Homeowners say the Army Corps and its contractors mishandled L.A. fire debris cleanup

After January’s wildfires reduced thousands of homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades to heaps of ash and rubble, wildfire survivors hoped federal disaster workers would give them a fresh start on a rebuild-ready lot.

But many residents say that has not been the reality.

More than 800 complaints were submitted to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hotline dedicated to the agency’s debris removal efforts from March to mid-May, according to public records obtained by the Los Angeles Times. About a third of those reviewed by The Times allege that federal crews either didn’t thoroughly remove wildfire debris or failed to follow protocols.

Many wildfire victims complained that remediation was mostly confined to each building’s footprint, leaving significant portions of their properties untouched.

In some cases, property owners criticized contractors hired by the Army Corps for leaving behind debris, including car parts, fire-damaged home foundations, hazardous trees and contaminated pool water.

In other instances, they said federal contractors didn’t adhere to their own cleanup guidelines. Among the most notable shortcomings: failing to remove ash-covered soil outside building footprints and not excavating to the depth established by the Army Corps.

Some issues raised in complaints have been flagged by Army Corps personnel tasked with providing cleanup oversight, according to internal reports obtained by The Times through a public records request.

It’s unclear whether or how these issues have been resolved.

“There are no formal standards and requirements after a disaster like this, when it comes to environmental safety and cleanup,” said Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor who studies natural disasters. “There are recommendations and guidelines. But that allows people … to choose not to follow them.”

Representatives for the Army Corps and its primary contractor, Environmental Chemical Corp., said the cleanup had overwhelmingly received positive feedback from wildfire survivors. But, on occasion, officials have ordered crews to return to properties where owners have raised concerns.

The remedies varied case by case, said Glenn Sweatt, ECC’s vice president of contracts and compliance. “We try to resolve issues to the homeowners’ satisfaction within the FEMA and [Army Corps] guidelines.”

In six months, federal contractors have cleared more than 9,300 properties in Los Angeles County, making it the fastest wildfire recovery in modern history. Even as elected officials have praised the Army Corps for the rapid pace of work, the grievances submitted by disaster victims have called into question whether federal workers are sacrificing quality for speed.

Environmental Protection Agency contractors work in February to remove hazardous waste from a beachfront property destroyed in the Palisades fire.

(Mario Tama / Getty Images)

The apparent deficiencies and inconsistencies have heightened fears that debris removal efforts could leave behind soil contamination — a possibility FEMA and the Army Corps have not acknowledged even as they argue soil testing is not necessary.

But, at very least, the complaints demonstrate the considerable amount of work — and potential costs — that may lie ahead for property owners after federal disaster authorities complete their mission.

Cleanup came with caveats, confusion

In late January, when the federal cleanup started, the plan seemed straightforward: The Army Corps vowed that its contractors would remove toxic ash and wreckage from destroyed homes. They also would extract up to 6 inches of topsoil.

But the scope of the work was more limited than many homeowners who signed up for the Army Corps cleanup realized. Outlined in the work plans and contracts, obtained by The Times, were a number of caveats.

The cleanup efforts were mostly limited to the “structural ash footprint,” which typically included a few feet surrounding the burned-down home. A wide range of debris outside that area was deemed ineligible for removal: driveways and sidewalks, patios, pool water and in many cases large portions of lawns and gardens.

Because the plans were not made public, many property owners were confused over what workers could haul away and what they couldn’t. What’s more, some federal contractors didn’t seem to fully understand them either, according to internal reports obtained by The Times.

The overall uncertainty led to sometimes inconsistent and inadequate execution.

Subcontractor Ray Ferrer, left, Randy Balik of environmental remediation company OFRS and Marco Rossi, also of OFRS, look at a property in Pacific Palisades in June, ahead of a cleanup.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

On March 23, a homeowner called the Army Corps debris removal hotline to complain that a contractor told them “part of their house is outside of the ash footprint.” The contractor had allegedly determined that a 12-by-6 room inside the house was actually a patio, according to the complaint.

