Staggering scope of debris cleanup
Toxic wreckage must be removed before rains, rebuilding
While the worst of the wildfires is over for Wine Country, the region faces another daunting test: the cleanup of heaps of ash, twisted metal and blackened debris scattered across some 250 square miles of burned hills and valleys — an area five times the size of San Francisco.
Never before has California seen such wildfire destruction. The blazes that roared through Napa and Sonoma counties this month obliterated at least 7,200 houses, barns and businesses, including entire neighborhoods, each with untold amounts of hazardous items now littered about, from pesticides to propane to melted plastics.
Residents are eager to get their properties cleared of the often toxic wreckage so that they can rebuild, though it will be months before any construction starts. Plans for the huge cleanup are still being worked out, with a goal of finishing
early next year. The state will lead the effort, in partnership with the federal government, but only after the fires are extinguished and logistics are addressed.
Officials need to find landfills with enough space to take the rubble and get consent from landowners to clear their properties, matters that could take weeks. Once that’s done, the state is likely to hire hundreds if not thousands of contractors to truck out the debris from private residences and public property. Businesses and their insurers, though, will probably be responsible for cleanup at their sites.
“This is bigger than anything that has come before it,” said Mark Oldfield, spokesman for the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, the agency that has stepped in to help with other large disasters. “It’s not like a contractor can go out there tomorrow with a bulldozer and start clearing things out. There’s a process.”
Ray Ruminski, environmental health director for Lake County who oversaw recovery after the devastating 2015 Valley Fire, remembers a slow start to a similar stateled cleanup there. The remnants of 1,300 homes, 66 commercial properties and hundreds of other buildings needed to be cleared.
“It took a long time to begin, but it was methodical, progressive,” Ruminski said. “It became the biggest heavy equipment project in California that year.”
At the height of the effort, Ruminski recalls 60 work crews, each with bulldozers and dump trucks, fanned out across the county, turning the relatively rural area into a busy construction zone. The cleanup, which cost about $100 million, began four to six weeks after the September blaze and continued through January, stopping for much of the winter and finishing by June, he said.
Two years after the Valley Fire, fewer than 400 building permits have been approved and even fewer homes rebuilt.
The recovery in Wine Country will be bigger, with more at stake.
The most immediate challenge lurks beneath the rubble: hazardous materials that authorities don’t want residents to come into contact with — for example, underground gas and diesel tanks at a charred Chevron station, ammunition below a gutted firearms shop, and the ordinary but toxic household items that have melted into the ground, such as paint, metal-laden electronics and chemically treated furniture.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is planning to help the state Department of Toxic Substances Control clear the hazards.
There’s also a growing urgency to move things along. With the wet season approaching, rain threatens to turn the burned debris into a toxic stew that spills into neighborhoods and creeks. Runoff and erosion could pollute water supplies for both people and wildlife for years.
“We’re definitely in a race against time,” said Karen Gaffney, an ecologist and conservation planning program manager for the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District who will be monitoring the region’s recovery. “If we’re able to secure the burned areas or remove contaminants prior to the rain, that’s a bestcase scenario. If we don’t get there in time and have a lot of early rain, well, that’s the worst case.”
As the state and federal government prepare to dig in, county health officials in both Sonoma and Napa have advised residents that, no matter how much they may want to fish through burn sites for lost belongings, they should steer clear. Most of the charred areas have remained closed to the public since the fires started, but authorities began opening some places late last week.
“Buildings could have had asbestos or lead, which is now in that ash,” said Christine Sosko, director of environmental health and safety for Sonoma County. “We don’t want to create dust, and we don’t want to be tracking it around. We don’t want it to go airborne and have it travel even farther.”
Fine particles, smaller than a few microns, are easily inhaled and can lodge into people’s lungs and bloodstreams. Heart and respiratory illness can result.
In addition to becoming toxic, the burned ground has opened the door to severe erosion. Grasses, shrubs and trees lost to fire mean less vegetation to sop up water and stabilize hillsides, and the top absorbent layer of soil was virtually blasted off. Often, gases released when the soil cools after a fire create a waxy, impenetrable coating over the ground.
“You’d be lucky if there’s 10 percent of the (plant) litter left after the fire,” said Bill Elliot, research civil engineer for the U.S. Forest Service, who has
studied the impact of wildfire on soils.
As a result of the scorched earth, as much as 100 times more erosion than normal can occur, Elliot said.
While recent light rains aren’t much of a threat and, in fact, can have the benefit of helping tamp down dust and debris, local environmental experts worry about bigger storms driving landslides.
“In areas where there’s no longer vegetation and damage to the soil, the rain, with nothing more to soak into, is a huge concern,” said Valerie Quinto, executive director of the Sonoma Resource Conservation District, a state-chartered agency that assists rural landowners. “When we think of a whole lot of soil going down the hill and into a creek, there’s many things to think about. It’s important to deal with it as quickly as you can.”
First, eroded materials can taint water supplies for those who have wells or divert directly from streams. This is common in the unincorporated parts of Sonoma and Napa counties, including the Mark West area where the watersheds of Porter Creek and Mark West Creek were heavily damaged by fire and in Sonoma Valley where fire brushed Sonoma Creek and its tributaries.
Perhaps more worrisome, municipal water supplies in Napa County remain at risk after fire licked the shores of three reservoirs nestled in the hills: the city of Napa’s Milliken Reservoir, Yountville’s Rector Reservoir and Calistoga’s Kimball Reservoir.
Joy Eldredge, water general manager for Napa, said she’ll be monitoring runoff into Milliken Reservoir, one of two city reservoirs, to make sure water isn’t impaired by unwanted metals, nutrients and organic carbons apt to wash in from the burn.
“Rain falling rapidly and picking up speed is going to carry more (material) in,” Eldredge said. “I would anticipate that this is going to be a more-than-one-year impact to our water quality, unfortunately.”
The city of Napa, like its neighbors, hopes that the deterioration of water supplies will remain minimal. The communities will turn to other sources if need be.
Runoff into streams, whether sediment or other pollut ants, also pesters fish, many of which are already threatened in the area, including steelhead trout, chinook salmon and coho salmon.
“Coho is a species on the brink of extinction. Something like a massive wildfire in a watershed can push this species over the edge,” said Gaffney, with the open space district.
Freshwater shrimp, tiger salamanders and red-legged frogs may also suffer, according to Gaffney.
County officials said last week that they’re are already trying to halt harmful runoff by cutting down damaged trees and installing filters on storm-water drains. But the work is likely to address just a fraction of the problem.
The state and its contractors, in addition to the counties, will probably take further steps to limit erosion once debris removal begins, such as grading hillsides, putting out straw bales and water bars, and reseeding wooded areas.
“This will be a very long and ongoing process,” said Sonoma County health officer Karen Milman, “months and months.”