Trump’s EPA Is Botching Removal of Toxic Waste From the Los Angeles Fires

The week after the Eaton and Palisades fires tore across Los Angeles, clear blue skies shone over the city. Residents consulted their weather apps; the Air Quality Index (AQI) was surprisingly favorable. It seemed impossible that, just days prior, two of the most destructive wildfires in California history had unleashed toxic smoke and made thick ash rain for miles.

But looks — and AQIs — can be deceiving. Urban wildfires are known to unleash a range of carcinogens not captured in typical air quality metrics. When things like plastic pipes, synthetic building materials, cars and appliances burn, they can contaminate the surrounding environment with benzene, formaldehyde, asbestos, and more.

Then, of course, comes the question of what to do with those burnt materials. The immediate destruction wrought by the Los Angeles fires was just the tip of the iceberg. Now, the city must contend with millions of tons of toxic ash and debris. As the federal government speeds through its cleanup process, many of the communities set to receive hazardous waste are pushing back. The battle underscores a growing problem in the face of the climate crisis: The debris must go somewhere, but where it ends up — and who gets a say — is often determined by longstanding social inequities.

In January, President Donald Trump directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to complete its first phase of debris removal within 30 days — a warp speed directive for one of the most complex wildfire cleanup efforts in U.S. history. On February 26, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had completed phase one — removed the most highly toxic materials, such as lithium batteries and propane tanks — and was moving onto the phase two cleanup of ash, rubble and contaminated soil.

But the agency’s approach has received substantial criticism from the start. When the EPA announced that the hazardous waste from the Eaton Fire would be temporarily stored in Lario Park, the mayor of the neighboring city of Duarte, Cesar Garcia, told LA Public Press that local officials hadn’t been consulted about that plan. In fact, Garcia said he found out in the same way as everyone else: through a news article.

The communities near Lario Park are predominantly working class, Latinx and Black, and local leaders worry their communities will suffer lasting harm from toxic emissions. The EPA says it will conduct air monitoring and water and soil sampling near the facility, but the agency has not announced long-term plans for the waste. Duarte officials have requested access to the EPA’s testing data to perform independent audits.

“We are a poor Latino community,” Mayor Robert Gonzales of Azusa, another city near Lario Park, told the New York Times. “Are we looked at with a different set of glasses, compared to Palisades or Pasadena?”

In fact, hazardous waste facilities have disproportionately burdened Black and Latinx communities for decades. The pattern was identified as far back as 1987, when the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice published the report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which found that communities with higher percentages of Black and Latinx residents were more likely to be chosen as sites for toxic waste. Today, nearly 80 percent of waste incinerators are located in communities of color or low-income communities. And as a warming planet fuels increasingly intense disasters, the disposal of the leftover debris stands to exacerbate this discrepancy.

While the EPA has designated phase two of its cleanup as nontoxic, this, too, has raised concerns, since the removed soil will not be tested for contaminants.

Soil testing has been conducted after every major wildfire in California since 2007, but despite the scale of this disaster and an appeal from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-California) himself, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will not be providing funding for soil testing this time around. A FEMA spokesperson told The Hill that, in consultation with the EPA, the agency had determined soil sampling would be “tedious, inefficient, and a barrier to timely clean up and recovery.”

The phase two waste will be temporarily stored at three Los Angeles area landfills, though again, long-term plans have yet to be announced. The City of Calabasas, where Sunshine Canyon Landfill is located, filed lawsuits to prevent the disposal of wildfire debris in its facility, which is not permitted to receive hazardous waste. While the EPA claims the phase two waste is safe, in past years, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has tested wildfire ash from burned homes and found that it contained enough heavy metals and lead to be classified as hazardous waste under state guidelines.

Residents near Sunshine Canyon Landfill are particularly concerned about the influx of debris because the facility already has a track record of noncompliance: Last year, it was cited for at least 25 air pollution and nuisance odor violations.

“Sunshine Canyon Landfill has shown itself incapable of processing the household waste that already goes to their facility,” Erick Fefferman, a community member, told the Los Angeles Times. “Adding toxic debris from a wildfire with known heavy metals and contaminants defies all common sense. Let’s not compound one disaster and create another one.”

In an ideal world, all potentially toxic waste would be deposited at carefully selected facilities, adequately outfitted with resources to prevent harm to human health and the environment. Government data from soil, air and water testing would be proactive, robust and transparent. Local officials and community members closest to the sites would be notified and consulted — though the facilities would also be far away from residential areas.

This is a far cry from the reality unfolding now in the Los Angeles area. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Government officials must devise a better, comprehensive plan for how to handle hazardous waste after natural disasters. After all, we know there are many more to come.