Another phoned on March 26 to complain that federal workers declined to remove the front steps and arched entryway to his home. “We’re already traumatized,” the complainant said. “This is adding to the trauma.”

On May 6, a property owner requested a second opinion from the Army Corps after federal contractors refused to remove a hallway that once connected his home to his garage.

Several callers noted that their home foundations hadn’t been removed, including one who discovered fire debris and his home’s foundation buried underneath a layer of soil after the cleanup wrapped up.

Luke Melchior, chief executive of Melchior Construction Co., has seen many of these issues firsthand. His company has been hired to carry out additional debris removal for several property owners who had opted for the Army Corps cleanup.

Melchior said the quality of work boils down to the experience of workers.

“You get different quality of work based on the integrity of the [subcontractor],” Melchior said. “There’s really no recourse, because you sign a complete liability waiver when you sign up for the Army Corps of Engineers program. So you basically get what you get.”

ECC oversees the many subcontractors and dozens of individual work crews involved. Sweatt denied that ECC contractors refused to take debris considered eligible by FEMA and the Army Corps. He maintained that there have been fewer complaints as the cleanup has progressed, which he credited to better communication and familiarity with the process.

However, because work plans have been revised several times throughout the cleanup, and are now more inclusive of some types of debris, that means early Army Corps-remediated properties may not have been cleaned to the same degree as later ones.

The Eaton fire destroyed nearly every home on the block of Poppyfield Drive in northwest Altadena where Shawna Dawson Beer lived, including her 1925 English Tudor cottage.

Although Dawson Beer and neighbors attempted to sign up for the Army Corps cleanup on the first day, she said, their properties were cleared sporadically over the course of months. By summer, it was apparent that not all homes were cleaned with the same rigor.

“We thought our block would get done at once. It didn’t,” Dawson Beer said. “It ended up being kind of piecemeal and haphazard.”

Polluted pool water, murky guidelines

The stagnant swimming pool at Palisades Charter High School in June.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

More than two dozen complaints involved stagnant pool water, which had been sullied by ash and debris.

Many homeowners wanted the federal contractors to drain their pools, but pool water was initially ineligible for removal, according to Sweatt.

The work plan has since changed to instruct federal contractors to drain pool water if it is within the ash footprint — meaning within a few feet of the house. That has rarely been the case.

Los Angeles sanitation officials said that soot- and ash-filled pool water cannot be emptied into the storm drain that flows into the ocean because of contamination concerns.

In many cases, that left homeowners to figure out how to dispose of contaminated pool water, or hire a professional to take care of it. Months into the cleanup, federal contractors were still struggling to figure out how to handle it.

An empty swimming pool sits on a mostly cleared Altadena property that was destroyed in the Eaton fire.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“No one is sure where the water is going,” an Altadena cleanup inspector wrote in an April 18 report. “[The workers] were instructed not to drain the water into the street. … Additionally, they cannot drain it into the sewer or spray it onto other properties. They need clarification on the proper procedure.”

Other crews may not have been aware of the restrictions.

On April 7, for example, a cleanup crew in Altadena drained “contaminated pool water” from a destroyed home and sprayed it onto a neighbor’s yard, according to Army Corps records.

Another team was told on April 10 they could drain pool water into the street with a proper filter. Two days later, workers on another site drained a different pool using the “wrong filter,” according to Army Corps reports.

Uneven soil removal worries residents

The complaints also raise questions as to whether crews are adhering to soil removal guidelines laid out by the Army Corps and ECC.

As thousands of homes burned, the ash and soot left the burn scars and communities downwind cloaked in toxic lead, arsenic and other heavy metals.

Although federal officials have consistently stated that workers would remove topsoil from the entire ash footprint, that hasn’t always been the case. Many homeowners say contractors are not abiding by the Army Corps standard, which includes ash-covered soil 3 feet outside of the building footprint.

Once the heavy machinery rumbled away and federal disaster workers moved on, Allen Chen, a 49-year-old spine specialist at UCLA Health, was stunned that the rose garden immediately in front of his home was still covered in fire-charred soil and flecks of white ash.

