Homes near Eaton Fire burn zone still test positive for lead and asbestos — even after cleaning

After the Eaton Fire, many homes remained standing but were coated with the ashes of structures that burned. Post-fire testing showed these surviving homes contained lead, asbestos and other heavy materials that pose a risk to human health.

On Thursday, a group of residents released results from a new round of testing in dozens of homes. The findings show contaminants remain present in many homes, even after professional cleaning.

Francois Tissot, a CalTech geochemistry professor who was not involved in the effort, said the results are concerning.

“I personally was expecting that the values post-remediation in most houses would look really good,” Tissot said.

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Instead, 63% of tested homes had lead on their floors at levels far above EPA screening thresholds.

It’s a result Tissot called “worrying.”

Digging through the data

The results came from 50 homes in the Altadena area. The data was compiled by Eaton Fire Residents United, a group formed after January’s historically destructive fire. Ten of those homes had been included in the group’s previous release of pre-remediation testing data.

Most of the homes (78%) in the latest round of testing had been cleaned by a professional remediation company. The other 22% were do-it-yourself jobs performed according to public health recommendations.

The testing was performed by various licensed industrial hygienist testing companies, and it was paid for either by insurance providers or out-of-pocket by homeowners. Only about half the homes were tested for asbestos.

The lack of consistency across testing is one of the limitations inherent in figuring out ongoing health risks, said Nicole Maccalla, the resident group’s data science director.

“There is a need for standards in this industry,” Maccalla said.

About one-third of the cleaned homes (36%) that were checked for asbestos tested positive. Not every home was tested for the presence of heavy metals. But among six homes that were, all returned positive results for chromium, barium, copper and zinc.

Dawn Fanning, the resident group’s managing director, said regulators should take these results seriously because asbestos has been linked with lung cancer, lead has been linked with neurological problems (especially in children and pregnant women), and heavy metals can cause kidney and liver damage, among other health issues.

“We don't want to alarm people, but we don't want them to live in unsafe homes,” Fanning said. “This is why we're asking elected officials to roll up their sleeves, get involved and do what needs to be done to make sure that every home is safe.”

Is normal cleaning enough?

Organizers from the group said they want elected officials to ensure homes are tested and fully clear of contaminants before residents are told to return. They said until full clearance is achieved, insurance companies should be required to extend relocation benefits for displaced residents.

Tissot, the Caltech scientist, said more data is needed to fully understand the health risks present in cleaned homes. For example, he said children living in the area should be given blood tests for lead.

Tissot said his own lab plans to test remediated homes for the presence of harmful substances, independent of the Eaton Fire Residents United project. He said it’s possible that cleaning standards that are sufficient in rural areas may not be enough to fully clean homes where thousands of structures burned.

“Most of those protocols are established based on wildfires which do not contain a very high amount of heavy metals to begin with,” he said. “But maybe the cleaning protocols are insufficient for urban fires.”

Eaton Fire Residents United leaders, who have been navigating their own path toward cleaning their homes, recommend that concerned homeowners run HEPA air filters and leave shoes outside.

Those precautions are a start, but they say it’ll take advocacy — and pushing insurance companies to cover post-remediation testing — for homeowners to feel confident about re-entering a healthy home.