California wildfire cleanup crews tackle toxic waste, risk of exploding batteries
This is an updated version of a story first published on March 30, 2025. The original video can be viewed here.
This past winter, a series of wildfires fueled by strong winds destroyed more than 11,000 homes and 37,000 acres in Los Angeles, reducing much of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods to ash.
City, state and federal leaders promised to expedite the rebuilding process and in February completed an important first step. The Environmental Protection Agency cleared more than 9,000 properties in 28 days. The EPA says it is the fastest hazardous debris removal in its history.
Tonight, we'll show you exactly how they did that and why some residents – including those with homes still intact – say they still don't feel safe to return.
As we first reported in March, they're worried about what the wildfires left behind.
Brick chimneys and burnt trees are the sole markers of what were once picture-perfect Southern California neighborhoods.
House after house on this pacific palisades block was destroyed by wildfire except for this one. On the corner of Iliff street, we met Lynn McIntyre. Her 1940s stucco home is, inexplicably, intact.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Everything around you is gone.
Lynn McIntyre: Every single house. I look at it and I said, why? Why was my house spared? I call myself one of the "left behinds." Because I don't have the same set of issues that all of my neighbors have. They're cut and dried. Their properties have burned to the ground. My home did not.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Some people would look at you and go, "oh, she's one of the lucky ones." But now you're dealing with what?
Lynn McIntyre: I don't feel as lucky as people think. The firefighter said that this fire was like a blow torch. They've never had anything so hot before. And it cooked everything inside my home at I don't know how many hundreds of degrees for I don't know how many hours. How do you salvage anything from that?
There are 10,000 houses still standing in the burn zones.
The strong winds that fueled the wildfires pushed smoke and soot into those homes and left tons of toxic ash and debris at their doorsteps.
These are the remnants of all the synthetic stuff that makes up modern life – appliances, clothing and carpets – after it all burned at high heat.
It's a unique component of urban fires that is complicating clean up efforts.
We were with the Environmental Protection Agency as it took the first step: removing all the hazardous waste – propane tanks, cleaning supplies and paint cans – while negotiating the newest challenge: electric vehicles.
Chris Myers runs the EPA's Lithium-Ion Battery Emergency Response Team. He says batteries in electric vehicles can explode or ignite when damaged.
Chris Myers: Uncontrolled, out in the field, in the public access, is very, very dangerous for anyone who is onsite, right, not just our workers, but the public at large.
And Myers says just identifying electric vehicles after they were incinerated was a challenge.
Chris Myers: It used to be fairly simple. If there was not an internal combustion engine with that vehicle, it was an EV, right? But now we have plug-in hybrids, hybrid vehicles, a tremendous amount of different platforms in which batteries are included in those vehicles.
Sharyn Alfonsi: I mean, there's not stuff left in some – you can barely tell it's a car --
Chris Myers: Exactly.
Sharyn Alfonsi: -- a lot of the times.
Chris Myers: Exactly.
So the EPA conducted reconnaissance. Dozens of teams fanned out across the burn zones, searching for the skeletons of electric vehicles in the debris and calling power companies and manufacturers to locate the power walls, that were often attached to homes to charge them.
EPA teams found about 600 EVs, most of them in Lynn McIntyre's Palisades neighborhood.
We watched as an EPA team approached one of them. Our crew was instructed to stay back 75 feet because even weeks or months after they're damaged, lithium-ion batteries can explode, emit toxic gases or re-ignite.
Sharyn Alfonsi: It sounds like you're treating these batteries almost like a live grenade in the field, that you don't know exactly what you're dealing with.
Chris Myers: That is the way that we actually speak about damaged, right, or insulted lithium-ion batteries, because they are delicate, they are fragile, they're unstable.
Because they are unstable, extracting the batteries from one electric vehicle can take a six-person team up to two hours. It's a delicate surgery performed with heavy machinery.
First, the top of the car is sawed off. Then, an excavator flips it, exposing the battery underneath.
Thousands of cells that make up the battery are scooped out and placed into steel drums.
Those drums, up to six are needed for each car, are then transported here to this temporary processing site where they are plunged into a saltwater bath for three days. The saltwater gives any trapped energy a place to go, so they're less likely to reignite.
See those bubbles. That's energy releasing from the batteries.
Chris Myers: Those cylindrical cells are from, generally, the vehicles or other energy storage systems. But it is the same battery from a toothbrush, to a hoverboard, to an e-bike, to a scooter, to a golf cart, to a vehicle, to a power wall.
That's a battery-powered scooter. Myers shared this simulation video (from the UL Research Institutes) to show how smaller lithium-ion batteries - when damaged or overheated - can explode and spark a fire.
Myers says even batteries that don't appear damaged, such as this power wall, can be dangerous. Intact batteries are typically more volatile so they have to be brined before their cylinders are removed.
After a thorough soaking, the cells are scooped out, shoveled onto a steel plate, and steamrolled.
Sharyn Alfonsi: After you've smashed 'em up, then where does that waste go?
Chris Myers: So that waste goes to either recycling facility or disposal.
Sharyn Alfonsi: How much of the waste can be recycled?
