A brick chimney teetering on a pile of rubble. Blackened palm trees, stripped of their crowns. Ash-covered clay pots and warped steel beams.
The infernos that whipped across Los Angeles left little behind of the homes they incinerated.
Residents are eager to rebuild their homes and move back into their neighborhoods. Many are starting to hire contractors and figure out what it will take to return to the lives they knew.
But before construction can begin, lots must be cleared of toxic materials and debris. Last week, crews donned protective suits and began clearing mountains of hazardous remains from the roughly 12,000 homes destroyed by one of the worst disasters in the history of the Los Angeles region.
While the clearing process could take mere days on any given lot, it could be as long as 18 months before the very last property is ready for rebuilding, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That estimate, which has been mentioned in community meetings, has made homeowners afraid that their own houses could be among the last ones to be cleared.
The timeline became a political flashpoint when Los Angeles residents told President Trump that they could not bear to wait 18 months to begin rebuilding their homes. Mr. Trump told Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, “I’m sure you can get it down to, I would say, not even 18 days. They are ready, mayor, they are ready to start.”
“They should be able to start tonight,” he said.
Ms. Bass said that she had signed orders to expedite work but explained that there were necessary precautions to take to ensure the safety of residents.
Here is what to know about the rebuilding process.
First, E.P.A. Crews Remove Toxic Materials
Cleanup occurs in two distinct phases. Workers managed by the Environmental Protection Agency last week began removing particularly dangerous items in clear view, such as batteries, pesticides and paint cans.
For this phase, which generally takes a few hours per home and is expected to be entirely completed in 30 days, homeowners cannot opt out or do it themselves, as the task is considered too dangerous, federal officials say. The E.P.A. performs this first cleanup step with workers qualified to remove hazardous waste, said Steve Calanog, the agency’s deputy incident commander for the Southern California wildfires.
Of significant concern are lithium-ion batteries, which have become increasingly popular in recent years because they can store high amounts of energy in a compact space, powering electric cars and bicycles, laptops and cellphones. But those benefits come with the risk of sparking huge fires after the strains of a natural disaster.
“When they become damaged, in this case by intense heat and flames, they have the potential and likelihood to spontaneously combust and explode days, weeks and months after they’ve been damaged,” Mr. Calanog said.
In the wreckage of Altadena, a town below the San Gabriel Mountains where more than 9,000 homes were destroyed by fire last month, E.P.A. crews fanned out on Thursday morning. Contractors in orange vests and white hazmat suits surveyed the damage, crouching over the husks of burned-out cars.
Crews bagged items like lightbulbs, paint, aerosol cans, cleaning supplies and lithium-ion batteries from drills, toys and vape pens. They packed the bags into plastic bins on the back of a flatbed truck with a “DANGER” sign affixed to it.
The workers collect these batteries and submerge them in a salt solution to prevent them from catching fire, before the batteries are taken apart and disposed of, Mr. Calanog said. The clearing of debris in Los Angeles will be the largest lithium-ion battery removal project ever, he said.
The E.P.A. is transporting the waste from the Eaton fire to a site in Irwindale, Calif., for collection and processing. But residents in neighboring communities are opposed to that location.
Next, Debris Can Be Hauled Away
Once the E.P.A. finishes inspecting a home site and removing toxic waste, crews contracted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can return to haul away ash, burned trees, damaged foundations and other debris. All told, more than 4.25 million tons across thousands of properties will have to be taken away.
The Army Corps will clear lots for free. But homeowners can instead choose to pay a private contractor, as many are considering, to speed up the process and have more control over their rebuilding timetable.
Col. Eric Swenson, who is leading the Army Corps’ response in Southern California, said that clearing smaller lots typically take two to four days. Larger ones can take more than 10 days. So can home sites along the coastline or steep hillsides, which may require cranes or other specialized equipment, or those where access is difficult, with crews having to navigate narrow roads to get in and out.
Colonel Swenson estimated that 80 percent of sites would be cleared within a year, with the remaining completed in 18 months. The homes that end up last on the Army Corps’ list are typically those for which the agency cannot confirm ownership, he said.
Homeowners must provide written approval to allow the Army Corps to enter their properties and remove debris. Sometimes those forms cannot be completed for months because the person listed on the deed as the owner has died, or some trustees are unavailable to sign the forms for a home owned by a trust, he said.
