In June, after months of thwarted efforts, the City of Calabasas received a favorable ruling in its case against Los Angeles County: The Superior Court ruled that Calabasas had the right to test the fire debris deposited in the landfill. The court decision seemed to have an effect: For the next seven weeks, the county and Calabasas tried to negotiate a settlement.
No agreement was reached, however, and finally, on Aug. 11, experts hired by the city took 20 samples from four trucks arriving at the landfill. By then, 210,000 tons of fire debris had been deposited. The rest of the fire ash from the Eaton and Palisades fires has been dispersed across three other authorized facilities, with the bulk going to the Simi Valley Landfill.
The composition of wildfire ash varies from plot to plot, even square inch to square inch — the difference between a burned privet hedge and a burned car battery. In April, when The Los Angeles Times conducted its own testing of the Palisades and Altadena after federal and state agencies refused, it found plots with elevated levels of arsenic, lead and mercury. In May, Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health released final data that showed high levels of lead in about 12 percent of Palisades properties not yet cleared of debris. In July, The Times found that fire ash contaminated with asbestos was accidentally trucked to the nonhazardous landfills that were authorized to accept fire debris, and possibly to Calabasas.
No one seems to be certain about what will happen — legally, politically or environmentally — if any of the samples taken from Calabasas show toxicity. But consensus has been achieved on one point: The only thing worse than confirming the existence of hazardous waste in the landfill would be removing it. Digging up hundreds of thousands of tons of buried waste and loading it into trucks that carry it back down the hill through town would kick up fresh plumes of toxic dust, exposing the community all over again. Once toxic waste is properly buried, it should no longer pose a threat to the air above it — just to the land and groundwater below it.
The landfill’s operators claim that the seven layers of composite lining beneath the landfill offer sufficient protection. But Calabasas’ mayor, Peter Kraut, doesn’t believe it. “We’re basically taking an environmental problem from the Pacific Palisades and moving it to Calabasas. When are we going to see a problem from that? Could be 10 years down the road, but I do think it’s going to be in our groundwater downstream.”