Chris Myers: Well, it's tough, because there's so much damage to these batteries. Oftentimes, they're burned up, they're covered with ash, there's a lot of contaminants. It's actually probably ejected most of what would be recoverable during recycling into the air and surrounding area.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So there's not a lot.
Chris Myers: There's not a lot. There's not a lot of value still left in what we have here.
And what is left is technically still a hazardous material under California's strict environmental regulations.
But here's why that is complicated..
There are only two landfills in California certified to take hazardous materials and even before the fires they couldn't hold all of the state's hazardous waste.
So we wondered: Where was all of this battery waste going?
We found the answer 600 miles away in Knolls, Utah.
About half of California's hazardous waste is trucked hundreds of miles away and buried in nearby states – mainly Utah and Arizona – which rely on more lenient federal waste standards.
Back in California, a cavalry of trucks arrived to start the second phase of the clean up: removing the rest of the debris - about 9 billion pounds worth.
Eric Swenson: I anticipate having all fire ash and debris removed by the one-year anniversary of this fire.
Col Eric Swenson is a commander for the Army Corps of Engineers. It was tasked by FEMA to clear the 13,000 properties destroyed by the fires, removing everything from concrete foundations to furniture.
More than 9,000 homeowners have opted for their help and, as of last week, about 4,400 parcels had been cleared.
Sharyn Alfonsi: How long does it take to do a single house?
Col. Eric Swenson: So it takes anywhere from, you know, one to four days to do a standard-sized house. If we have a house that's pinned on the side of a mountain, those properties could take us six, eight, 10 days to do, because we're gonna need some specialized equipment to get in there.
All that remaining debris from burned down homes is headed to 17 landfills and recycling centers across California.
After the property is cleared, six inches of soil are removed in an effort to get rid of any contaminants that may have seeped into the ground.
Sharyn Alfonsi: In your mind, six inches is deep enough to remove the soil to make the area safe?
Col. Eric Swenson: Absolutely.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And I know previously in other fires, more soil has been removed. Why not remove more soil now?
Col. Eric Swenson: We find that it's not necessary. If you over-excavate a property and continue to dig down deeper, maybe you'll find a lead pipe that was installed for drinking water 80 years ago, that was never properly removed. And so all we're doing is economically disadvantaging that owner, 'cause now they're gonna have to replace all of that soil we excavated from that property.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn't think removing six inches of soil is enough. His office asked FEMA to test the remaining soil for toxic contaminants, as FEMA has done after previous wildfires.
But FEMA says the agency changed its approach to soil testing in 2020 because it found that contamination deeper than six inches was typically pre-existing and not necessary for public health protection.
Matthew Craig: I think it's pertinent that we test inside, outside, soil. Do as much testing, get as much data as we can. We need to know what we're working with.
Matthew Craig lived here, in Altadena, with his wife and son. Fire destroyed the homes across the street from them but with the help of neighbors and, he says, a comically short garden hose, Craig was able to save his home.
Matthew Craig: But we haven't spent more than an hour in the house since the fire started.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Why haven't you gone back into the house for longer than an hour? What's inside?
Matthew Craig: These houses are filled with asbestos. They're filled with lead. The Teslas and the EVs, those batteries were exploding. They sounded like hand grenades, right? So that's all in the atmosphere as well as all over the ground. So there's a ton of debris. And you'll see that debris all over my house.
And you can smell it as soon as you open the door. Craig's home is frozen in time. A fine film clings to everything, leaving an outline of the teddy bear he tried to salvage for his son.
Sharyn Alfonsi: It's so deceiving. Because outside the house looks like it's pristine. And inside, it really is a mess.
Matthew Craig: It's everywhere. It's under your feet. It's on all of this.
Craig's insurance company has agreed to test the inside of his home for toxins and he's waiting to hear whether they'll cover his clean-up costs.
Sharyn Alfonsi: If someone was to look at this and say, "It's dust, right? Clean it up. Move on." What would you say?
Matthew Craig: The house is filled with the ashes of thousands of homes that are hundreds of years old. It's not just dust. It's 100,000 gallons of pesticides. It's a million gallons of lead paint. It's a million pounds of insulation.
Back in the Palisades, Lynn McIntyre has theories about why her house was somehow spared in the fires. But what she is desperate for now are some definitive answers.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What are you being told about the safety of your air, of your soil, of the inside of your home?
Lynn McIntyre: Nothing. Nothing. There's no guidelines for moving back. There's no guidelines for what you should be looking for. There's no guidelines telling you who to call or regulate testing. It's like – it's a Wild West out there with the testing, with the remediation companies. People are just grasping at straws with no guidance from government.
So she decided to pay $5,000 out of pocket to have her home tested for toxins.
The tests revealed arsenic in her home and lead levels 22 times higher than what the EPA considers safe.
Her insurance company says it will not cover the cost of cleaning it all up because it says it does not constitute, quote, a "direct physical loss."
Lynn McIntyre signed an 18-month lease on an apartment out of town anticipating the road home for her and her neighbors will be a long one.
Produced by Lucy Hatcher. Associate producer, Jessica Kegu. Broadcast associate, Erin DuCharme. Edited by Michael Mongulla.
