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Besides posing a humanitarian problem, an insurance problem, an economic problem and a public-health problem, the Los Angeles fires of 2025 posed a daunting garbage problem. The incineration of 50,000 acres of Los Angeles County converted some 18,000 homes into 2.6 million tons of waste. That is more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year — and it doesn’t even account for all the charred vehicles and trees. Where would all the trash go?
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A further complication: Much of the waste was probably toxic. Any home built before 1980 is most likely coated with lead paint and insulated with asbestos. Nearly every residence in the United States can be safely assumed to contain batteries, cleaning solvents, computers and plastics. Even compounds naturally found in soil, like trivalent chromium, can be transformed by wildfires into the highly carcinogenic hexavalent chromium — the contaminant made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich.” Because of these assumptions, it is standard practice, after a fire, to clear structures, remove six inches of soil and conduct tests to ensure that no hazardous compounds remain.
State and federal law requires hazardous waste to be sent to permitted hazardous-waste facilities. The closest one, in the San Joaquin Valley, is 2½ hours north of Pacific Palisades, but only when there’s no traffic on Interstate 405, which is like saying Los Angeles is rainy but only when it’s not sunny. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated that it would take at least 110,000 dump trucks to clear the debris from Los Angeles County. (In fact it would be more than twice that.)
The predicament posed a set of diabolical SAT questions: If each truck had to travel 10 hours round-trip, how many months would it take to clean up Pacific Palisades and Altadena? How much diesel fuel would be required, with what attendant carbon emissions and air pollution? How much would that cost? And who would pay for it?
The Los Angeles fires were one of the most destructive wildfire events in California’s history. They were also among the most predictable. “The hots are getting a lot hotter. Dries are getting a lot dryer. The wets are getting a lot wetter. That’s climate change.” And that was Gov. Gavin Newsom more than five years ago, after a different, only somewhat less catastrophic fire. A Los Angeles County report the same year concluded that 386 square miles of the county lay in a “Very High” Fire Hazard Severity Zone and projected that climate change would make those fires more frequent and chaotic. Yet the images of the flaming metropolis — the eradicated acres, the incandescent grid seen from orbit, the Hollywood sign engulfed by smoke — seemed to inaugurate a new category of climate disaster, one that might be too expensive to overcome, even for the world’s richest society.
