Gilien Silsby went out to her lot with a spoon and a handful of sandwich bags.
Three generations of her family lost homes in the Eaton Fire. Her parents' place was built in 1925. All of them plan to rebuild. But before anyone breaks ground, Silsby wanted to know what was in the dirt. She said as much to CBS News last October, asking a question so plain it's easy to miss how much weight it carries: "Why can't you take another six inches?"
By then, the Army Corps of Engineers had already come and gone. They hauled away the debris, scraped six inches of soil from within the ash footprint, and LA County Public Works issued the designation: cleared. The property was ready for construction.
Silsby was already out there with her spoon.
What the letter certifies
The Army Corps' scope covered structural ash, debris, foundations, and six inches of soil within two feet of the original building footprint. They completed over 5,600 Eaton Fire properties by August 2025. Testing was not part of the operation and is not required to rebuild.
That breaks with every major California wildfire since 2007. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology noted that post-clearance confirmatory testing had been standard practice for nearly two decades. In past fires, 20 to 40 percent of properties still showed contamination after initial removal, requiring crews to rescrape until levels dropped below health screening thresholds.
In Altadena, the clearance letter means the debris is gone. The soil is a separate question, and one the letter doesn't address. The distance between those two facts is where families like Silsby's are deciding whether to raise children for the next thirty years.
Below the line
University researchers went looking at what remained. The USC CLEAN Project processed over 1,500 samples and found lead contamination persisting after the six-inch scrape. UCLA's CAP.LA team, working with Loyola Marymount and Purdue, found lead exceeding California's 80 parts-per-million residential threshold in roughly 40 percent of tested Altadena homes. Among properties already cleaned by the Army Corps, that figure reached closer to 49 percent.
California sets its screening level based on the likelihood that soil contamination will raise a child's blood lead enough to cost roughly one IQ point. More than 90 percent of Altadena's homes were built before 1975, three years before the federal government banned lead-based paint for residential use. When those structures burned, decades of lead paint didn't vanish. It settled into the soil, and heavy rains drove contaminants deeper than six inches.
Silsby's parents are older. She told CBS she worried about what they might be exposed to on a lot where a house has stood for a century. The researchers confirmed what she suspected. And confirmation, so far, has led nowhere.
Testing without a promise
In January 2026, the EPA announced it would sample 100 properties, funded by FEMA. Results were expected by the end of spring. As of today, they have not been released.
The announcement came with a caveat that Rep. Judy Chu called dismaying: EPA officials indicated that federal remediation funding was "unlikely." If testing confirms contamination, homeowners would receive referrals to county and state agencies. Chu's response:
"If the EPA now finds that this debris removal failed to clear contaminated soil, then the federal government must finish the job they committed to do."
No government program currently exists to remediate residential soil in Altadena at scale. A $2 million pilot targets the most contaminated homes, but its capacity against thousands of affected lots is thin.
So the federal government funded the largest wildfire debris removal in its history, declared it complete, then funded testing that may demonstrate it wasn't complete, while declining in advance to act on what the testing finds. For someone standing on a lot like Silsby's, holding sandwich bags of dirt because no institution collected what she needed to know, that sequence lands with a specific weight. The money for testing exists. Nobody has agreed to own what the tests might show.
What waiting costs
Sandy Dennis lived 25 years in Altadena before she put her lot up for sale and left Southern California. When ABC7 tested her scraped property, lead had dropped dramatically in some spots. Other spots on the same lot still exceeded the state limit. One lot, one clearance letter, two different answers depending on where you push the core sampler.
Silsby, as of her last public account, was still planning to stay. Her parents were still planning to rebuild.
The questions she faces don't resolve. What does the EPA find, and when? If contamination is confirmed below the sampled depth, who pays? What does waiting cost, financially and otherwise? And what happens to the bodies of the people who stop waiting and move back in?
The clearance letter sits in a file. It certifies that the debris is gone from a lot where her family has lived for a century. Whether the ground is safe for her parents to come home to — that question belongs to a different document, one that doesn't exist. The six inches the Army Corps removed were the six inches they were told to remove. Below that line, the question stays open. Silsby knew it before the researchers confirmed it. She was already out there, collecting what the institutions wouldn't.
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EPA results, any day: The EPA's 100-property soil sampling program in Altadena was expected to release findings by the end of spring 2026, and the EPA's January announcement framed the effort as validating cleanup success rather than investigating failure.
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Flawed state guidance: Purdue's Dr. Andrew Whelton flagged serious problems in California's August 2025 soil contamination guidance, including a chromium threshold set 50 times higher than the state's own hazardous waste standard, as detailed in CalMatters' breakdown of post-fire soil testing protocols.
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Insurance won't cover it: Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist who co-founded Eaton Fire Residents United, told LAist that her insurer has not approved any contaminant testing, leaving displaced families to educate their own adjusters while navigating recovery.
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Who's buying the lots: Strategic Actions for a Just Economy reports that corporate entities have purchased 50 percent of Altadena properties sold since the fires, a dynamic explored alongside permitting and equity gaps in CalMatters' January rebuild analysis.