Yvonne Chaves Lombardi went home to put some things away. Her house in Altadena was still there. The Eaton Fire, which destroyed more than 9,400 structures in January 2025, had spared it. She walked in, started organizing, and within hours a migraine set in that lasted three days.
"Lead cannot be 100% cleaned," Lombardi told ABC News a year after the fire. "Kids absorb the lead twice as fast as adults do."
Her home survived. She couldn't live in it. And there is no word, in any recovery framework or insurance category or federal assistance program, for what she is.
The language of wildfire recovery sorts people into legible categories. Destroyed. Damaged. Displaced. Rebuilding. Lombardi's house fits none of them. It stands. It has walls and a roof and windows. From the street, it looks like a home someone lives in. The fact that it is contaminated by the incineration of neighboring structures built before lead paint was banned, that the soil around it tested above health screening thresholds, that returning to it produced a neurological symptom lasting seventy-two hours: this registers nowhere in the architecture of disaster response.
According to Dawn Fanning, managing director of Eaton Fire Residents United, about 70 percent of residents in smoke-damaged homes have yet to return. Seventeen months after the fire, thousands remain displaced from houses that are, by every visible measure, still there.
What the wind carried
The Eaton Fire burned through a neighborhood where more than 70 percent of homes predated 1979, when lead paint was standard. Winds topping 90 miles per hour turned those structures into particulate. Lithium from electric vehicle batteries, arsenic from old lumber, asbestos from attic insulation entered the smoke column. A Stanford researcher collecting samples at a Pasadena park within the plume found that the majority of particles were nanoparticles roughly one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Small enough to enter the lungs, the bloodstream, the brain.
Those particles settled on and inside the homes that didn't burn.
Between February and March 2025, Roux Associates tested 416 parcels across the fire zone, collecting 2,401 soil and ash samples. The preliminary findings, released that April, confirmed what residents like Lombardi already knew in their bodies: parcels with intact homes downwind of the fire showed lead levels above health-based screening thresholds. Of 23 sampling grids containing standing homes, 10 exceeded California's residential screening level of 80 milligrams per kilogram.
Grid averages flatten the reality on individual properties. Ellen Dinerman's front yard tested at 1,200 parts per million in one patch. The EPA threshold for potential lead contamination is 300.
Inside the homes, the picture was worse. Dawn Bolstad-Johnson, an independent industrial hygienist who has tested approximately 150 standing homes, described finding contamination inside walls, HVAC systems, dryer vents. "The lead is very high, the arsenic high, the beryllium is high, the chromium's high."
A dataset of 50 homes compiled by EFRU in November 2025 found that 63 percent still had lead levels above EPA standards — an average of almost 60 times higher than the federal rule. Chromium, barium, copper, and zinc were detected in every single home sampled.
The Roux report was careful to note that the results "are not intended to imply cleanup or specific remediation is necessary." The county's formal guidance advised residents with concerns to test their soil or consult an environmental professional. The contamination is documented. The recommendation is individual. What happens next is on you.
What survival costs
François Tissot is a geochemist at Caltech. A window blew out in his Altadena home during the fire, filling the interior with toxic smoke. He tested surfaces in more than 50 homes, including his own, and found lead levels about four times above federal limits. His family is living elsewhere. His insurance company is disputing the claim.
"My kids did not have to see the house burnt to ashes, and it avoided them a trauma. But now, in some ways it would have been much easier had the house been destroyed." — François Tissot, to NBC News
A Caltech geochemist saying he'd be better off if his house had burned down. If the house had burned, the path forward would be brutal but legible: insurance, Army Corps debris removal, a sequence of decisions. The house stands. There is no path. You own a structure that looks whole and is poisoned, and every institution you turn to was designed for a different problem.
Lombardi's three-day migraine was the first signal. What followed, for her and for thousands of others, was the discovery that the signal had no receiver. No agency was tracking the health effects of returning to a standing home. No program existed to test, remediate, or certify safety. The migraine was evidence of a condition no institution had been built to recognize.
