A hazmat team, on their hands and knees, sifts through piles of ash slowly, methodically. They poke and prod mounds of debris with a shovel. They were tasked by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to examine what is left of Altadena, a neighbourhood destroyed by the fires that razed parts of Los Angeles County last month. The crew wears jumpsuits and gas masks while they look for pesticides, paint cans and propane tanks—anything toxic or prone to explode. They avoid walking near chimneys, which are often the only things left standing on incinerated lots. They could topple over at any minute. To the north, the charred mountains loom.
The fires, which killed at least 29 people, are at last fully contained. Before rebuilding, there is the question of what to do with the wreckage left behind. The scale of the task is daunting: more than 16,000 buildings were destroyed across an area larger than San Francisco. Clean-up has just begun, and it could be months before any new construction starts. But the recovery is already revealing tensions between Angelenos and their government, and is sparking questions about how much the fires will or won’t change America’s second-largest city.
First comes debris removal. The Trump administration decreed that the EPA needs to finish removing hazardous waste in 30 days, an unprecedented pace for fires of this size. Time isn’t the only challenge. Some houses are hard to get to, especially in the canyons of Pacific Palisades, a neighbourhood that burned. Only one big road serves the area: the Pacific Coast Highway. Lorries hauling debris, police cars and power utilities have to work around LA’s infamous traffic.
Tara Fitzgerald, who is overseeing the EPA’s clean-up, says that because the fires burned through urban areas, it was tricky to find a large place to gather all that hazardous waste before shipping it to landfills, scrap yards or recycling centres around the country. People who live near those waste-collection sites aren’t too happy about their new neighbours. Then there is the waste itself. Some of the biggest hazards among the debris are lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs). The EPA first found large numbers of burned EVs in Lahaina, a Hawaiian town that was reduced to ashes in 2023. They were shipped off Maui and then trucked to a battery recycler near Reno, Nevada. Some of LA’s waste might end up in the same spot. When a battery heats up and expands, explains Harry Allen, the EPA’s on-scene co-ordinator, “there’s a jet fire like a little roman candle.” He shows your correspondent a video of one of his teams gingerly towing the skeleton of a Tesla.
Next comes the rest of the debris: the husks of washing machines, the chimneys standing sentry over the remains, and heaps of ash and rubble. The Army Corps of Engineers initially told Angelenos that clean-up would take 18 months. Residents revolted, and they were joined by an unlikely ally: President Donald Trump.
The fire next time
In an awkward discussion with local leaders during his first week in office, he lambasted LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, for moving too slowly. Although many Angelenos welcomed his visit (and his impatience), Mr Trump’s overall response to the fires has been chaotic. The same executive order that expedited waste removal also directed federal agencies to “maximise water delivery” from reservoirs in the Central Valley, which, rather than helping LA, nearly resulted in the flooding of farmland during the state’s wet season.
While some things about the LA fires resemble what happened in Lahaina, the better comparison is to the Camp Fire, which wiped out the northern California town of Paradise in 2018. “Wind conditions, no rain, no ability to get aircraft up to fight the fire. It was a carbon copy of what happened to us,” says Steve Crowder, the mayor of Paradise. He has been fielding calls from LA asking for advice. Mr Crowder understands better than most the need for speed, but warns that rebuilding Paradise may take 20 years. Officials there reckon they went from erecting fewer than ten homes a year to more than 500. Five years after the fire, the town has recovered only about 40% of its population.
LA County, home to nearly 10m people, has far more resources than Paradise. Still, the need for workers and speedy permits (not something California does well) will be enormous. The county wants to create a fast process for those who want to rebuild exactly what they lost and a slower lane for everyone else. Local officials also plan to ask the state to allow them to ignore recently-passed laws to increase housing density, arguing that they will just slow down rebuilding. YIMBYs say these moves would prioritise rebuilding single-family homes in fire-prone areas. “There’s political pressure to be seen as doing something,” says Chris Elmendorf of the University of California, Davis. Fire victims deserve haste and help. “But I don’t see the legislature just saying, ‘OK, you don’t have to comply with any state housing law.’”
In the past, cities have used disasters to remake themselves. After Chicago burned in 1871, buildings got taller and less flammable. Insurers demanded stricter fire codes. Housing in San Francisco was built more densely after the earthquake of 1906 and the resulting fires. More than a century later, California’s government is fragmented and sclerotic, making sweeping change hard. A lack of imagination won’t help.■
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