testing is outside of USACE’s role, as it is not part of our assigned responsibilities for this disaster.”
Although FEMA has funded and conducted soil sampling at some of California’s biggest wildfires over the past two decades, the federal agency changed its approach in 2020, Brandi Richard Thompson, a spokesperson for FEMA Region 9, told The Hill in an emailed statement.
Based on lessons learned from past fires and in consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), FEMA “stopped funding soil testing as a routine practice and adopted the 6-inch removal standard,” Richard Thompson said.
These instructions by no means bar private individuals or state entities from conducting soil testing themselves, and scientists from the University of California and Loyola Marymount University have begun conducting soil sampling efforts themselves.
Seth John, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California who is working on the sampling, told The Hill in a recent interview that although he believes “it’s always better to have more information,” the lack of FEMA-funded soil sampling is not necessarily a cause for alarm.
But local officials have expressed concern about the lack of federal involvement, as originally reported by the Los Angeles Times.
While FEMA’s debris removal instructions align with similar guidelines set by the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), the stage agency also calls for an additional cleanup phase that involves further soil testing at burn sites.
Wildfire cleanup efforts in the Golden State usually begin with a first phase focused largely on household hazardous waste removal, which was declared complete this week by the EPA.
Following a subsequent debris removal stage — cleanup of asbestos, concrete, metals and other waste — CalRecycle’s state guidelines indicate that the top 3 to 6 inches of soil should be cleared.
But those instructions stress, in bold type, that “after a fire, toxins like arsenic, lead, mercury, and chlorine seep into the top soil.” The goals of testing are “to leave a property safe for families, children and pets to occupy,” as well as “protect groundwater, wildlife and air quality.”
Echoing these concerns, Ward referred in her letter to FEMA to past incident data indicating “that without thorough testing, these materials can remain at depths exceeding 6 inches.”
She asked “that FEMA prioritize soil sampling as part of the recovery process,” noting “the urgency of this matter” in enabling the safe return of residents to their homes.
In response to Ward’s requests, Brown wrote back that “FEMA has not funded soil testing on properties impacted by fires” over the past five years. He verified that up until 2018 — after California’s historic and catastrophic Camp Fire — FEMA’s policy involved clearing 3 inches of soil and sampling it, prior to digging up another 3 inches to test it again.
“This practice was tedious, inefficient, and a barrier to timely clean up and recovery,” Brown wrote, noting that positive results were typically linked to pollutants present in the soil prior to the fires.
“FEMA’s position since 2020 has been to fund the removal of the full 6 inches of soil right away but not fund any further testing,” he added. “To err on the side of caution, FEMA implemented the practice of removing the full 6 inches of soil, rather than 3.”
Any further excavation, Brown explained, would be “related to economic recovery and restoration activities” rather than to “public or environmental health concerns.”
While noting that soil testing would prolong recovery by months, Brown stressed that FEMA does not prevent others from engaging in such efforts. He added that California covered the costs for soil sampling following blazes in 2020 and 2021 that were declared disasters by the then-presidents.
“We encourage the state to conduct soil testing if they wish to do so but are confident that our current practices speed up recovery while protecting and advancing public health and safety,” Brown concluded.
Richard Thomspon, the FEMA Region 9 spokesperson, explained that soil sampling was never “a universal practice” but that prior to 2020, the agency “conducted soil testing in certain wildfire recoveries.”
But upon consulting with the EPA and determining that contamination deeper than 6 inches was usually preexisting, the agency ultimately adopted its “streamlined approach beginning with the August 2020 California wildfires,” she added.
One exception to this approach that Richard Thompson cited was in 2023 following the Lahaina, Hawaii, wildfires, which “burned through a densely developed urban area, with industrial and commercial zones covering over 20 percent of the burn area.”
“Because historical wildfire soil contamination data was lacking in the Pacific, FEMA approved targeted soil testing at the request of the Hawaii Department of Public Health,” she said.
Those tests only further cemented FEMA’s approach, Richard Thompson explained, noting that the results confirmed that most pollutants detected at those depths were present before the blazes.
John and other USC researchers started measuring lead levels in samples they gathered of roadside dust, playground sand and stormwater runoff near the Eaton Fire burn zone at the end of January as part of their effort to provide residents with general safety updates about potential exposures.
In the heart of the burn zones, they detected lead concentrations in roadside dust that surpassed the EPA’s regional screening thresholds for residential soils. But they found that playgrounds posed less of a concern, as lead levels in sandboxes remained low.
John said that team has also identified high concentrations of lead and arsenic in stormwater, with the latter likely coming from wood rot treatment used in homes.
After conducting super-high-resolution sampling throughout Altadena, the researchers obtained preliminary results that showed elevated lead levels adjacent to burn structures but no such issues “even a short distance outside of those areas,” according to John.
In the coming months, the USC team intends to expand their measurements to include other heavy metals, while providing free lead samples to affected community members, he added.
Another soil sampling effort is also being offered to residents of the Palisades and Eaton areas by researchers at Loyola Marymount University.
Regarding lead contamination in particular, John explained that cleanup usually involves removing the top layer of soil, where most lead is localized, and replacing it with new material — pretty much in line with FEMA’s approach.
Nonetheless, John said he as a parent is “very aware that there’s a huge amount of uncertainty and maybe even distrust of the process among people who live there.”
“Testing will make people feel much more comfortable with the situation,” he continued. “But when it actually comes to the question of, ‘Do we need testing in this situation from a scientific perspective?’ I’d say maybe not.”
Julia Van Soelen Kim, a food systems advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, noted in an email “that urban soils have the potential for contamination even before a fire and urban fires also pose unique soil safety risks.”
With the disclaimer that she is a social scientist and not a soil scientist, Van Soelen Kim maintained that testing is considered “best practice before planting a food garden, regardless of whether a fire has taken place.”
“I absolutely do think there is good reason to test soil after an urban wildfire of this nature,” she added.
Backing up these assertions, John acknowledged the legitimacy in the perspectives of, “Why not just go ahead and test?” or, “Better safe than sorry.”
“But testing also takes time,” he said, noting the expensive nature of sampling for certain compounds.
“There’s some value in that information, and certainly value in having that information in terms of making people feel more comfortable,” John added.