Zoe Gonzalez Izquierdo, whose children are two and four, can't get her insurer to pay for adequate cleanup. "They can't just send a company that's not certified to just wipe things down," she told LAist, "so that then we can go back to a still contaminated home." An unnamed mother in Altadena started her son on chelation therapy to remove lead from his blood.
And then there is Dinerman, whose story traces the full arc of what happens when a family's ingenuity is the only system that shows up. Faced with 1,200 ppm of lead in her soil and an insurer that won't cover remediation, she planted her front yard with specific grasses and sunflowers known to absorb heavy metals from the ground. Phytoremediation, the scientists call it. Dinerman was doing it with seed packets and a garden hose. Then she pulled every plant out, because she didn't want birds eating the seeds and ingesting the toxins. So the lead is still in the soil, the sunflowers are gone, the birds are safe, and Dinerman's insurance still won't pay. She solved one problem, created another, solved that one too, and is exactly where she started. The resourcefulness is real. It is also doing the work that a remediation program would do if one existed, and the fact that she can manage it herself becomes, perversely, the reason no one has to build one.
What stands between a family and home
California law says this: if your home is uninhabitable due to a covered peril, your insurer must provide Additional Living Expense coverage. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued formal guidance in early 2025 making this explicit. "Accessibility alone does not guarantee a home is safe to live in," he stated. SB 872, which Lara sponsored after previous fires, ensures ALE applies when a home is uninhabitable due to wildfire, not only when it is physically damaged.
What is actually happening: insurance companies have cut off ALE coverage for hundreds of homeowners before any qualified professional has certified their homes are safe to occupy. Standard ALE is typically 20 percent of dwelling coverage. A homeowner with $400,000 in dwelling coverage has $80,000 for temporary housing in a market where LA-area rents consume that in under two years. When coverage runs out, families face a choice between paying market-rate rent indefinitely or moving back into a home where lead levels are 60 times the federal standard. For a family with children who absorb lead at twice the adult rate, the calculation collapses into something more basic: what you are willing to expose your kids to, answered under financial duress.
Underneath the ALE fights sits a simpler, harder problem. Outside of lead and asbestos, California has no safety standards for indoor residential contamination with many of the substances found in Altadena homes. Beryllium, chromium, barium, arsenic at elevated levels, documented in 100 percent of the homes EFRU sampled. Without a standard, there's no benchmark. Without a benchmark, an insurer can decline to remediate by pointing at the regulatory silence.
"I don't know how you fight that. How do you find that argument to compel an insurance company to pay for something to make yourself safe?" — Nina, an Altadena homeowner, to NBC News
The LA County Public Health Officer issued a Health Advisory for residents within 250 yards of a burned structure. An advisory. Without a formal prohibition on reoccupancy, living in a contaminated standing home is legal. It is inadvisable, per the county's own guidance, but legal. No building department has the documented authority to restrict reoccupancy of a structurally intact home based on soil contamination from neighboring properties. The Trump administration's closure of the EPA's Office of Research and Development, responsible for analyzing threats from toxic chemicals and wildfires, narrowed the institutional capacity to resolve the uncertainty at the moment it mattered most.
Rep. Judy Chu, EFRU, and community advocates have demanded what they call clearance before occupancy: mandatory testing and certification that a standing home meets safety thresholds before residents can be pressured to return. As of June 2026, no such standard exists. That absence functions as policy. Every family makes the safety determination alone, with whatever testing they can afford, against whatever thresholds they can find, while their ALE runs out.
Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist who co-founded EFRU, described the landscape: "You've got a whole bunch of variability in testing approaches and practices, and it's just left residents navigating through just a nightmare. Basically, trying to figure out and educate their adjuster at the same time while they're displaced, and while they're trying to navigate recovery and jobs and families."
The ground beneath the argument
In May 2026, the EPA released a study of 100 randomly selected destroyed-home lots in the debris cleanup zone. Only five exceeded federal screening standards for lead; 17 exceeded California's more stringent thresholds. The EPA's regional administrator said the results should give residents confidence in the Army Corps cleanup.
