Clearing ruins begins new phase of cleanup

Wildfire losses estimated at $3.3 billion so far

SONOMA, Calif. — Rumbling bulldozers and front-loaders have started scraping up the ash, charred wood and crumbled bricks and concrete left from thousands of homes and buildings destroyed by blazes in California wine country, launching a new phase in the largest wildfire cleanup in state history.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors began the work this week in flattened, blackened blocks of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood. It experienced some of the most sweeping destruction last month when fierce winds drove flames that killed at least 43 people and destroyed 8,900 houses and other buildings across Northern California.

On Santa Rosa streets where hundreds of houses once stood, “you look across the landscape and see nothing but burned everything,” Army Corps spokesman Rick Brown said as crews and heavy equipment around him began clearing debris from lots.

U.S., state and local agencies are working on the cleanup, which includes testing soil, air and water samples from burned areas for contamination. Authorities say they expect to have the lots cleared for property owners by early 2018, although rebuilding is expected to take years more.

California puts the insured losses at $3.3 billion so far, among the highest of any U.S. wildfires in recent decades.

In hard-hit Sonoma and Napa counties, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finished the first phase of cleanup at most properties: removing potential hazardous substances before the heavy equipment moves in.

Generally, the fires overran housing developments and rural areas rather than industrial sites, so the hazardous waste is mainly what’s in garages and barns — propane tanks from barbecue grills, cans of motor oil and pesticides, officials say.

That contrasts with Hurricane Harvey, which flooded more than a dozen Superfund sites in Houston and other coastal areas this year, raising fears that contamination might have reached a wide area.

In California, crews have started scraping up home foundations and the top 3 to 6 inches of ash, debris and soil, said Brown of the Army Corps of Engineers. In some of the more upscale developments on ridgetops, the work is complicated by ruins that have tumbled downhill, he said.

The Army Corps is taking soil samples near burned homes and buildings and will take more from the lots after they have been scraped, Brown said. The state will test the samples for contaminants such as asbestos or other metals and chemicals to ensure the sites are clean enough for rebuilding.

Watching the heavy equipment at work this week, survivor Larry Keyser admitted worrying over contamination but wasn’t sure what the cleanup crews would be testing for.

“Like any concerned citizen, you want to be concerned about your environment,” Keyser said.

Officials, meanwhile, have placed about a dozen air monitors around Sonoma County. The wildfires burned for more than a week and shrouded much of the San Francisco Bay Area in smoke, creating some of the worst air-quality readings on record there.

The air in the burned region is again testing at healthy levels, said Melanie Turner, spokeswoman at the California Air Resources Board.

Jeff Chiu The Associated Press Larry Keyser looks around Wednesday as he and volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse disaster relief sift through remains of his family’s home, which was destroyed by fires in the Coffey Park area of Santa Rosa, Calif.