The Brief

The L.A. County fires have destroyed thousands of homes.

“The first week was really, crisis, like just sheer crisis and panic and a lot of huge uncertainty and fear about our home,” said Adriana Martinez.

She has a home in Altadena with her husband and two children. It was still standing Thursday as the Eaton Fire raged nearby and she entered the house to retrieve passports and other items. Homes a few doors away burned down, she said.

Now in her second week at a West Covina hotel, she’s able to think about the damage smoke and ash have caused inside her home and how her family will clean it. There was a lot of smoke:

“I use a mouth guard. Even the clothes that we were able to grab, toiletries, lotions or whatever, are they actually safe to use? Like toothpaste that I grabbed from the drawers that, you know, things that we put into our mouths or put on our face or our skin,” she said.

Many others are asking similar questions — and there are many ways to do it.

What to understand about fire smoke

Fire smoke is not created equal. Soot from natural fibers such as wood and vegetation cleans out easier than soot from plastics, such as chairs and PVC pipes.

Adriana Martinez's living room during the Eaton Fire.

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“Most fires are going to be a mix of plastics and natural fibers,” said Tiffany Smith, a franchise consultant for 911 Restoration, a fire and smoke damage clean-up company.

Those manmade materials, she said, tend to produce a greasier and more penetrating soot and odor than the soot produced in a forest fire.

“Most people, in general, feel like they've got a really big odor problem and [yet] they're really underestimating the cleaning challenges that are out there in front of them,” said Robert Bowles, director of service line development for Servpro, another fire damage clean up company.

What to clean, what not to clean

Much of the work to clean up smoke damage inside homes after the L.A. fires will be done by companies that specialize in this. (And insurance can help; more on that below.)

There were some differences of opinion among the companies LAist talked to as to what should be discarded, what should be kept, and what residents can clean themselves. But here's what the experts we talked to said:

• Keepsakes: Take inventory of invaluable items such as childhood teddy bears, Christening outfits, or family Bibles. If you get expert help cleaning, start with these.
• Toiletries, pantry items: Temperature matters because contents may have been affected if flames raised temperatures enough to spoil contents; other than that, Bowles said the outsides of sealed items can be cleaned. Smith recommends throwing everything out.
• Clothes: You can dry clean them, although buying new tees may be cheaper. If you wash them yourself, don't mix them with regular laundry.
• Mattresses: Bowles said mattresses can be cleaned because they are often protected from soot by linings, covers, sheets and blankets. But Smith pointed out that mattresses have dense fabrics — so if your mattress wasn’t well-covered, you might need a new one.
• Couches: The dense fabric makes it difficult to clean but it can be done.
• Pillows: Throw them out; the dense fabric makes it difficult to get smoke soot out.
• Hard, non-porous surfaces: Stone countertops, metal appliances, and sealed wood surfaces can be cleaned as usual.
• Porous surfaces: Walls and ceilings should be cleaned by professionals; here's a good explainer from Keri Blakinger of the Los Angeles Times.
• Cars: 911 Restoration says they might be able to use chlorine dioxide or ozone gas to break down the odors at a molecular level.

A key element of all of this: Time. The experts say that waiting weeks to clean an item allows the soot to set into the fabric, which makes it harder to get out.

Be safe

While Smith and Bowles speak with authority about the process of deciding what to clean, they underline that they are not health experts; decisions about the safety of going into your home and cleaning should be done with protection and with information about what you’re walking into.

“Ash that made it into your home could have asbestos. Heat from the fires could cause acid to leak from batteries,” said Rania Sabty, an occupational health and safety expert, during a webinar organized by an air quality advocacy group.

You may also be able to draw on the expertise of people who have been here before — many people around L.A. have cleaned up homes after a wildfire.

For things you do clean: Again, use protection. The Pasadena Public Health Department recommends a mask like an N95 or P100; gloves; long-sleeved shirts; long pants; shoes and socks; and goggles to avoid skin and eye contact.

What can insurance do?

Insurance that pays for cleaning and replacement of items in a home damaged by fires is called personal property coverage. Here’s a basic description.

“Smoke damage is covered by the standard homeowners policy,” said  David Russell, a professor of insurance and finance at California State University, Northridge.

It’s important, Russell said, for the person filing the claim to begin documenting everything that will need to be cleaned or replaced.

“ It's not up to [the insurance adjuster]. It's up to you to tell them what you've lost and then they validate your claim. Don't expect them to accept everything wholesale,” he said. That’s because adjusters approach claims with some skepticism.

Insurance companies balance their responsibility to put the person who’s insured back to where they were before the loss, with being economical.