But the EPA study tested cleared lots where debris had been professionally removed. It did not test standing homes where no government cleanup occurred. UCLA environmental engineer Sanjay Mohanty, working from a dataset of roughly 1,300 affected properties, found that many homes and burned lots still exceeded California safety thresholds even after cleanup efforts. He criticized the absence of soil testing requirements during debris removal, saying the policy left subcontractors "unaccountable."
The two claims are about different things, but they circulate in the same information environment. A resident trying to decide whether to move her children back into a house that looks fine from the outside has to parse the difference herself. The EPA says the cleared ground is mostly safe. Independent scientists say the standing homes are not. And the testing companies working inside those homes don't even use consistent methods, which means two families on the same block can get results measured against different baselines and interpreted by different standards.
What the block looks like now
Drive through Altadena and the limbo becomes visible in the landscape itself. Newly framed construction stands next to burned-out lots with waist-high weeds. Beside them, homes that look pristine sit empty while their owners fight insurers about the particles of heavy metals found inside.
The family rebuilding from a cleared slab has a timeline, however painful. Permits, contractors, a move-in date that recedes but exists. The family whose house stands has no timeline at all. No remediation endpoint, no clearance standard to meet, no moment when someone with authority says: now it's safe. The two families live on the same block, their fates diverging from what looks, to anyone driving past, like the same street.
Julie Lawson's family paid $7,000 out of pocket to test their soil, even though their insurer had already agreed to replace the grass in their front yard. They planned to test again after remediating the interior. Even if their home becomes livable again, they still face losses that remediation can't touch. The neighbors who burned out are rebuilding or gone. The neighbors whose homes stand are scattered across temporary housing. The community that made the block a place to live existed in the relationships between those houses, and those relationships don't survive seventeen months of dispersal intact. "We have to live in the scar," Lawson said.
Jane Lawton Potelle, founder of Eaton Fire Survivors United, put the population into words at a press conference ten months after the fire:
"We're here today on behalf of thousands of residents whose homes are still standing. We deserve not just to return to our homes, but to be safe in our homes. And right now, our homes are not safe."
FEMA Individual Assistance is designed for damage, not for contamination of an undamaged structure by a neighboring structure's destruction. Insurance ALE coverage exists in law but is being terminated in practice. The county's health advisory recommends caution but cannot compel it. There is no dataset that counts these people, no program designed to serve them, no category that names what they are.
The Camp Fire in 2018 destroyed Paradise so completely that the standing-home question barely arose. The Eaton Fire, burning through a dense, historic neighborhood where structures stood close together and the housing stock predated every modern standard for lead, created something different: a population of survivors whose survival is the source of their displacement. Their homes did what homes are supposed to do. They stood. And standing, they became containers for the aerosolized remains of everything that burned around them.
Lombardi's migraine was data. Her body registered what no institution has yet been willing to name: that a standing house full of lead is uninhabitable. The house is there. The family is somewhere else. And the question of when it is safe to go back has no one assigned to answer it.
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Altadena's displacement by investment: Since the Eaton Fire, more than 300 lots have been sold and nearly half purchased by corporations or investors, according to an ABC News data analysis, raising the question of what happens to standing-home families who eventually give up and sell into that market.
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California's insurance withdrawal accelerates: State Farm stopped writing new California homeowners policies in 2023 and nearly 400,000 policies statewide have been canceled since 2021, a collapse tracked in detail by a Brookings analysis of nonrenewal rates by climate risk and income.
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Camp Fire precedent on reoccupancy: After the 2018 Camp Fire, FEMA's federal coordinating officer forced Paradise officials to retract emergency ordinances allowing residents back onto contaminated land, a reversal that has no equivalent for Eaton Fire standing-home residents seventeen months on.
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Rebuilding on untested ground: Some Altadena and Pacific Palisades communities are pouring new foundations without ever having tested the soil beneath them, a pattern scientists and public health advocates are calling a slow-motion catastrophe.