“You have the Army Corps send you this email, like, here’s the final sign off,” Chen said. “But what you don’t realize is that doesn’t mean anything. That just means the Army Corps has wiped their hands clean of what they were gonna do, which is the footprint. But there’s all this other stuff left over that you have to think about.”

Many other wildfire survivors say the amount of soil removed has been inconsistent from property to property. At least one homeowner complained it appeared no soil had been removed from their property, which an Army Corps representative concurred with, according to records of an April 2 call.

Vantanath Oun of OFRS digs up a rosebush that a homeowner wanted to save on June 25 in Pacific Palisades.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

Several other complaints claimed contractors excavated too much soil from their building footprint, leaving impressions that could cost thousands of dollars to be filled with new dirt.

Indeed, several reports written by Army Corps cleanup oversight personnel noted that crews had over-excavated properties. The Army Corp says these internal reports demonstrate effective supervision. “They reflect that our [quality assurance] systems are working as intended: identifying issues, tracking them, and taking corrective action as needed throughout the course of the mission,” an Army Corps spokesperson said.

Army Corps officials noted that some properties may appear to be over-excavated due to removal of thick building foundations, crawl spaces and basements.

In past wildfire cleanups, the amount of soil removed was guided by soil sampling for contaminants. In this case, however, without testing and a measurable cleanup goal, experts had warned California officials that over-excavation was a risk as well.

“If you’re a contractor making money off of tonnage you remove per property, that works out in your favor,” Whelton said. “The consequence is that when the property owner tries to rebuild, sometimes the builder will say: You have to bring in soil, we can’t build at this elevation. And that is a cost to the property owner.”

The last time the federal government led a fire response in California — the 2017 North Bay fires — the Government Accountability Office concluded that over-excavation had lengthened the rebuilding process. That led to the California Office of Emergency Services paying to bring in clean soil to fix some of the properties.

Finishing the job

A private contractor hired by a homeowner performs additional cleanup in July after the U.S. Army Corps completed its work at a property in Pacific Palisades.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Private contractors have stepped in to resolve issues left in the wake of the federal Palisades and Eaton fire cleanups.

One debris removal company even advertises in the Palisades with placards that read: “We’ll remove what [the Army Corps] leaves behind.”

Chen, the Pacific Palisades resident, said he immediately knew there was still work to be done after the Army Corps crew left his property.

Under the plans, federal cleanup workers couldn’t scrape ash-covered soil from the front or back yards. And unlike in past wildfires, disaster workers couldn’t conduct soil testing — on any portion of his property — to determine whether elevated levels of toxic substances might still be present.

So Chen hired OFRS, an environmental remediation company that offers to test soil, remove debris and fully scrape fire-destroyed lots across Pacific Palisades.

Soil testing revealed that Chen’s front and back yards contained lead levels that exceeded California’s standard for residential properties. On a recent afternoon, OFRS sent a backhoe to scrape away 6 inches of soil from Chen’s yard and remove ash-covered soil from his rose garden.

Chen was able to use his insurance to pay for the extra work. Private contractors say many homeowners who opted into the Army Corps cleanup don’t realize they may be able to tap into insurance proceeds for additional remediation.

But hiring private contractors may not be an option for those without robust insurance coverage or the ability to pay out of pocket.

Dawson Beer, the Altadena resident, said many of her neighbors already are engaged in heated negotiations with their insurance companies over what they will cover.

A worker folds and tapes the tarp on a truck carrying debris from a house on Fiske Street in Pacific Palisades in June.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

As these fire-hollowed lots are eventually built upon, Dawson Beer said, she fears that some of her neighbors will come to regret accepting a cleanup that not only was incomplete but also could jeopardize their health.

“Some lots are going to be cleared properly and clean, and others will not be. And, in the future, we’re not going to know what’s what,” Dawson Beer said. “It’s Russian roulette.”

Times assistant data and graphics editor Sean Greene contributed to this report.