“The insurance adjuster has to protect and minimize the payment of claims for the benefit of all policyholders, because losses flow through ultimately to the premiums we all pay at the same time,” Russell said.

He said state and federal regulations keep abuse at bay.

Documenting what’s been lost or damaged, along with finding receipts, is critical for the many people who find themselves now with smoke damage in their homes.

The damage to homes and property from the current L.A. fires ranks, he said, as one of the big three major property loss events in recent U.S. history, behind Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Russell expects that the magnitude of the current losses will lead to lengthy waits for policyholders.

“Impatience and urgency can be the enemy of a thorough and complete accounting of what's been lost,” he said.

His own replacement cost insurance on his $1 million Westwood home, he said, is about $3,000 a year. He has a $1,000 deductible and a California Earthquake Authority policy that costs him about $4,000 yearly.

It’s critical for people to review their own policy. Some people don’t have enough coverage to replace what may be lost.

“I didn't know that much about my policy,” said Diane Read, whose four-bedroom house was partially damaged by the Woolsey Fire in 2018. She recommends listening to recommendations and asking the companies a lot of questions about what the cleaning process will look like. In hindsight, she said, she would have done more about her keepsakes.

“I wouldn't have listened to ‘everything is ruined,’ because it wasn't, and you can take books and let them air out, anything that's really important to you,” she said.

The silver lining to the difficult process of recovery, she said, is that her home was rebuilt. And, she said, it looks gorgeous now.

A Trump administration official on Friday signaled a potential rollback of the racial and ethnic categories approved for the 2030 census and other future federal government forms.

Supporters of those categories fear that any last-minute modifications to the U.S. government's standards for data about race and ethnicity could hurt the accuracy of census data and other future statistics used for redrawing voting districts, enforcing civil rights protections and guiding policymaking.

Those standards were last revised in 2024 during the Biden administration, after Census Bureau research and public discussion.

A White House agency at the time approved, among other changes, new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino" under a reformatted question that asks survey participants: "What is your race and/or ethnicity?" The revisions also require the federal government to stop automatically categorizing people who identify with Middle Eastern or North African groups as white.

But at a Friday meeting of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics in Washington, D.C., the chief statistician within the White House's Office of Management and Budget revealed that the Trump administration has started a new review of those standards and how the 2024 revisions were approved.

"We're still at the very beginning of a review. And this, again, is not prejudging any particular outcome. I think we just wanted to be able to take a look at the process and decide where we wanted to end up on a number of these questions," said Mark Calabria. "I've certainly heard a wide range of views within the administration. So it's just premature to say where we'll end up."

OMB's press office did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.

Calabria's comments mark the first public confirmation that Trump officials are considering the possibility of not using the latest racial and ethnic category changes and other revisions. They come amid the administration's attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a push to stop producing data that could protect the rights of transgender people and threats to the reliability of federal statistics.

In September, OMB said those Biden-era revisions "continue to be in effect" when it announced a six-month extension to the 2029 deadline for federal agencies to follow the new standards when collecting data on race and ethnicity.

Calabria said the delay gave agencies more time to implement the changes "while we review."

The first Trump administration stalled the process for revising the racial and ethnic data standards in time for the 2020 census.

The "Project 2025" policy agenda released by The Heritage Foundation, the conservative, D.C.-based think tank, called for a Republican administration to "thoroughly review any changes" to census race and ethnicity questions because of "concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas."

Advocates of the changes, however, see the new categories and other revisions as long-needed updates to better reflect people's identities.

"At stake is a more accurate and deeper understanding of the communities that comprise our country," says Meeta Anand, senior director of census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "I am not concerned if it's reviewed in an honest attempt to understand what the process was. I am concerned if it's for a predetermined outcome that would be to ignore the entire process that was done in a very transparent manner."

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2025 NPR

A large black bear that was relocated earlier this year after being found under a house in Altadena is up to his old tricks again.

The bear, nicknamed Barry by the neighbors, was found last week under a different Altadena home, and wildlife officials are using a caramel- and cherry-scented lure to entice the roughly 550-pound male bear out of his hiding spot.

So far, they’ve been unsuccessful.

Cort Klopping, information specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told LAist the bear seems to be spooked by increased activity around the home, including media crews outside and helicopters overhead.

“It seems as though in this case, this bear has found this poor guy's crawlspace as a comfortable, safe-seeming, warm enclosure for denning purposes,” he said.

He said the space is “somewhere for this bear to kind of hang its hat when it's relaxing.”