“I don’t want to make it sound like that’s the majority,” Colonel Swenson said. “Those are outliers, but they exist in every fire.”
Los Angeles County on Tuesday morning made the rights-of-entry forms available for homeowners to fill out, and by the evening 600 of them had signed up, according to officials. Submitting the forms sooner helps homeowners get in line first for Army Corps work, though it isn’t exactly first-come, first-served, Colonel Swenson said.
The Army Corps reviews the forms and looks for neighborhoods where large groups of people have submitted their paperwork, so that it can hire a contractor for a single area and not have to repeatedly haul equipment up and down the same roads, he said.
“Ideally, we would love to get whole neighborhoods at a time before we send our crews out, because we want to be as efficient as we can in the removal of this debris,” he said.
Residents Are in Limbo
In both Altadena and Pacific Palisades, many residents have said they were frustrated by having to wait to return to their old lives, without knowing for sure when they can rebuild. Some have begun sifting through the rubble of their homes searching for wedding rings and other mementos, despite warnings from health officials about the toxicity of ash and other debris.
Kimberly Bloom, 65, was on the phone last week with private contractors she hopes to hire after the E.P.A. finishes clearing the site of her Pacific Palisades home. It was a small house built in the 1940s with a front porch and a flower-filled backyard that she called her “garden of Eden.”
She has to make some decisions soon. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has set a March 31 deadline for homeowners to decide whether they want the agency to remove debris.
Ms. Bloom and her husband have been staying in a one-bedroom apartment in Marina del Rey, about 10 miles south of Pacific Palisades. She said that her home insurance will likely cover their rent for only two years.
If it takes a full 18 months for her property to be cleared of debris, she sees no chance that her home will be rebuilt within two years. “That’s a long time to wait for these governmental agencies to do their thing,” she said.
She and her husband are considering paying for a private contractor to remove the debris from their property. But Ms. Bloom’s insurance covers only $5,000 for debris removal, far less than it would cost out of pocket.
“It’s just a hornet’s nest,” said Ms. Bloom, who purchased her home in 1993. “This has a big ripple effect for so many people’s lives.”
Some Begin Their Own Cleanup
Residents are allowed to retrieve personal property. But a Jan. 15 Los Angeles County Health Officer emergency order prohibits them from doing fire cleanup until local, state or federal officials have inspected their properties for hazardous materials.
The ban did not seem to be enforced last week. Contractors, church groups and individuals were cleaning up properties on Thursday before they had been inspected by the E.P.A. Yard signs advertising contractor services had sprouted on nearly every block.
“We can’t stop anybody,” said Harry Allen, an on-scene coordinator for the E.P.A.
Suzanne Paulson, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on air pollution, said that the smoke plume from the fires included “astonishingly high” levels of heavy metals and other toxic ingredients — all of which were present in the ash that covered the burn sites.
Those particles also stick to debris and become more dangerous as people begin to sift through materials and move things around, she said. Los Angeles County has banned the use of leaf blowers in the wildfire areas.
“When that material is disturbed, there is potential for it to become airborne,” Dr. Paulson said.
Next door to one site where E.P.A. crews worked on Thursday, two women suited up in their own protective gear.
Marialyce Pedersen had returned to the carcass of her home to meet Christine Lenches-Hinkel, a local environmental consultant and composting specialist.
Ms. Lenches-Hinkel pulled a bin of compost onto the property. The two then mixed the compost into a bucket filled with water and sprinkled the liquid over the debris of Ms. Pedersen’s home — a bed’s iron springs, the charred ashes of her books — with a watering can. The solution could help degrade toxic materials in the ash, Ms. Lenches-Hinkel said. (The E.P.A. maintains that coming into contact with the ash isn’t safe for people except for workers trained in hazardous material removal.)
“I don’t understand why they’re not teaching residents how to help — here’s how to manage your own hazardous waste,” Ms. Pedersen said. “They’re going to take a ton of time looking over every square inch. I could tell them exactly where my propane tanks and batteries and stuff are.”
“It’s so funny. They let us buy all this stuff, but as soon as it burns, they’re like, ‘Stay away,” she observed. “Maybe we should build a less toxic world.”