‘We don’t want it!’ San Gabriel Valley rages against shipment of Eaton fire hazardous waste
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- Paint, bleach, asbestos, lithium-ion batteries and other potentially hazardous waste are being trucked 15 miles from the Altadena burn zone to Lario Park in Irwindale for sorting and storage.
- The agency was told, “by order of the White House,” to expedite the removal process to 30 days, said Celeste McCoy, an on-scene coordinator for the EPA.
Hundreds of San Gabriel Valley residents confronted state and federal officials during a heated community meeting Wednesday, asking how a local recreation area had become a processing site for hazardous waste from the Eaton fire without community input.
The Environmental Protection Agency began trucking hazardous waste 15 miles from the Altadena burn zone to Lario Park in Irwindale for sorting and storage on Monday. Officially known as the Lario Staging Area, the rocky area is owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and was leased until this month to the Los Angeles County parks department.
The 5-acre site is now home to workers in protective gear who are organizing potentially hazardous household items — which can include paint, bleach, asbestos and lithium-ion batteries — that cannot be sent to landfills.
State Sen. Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and several local mayors said they learned about the EPA’s use of the Irwindale site from news reports.
Residents of Duarte, Azusa and nearby cities said they were furious that they had not been notified that waste was arriving by truck at a site near a popular recreation area, which includes the San Gabriel River trail. Some said they were afraid that toxic chemicals or other fire debris would leach into the air, soil or water.
Nearly two weeks after the Eaton fire forced Claire Robinson to flee her Altadena home, she returned, donning a white hazmat suit, a respirator and goggles.
Officials from the EPA and the California agencies that handle environmental protection and toxic substances control assured residents they were taking safety precautions, but were repeatedly interrupted by audience members who yelled, “We don’t want it!” and “Find another place!”
“Once you have a community that’s that upset, it’s really hard to walk it back,” Rubio said.
At one point, a woman rose from her seat and asked whether officials would be comfortable sending their children to school near such a site.
Yes, said Katie Butler, the head of the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control: “Hazardous waste sounds really scary because sometimes it is, and that’s why experts have to handle it properly.”
The EPA is working under a 30-day deadline to remove all hazardous waste from the Eaton and Palisades fire burn areas so that the Army Corps can safely clear the rubble, said Tara Fitzgerald, the agency’s incident commander.
Fitzgerald had told frustrated Pacific Palisades residents last week that the process could take months.
The EPA was told, “by order of the White House,” to expedite the removal work to 30 days, Celeste McCoy, an on-scene coordinator for the EPA, said in testimony to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week. McCoy said it’s likely that the cleanup will take less than six months, but that was an estimate.
“Again, this is kind of unknowable,” she said. “The scale of this is bigger than we’ve dealt with before.”
Rubio and several mayors, including Duarte’s Cesar Garcia, repeatedly pressed Fitzgerald about whether the 30-day deadline could be extended, or at least whether the EPA could move the disposal of lithium-ion batteries to another site.
“I don’t know that we can reassess the deadline,” Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald said the EPA chose the Irwindale site because it was big and flat enough to suit their needs, and because it was available. Other potential sites closer to the burn zone, including the Rose Bowl and Santa Anita Park, are being used for fire crews and relief efforts.
Household waste from the Palisades fire will be trucked to the site of the former Topanga Ranch Motel in Malibu. Fitzgerald said the EPA is looking at additional processing sites for both fires, including the Altadena Golf Course and the Irwindale Speedway.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger recalled Tuesday that President Trump, who met with her and other local officials during his brief visit to Los Angeles last week, “said 30 days.”
“The EPA’s got to begin, like, yesterday,” Barger said.
The cleanup begins in the burn zone with EPA contractors in respirators, white suits and hard hats sifting through the rubble of homes and businesses.
Each material is placed in a container at the burn site, EPA spokesperson Anna Drabek said. Waste containing asbestos is sealed into two layers of polyurethane bags and then into a plastic container with a lid, she said, while liquids such as bleach and motor oil are poured into drums.
The items are loaded onto lined stake-bed trucks to be driven to Irwindale. The trucks stop multiple times inside the facility to drop off materials such as batteries, bleach and propane in separate areas of the site, Drabek said.
“There’s nothing out in the open, no open bags, no dust, none of that,” Drabek said. “There are several layers between whatever is in the bags and the actual soil. At no point do we expect there to be contact with these materials.”
The waste won’t stay at the Lario site permanently. Drabek said that each type of material will be sent to a different permanent facility, and that the agency is looking for options in California and other states.
President Trump pushed local leaders to allow homeowners affected by the fires access to clear and clean their properties quickly. But is that putting speed ahead of consequences?
Fitzgerald said the EPA has installed liners to prevent toxic materials from leaching into the soil. She said the agency performed soil testing before beginning and will test the soil again before leaving.
The site also has eight air-quality monitors at the perimeter, Drabek said, and water trucks that spray three times daily to suppress dust.
After the 2023 wildfires in Maui, Hawaii, the EPA trucked waste to a shooting range on the island about 10 miles from the burn zone. About 2,200 buildings were destroyed in that fire, and the EPA’s cleanup took about four months.
Jennifer Roman of Duarte attended the meeting with her sister-in-law and did not leave reassured. She said that she was worried that the waste was being trucked through more than a half-dozen cities to reach the site. The meeting was so raucous, she said, that it was hard to learn much about how residents or workers would be protected.
“I don’t know why we should trust them,” Roman said of the government agencies. “Don’t they always lie?”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
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