How the bear returned

Wildlife officials can tell it’s the same bear who was lured out from under an Altadena house after the Eaton Fire because of the tag number on his ear.

The bear was trapped and relocated about 10 miles away to the Angeles National Forest in January, but Klopping said he’s been back in the Altadena area for around five months.

The male bear after it was removed from under an Altadena home earlier this year.

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The bear spooked a SoCal Gas crew who stopped by for repairs after the Eaton Fire in January.

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The Department of Fish and Wildlife fitted the bear with a temporary GPS collar so officials could keep track of it. The collar came off a couple months later while the animal still was living in the forest.

The bear is believed to have been spotted around the home last Tuesday, Klopping said, and the owner reached out to wildlife officials a few days later for help.

“I’ve seen pictures of this bear, and I’m shocked to be under that house,” homeowner Ken Johnson told LAist media partner CBS LA.

Officials said they were hopeful the bear would move along on its own. They encouraged the homeowner to set up a camera on the crawlspace and line the area with ammonia soaked-rags or a motion-activated wildlife sprinkler system to deter the bear from returning, Klopping said.

“These are all actions that would not harm the bear, not harm people, but they would make it less comfortable for the bear to be there,” he said.

But the bear stayed put.

“Right now, it seems like it's stressed,” Klopping said. “It seems like it's scared, and therefore, it's not really wanting to leave the security of where it is at the moment.”

The hope ahead

A pair of wildlife officials stopped by the home Thursday to set up the sweet-smelling lure and camera so the department can keep an eye on the bear’s activity remotely.

Barry didn’t take the bait immediately, Klopping said, but officials are hopeful the animal will feel more comfortable leaving the crawlspace once activity around the home dies down a bit.

Klopping also is warning people in the area to secure access points on their property so the bear just doesn’t move in there next.

“If I were in that neighborhood, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure that my crawlspaces would not be accessible,” he said, including covering it with something stronger than the wire mesh the bear got through before.

Bears also are extremely food motivated, and Klopping said they can smell your leftover chicken in trash cans on the curb from 5 miles away.

He encouraged residents to be mindful of trash that could be an easy meal for wildlife, as well as pet food and hummingbird feeders, which Klopping said biologists have seen bears drink “like a soda.”

You can find tips on how to handle a bear in your backyard here and resources from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife here.

There’s a new way you can track pollution in your neighborhood.

The SoCal Clean Manufacturing Coalition, a climate advocacy group, has released a map with the locations of more than 1,800 fossil fuel-burning industrial boilers across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Many are at universities and hospitals, as well as some apartment complexes like the Park La Brea apartments in the Miracle Mile.

The map is part of an effort to push the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates our air quality, to pass rules to require these large boilers to be phased out.

Why do these boilers matter?

Industrial boilers aren’t exactly the poster child of pollution, but they do play a role in Southern California. Boilers come in different sizes, and although there are electric types, many still burn fossil fuels to generate hot water, steam and, as a byproduct, nitrogen oxide.

South Coast AQMD says that makes it a source of pollutants. Nitrogen oxide contributors are not only a problem for smog and respiratory issues but also for the agency’s effort to meet federal air quality standards.

That’s why last year the agency approved new requirements for certain buildings to use zero-emission water heaters and boilers when they need replacement.

Teresa Cheng,  California director for Industrious Labs, a coalition member focused on creating cleaner industries, says these rules were for smaller “baby boilers” and that the coalition wants to see that applied to larger ones, which are covered under the agency’s 1146 and 1146.1 rule.

The push has caused concern in the gas industry. The California Fuels and Convenience Alliance, which represents small fuel retailers and industry suppliers, says boilers are essential in a wide range of manufacturing facilities that need high heat, like food processing, fuel production and more.

“CFCA is deeply concerned that requiring industrial facilities to abandon gas-fired boilers at the end of their useful life before the market is technologically or economically ready will still have severe consequences for manufacturers, workers and consumers,” the alliance said in a statement.

The organization says many facilities already have invested in “ultra-low” nitrogen oxide technology and that requiring a switch to zero-emissions equipment could destabilize the industry because of costs.

See the map

The map includes the number of boilers in each place, including how many aging units, and their permitted heating capacity. (That metric essentially correlates with how much pollution it can release.)

Cheng says the map is being shared to make the “invisible visible” so residents can know what’s around them. Most boilers are in communities that already deal with environmental pollution problems.

Boilers are even close to K-12 schools, like Glendale’s Herbert Hoover High School, which has its own.

“ These boilers have a very long lifeline,” she said. “If the air district doesn't pass zero-emissions rules for these boilers, we actually risk locking in decades more of pollution.”