Southern California was made to burn. The earliest wildfire recorded there was in 1889 and scorched 300,000 acres.
Given such a history, it might be tempting to see the calamitous Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires in Los Angeles County in January as part of a continuum. That would be a mistake. Rather, these fires show we need a new way of thinking about fire: as not only natural disaster, but also environmental threat with a high risk of long-term harms to health.
In part, this has to do with more frequent fires in the wildlife urban interface, where the city meets the wilderness. Both the Eaton and Palisades fires affected this type of terrain, which the historian and social critic Carey McWilliams (among others) once characterized as “rurban,” which is to say, untamed and densely populated at once.
Blazes in these areas consume, in addition to brush and undergrowth, all sorts of manufactured materials: lead paint and piping, lithium batteries and computers, cleaning solutions and artificial fibers, automobiles and electric wires. Soil samples collected from the Palisades and Altadena have revealed the presence of heavy metals and other toxic elements, including arsenic, lead and mercury. If not properly remediated, such contamination can linger, with potential effects including not only cancer but also damage to the brain and nervous system, especially in children under 3. That makes every fire in the wildlife urban interface a potential public health emergency.
Normally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would take the lead on testing the soil and other sites for contamination after such an event. In February, however, the Corps announced it would not order sampling to see if properties had been properly decontaminated, citing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s refusal to authorize remediation efforts of that scope. Such a pullback is hardly exclusive to Southern California; in recent months, FEMA has denied disaster aid to West Virginia and Washington. This means that survivors in Los Angeles, as well as elsewhere, are on their own more than ever.
Some residents of Altadena and the Palisades have paid for their own remediation, then waited, in some cases for months, to be reimbursed by insurance companies. Many homes that escaped fire damage were inundated with debris, some of it toxic. The administration has said it wants states and municipalities to take a larger role in mitigation and recovery, but the truth is they are already strapped. California is no exception.
In June, the state announced a mortgage relief program for those whose homes have been destroyed or irreparably damaged, but these grants top out at $20,000. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County has allocated up to $3 million for soil testing for residents affected by the Eaton fire, but this, like many private programs, relies on residents gathering and transporting their own samples.
The ramifications of toxic contamination in large areas of Los Angeles for public safety and health are likely to be significant. Consider the spike in both heart and lung disease reported after the 2023 Lahaina fire on Maui. And then there are the psychological risks. In the immediate wake of Lahaina, suicides and overdoses rose precipitously across Hawaii — a staggering 97 percent on Maui alone in the month of the fire, according to a recent paper.
Among the problems with fire is how its effects linger. It may take years for the full consequences to be known. Equally troubling is that contamination doesn’t stay contained. For all the visible damage to Altadena and the Palisades, in other words, there is a more insidious set of dangers, both in the homes and structures left undamaged and throughout the broader region. Even as the January fires had stopped burning, wind had distributed toxic smoke and ash across much of Los Angeles County, before blowing them out to the Pacific by way of Long Beach.
The slow recovery in Los Angeles is the result, in part, of complex and contradictory insurance practices — according to one report, as many as 70 percent of survivors in Altadena and the Palisades have reported delays, denials or underpayment — intensified by the shifts in federal policy. According to Department of Angels, one of several community-based groups that have emerged to work for those left behind by government and insurers, a large number of affected residents are still unable to return to their properties.
Without federal resources for recovery efforts, survivors can end up in an ongoing state of triage, in which the best that can be hoped for is short-term remediation, amid the certainty that fire will come again.
Because fires and other climate disasters are no longer discrete episodes, but instead a constant barrage. They represent a new normal in a nation where more than 60,000 communities are within a wildlife urban interface, a number that, as weather patterns continue to turn increasingly severe, will only grow. We know what to do: plant fire-resistant vegetation; create defensible space cleared of flammable objects; build with fire-resistant materials. Such strategies, however, require time and money. They require patience and grit. Eight months later, with recovery moving slowly, those things are in short supply.
Meanwhile, climate change isn’t waiting. Every day, it seems, we face another catastrophe. July marked the onset of fire season in California, and conditions that helped precipitate the January conflagrations — drought and a preponderance of dry brush — remain a substantial risk. This month alone, the Gifford fire in San Luis Obispo County has burned more than 130,000 acres, making it the state’s largest fire by area in 2025.
And yet California has learned from, and adapted to, climate challenges since before the phrase was in use. I recall the Field Act, which mandated earthquake-resistant building codes for schools after more than 200 were destroyed or damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. I recall Bob and Jackie Genofile, the couple featured in John McPhee’s essay “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” their Glendale home demolished by debris flow only to be rebuilt and reinforced.
Each, in its own way, represents a gesture of community. Each represents an act of will. As the wildlife urban interface expands and fires become more toxic, Californians have become, perhaps, the canaries in the coal mine, in a world where environmental devastation provoked by climate change is now a commonplace.
David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel “Thirteen Question Method.” He is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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