Some homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades survived the January 2025 fires. The families who own them have four kinds of evidence about whether they can move back in, and the four rarely agree.
Nina Malone says her Altadena bedroom smells "like an ashtray has been sitting around for a long time." She and her husband, Billy, have lived with that smell since August 2025. The Eaton fire burned through their neighborhood that January and left their house standing. They moved back in seven months later. According to the Associated Press, they came back because their insurer had stopped paying for them to live anywhere else.
Since then, Nina has had headaches and a sore throat almost every day. Billy's wheezing and congestion have gotten worse, and he uses an inhaler now. After a professional cleaning, tests still found lead on the wooden floors of their living room and bedroom. In March 2026, an Altadena homeowner named Jane Lawton Potelle told state legislators that the Malones' house had been cleaned and tested twice and had failed both times, and that the couple was now scrubbing it themselves while living there.
Every family whose house survived has had to make the Malones' decision. They make it with four kinds of evidence: what their own bodies tell them, what a lab finds, what the insurance adjuster will pay for, and what California's new smoke-damage law requires. Each of those was set up to answer its own question, and each question is narrower than the one a family is actually asking, which is whether to go home. Los Angeles County's guidance for returning residents says there are "no laboratory tests" that can determine whether a property is "safe," and this piece won't call a house safe either. It looks at where each kind of evidence helps a family and where it stops.
What the body reports
Lawton Potelle went back to her own house early, wearing a mask, to meet the adjuster from her insurer, AAA. Her throat itched within minutes, she said in an account published by the California Community Foundation, a charity that backed the new law. A severe headache came next, then a tight chest. AP reported that she left with chest discomfort and a rasping voice.
Families start with the body, and officials don't dismiss it. The county's guidance says coughing, eye irritation and headaches after returning could be linked to contaminants that linger indoors. In 2025, California's insurance department convened a task force on smoke-damage claims. Its members included insurer trade groups, consumer advocates, environmental consultants and public health officials, and it heard presentations from survivor groups. The insurance industry's proposal to that task force begins with the senses too: "Begin with visual/olfactory checks and simple wipe tests; escalate to lab sampling only when warranted." Olfactory means smell. So survivors and insurers agree that the nose counts as evidence. They disagree about what a bad smell should lead to.
Researchers who surveyed 849 adults two to three months after the fires found that people exposed to more outdoor smoke reported more symptoms, and that much of that connection ran through how bad they believed their indoor air was. The researchers asked residents to rate their air instead of sampling it, so the study can't say which chemical, if any, caused what.
The body can mislead in both directions. The federal toxic-substances agency notes that people can smell some chemicals, and get temporary headaches or nausea from them, at levels below what causes lasting harm. And lead, the contaminant that keeps showing up in these homes' test results, has no smell at all. Nina's bedroom could stop smelling like an ashtray tomorrow and still have lead on the floor.
What the lab can measure
Lawton Potelle's house was tested three times in six months. In March 2025, an industrial hygienist she hired, a specialist in indoor and workplace contamination, found lead and other heavy metals. In June, a hygienist working for her insurer found asbestos in one room. In September, another tester chosen by the insurer found nothing it could detect.
The foundation's account doesn't say whether the three testers sampled the same spots or used the same methods, and those details matter a great deal. A technical guide from the restoration industry, submitted to the task force, describes sampling methods that each answer something narrower than whether a house is all right. A wipe over a measured patch tells the lab how much metal sits on that patch. Cutting out a piece of drywall shows whether contamination soaked into the wall behind it. So a "nothing found" result applies to the spot that was sampled and the test that was run there.
A number also has to be compared against a limit, and for most of what's in wildfire residue, there isn't one. Lead is the clearest exception. The EPA's dust-lead action levels are 5 micrograms per square foot on floors, 40 on windowsills and 100 in window troughs, the channel a window slides in. A microgram is a millionth of a gram. In the Palisades, testing cited in a legal demand by the family of Austin Beutner, former head of Los Angeles public schools, found 9,574 micrograms per square foot inside wall cavities, far above the floor limit. But the federal limits were written for floors, sills and troughs, and they say nothing about the hollow inside a wall.
Air and surfaces can disagree about the same room, and both can be accurate. A study of 19 homes, mostly in Altadena and Pasadena, found airborne metals within normal background ranges in March 2025, while surface wipes in several of those homes found lead above EPA levels. Particle counts in the air went up when people walked around and kicked settled dust back up.
California's public health department gave the task force two lines that sum up what a lab result can and can't tell a family: "Presence ≠ Exposure" and "Exposure ≠ Health Impact." A wipe shows lead is on the floor. Whether a child takes it in, and whether it harms her, are separate questions.
Residents didn't wait for an agency to start counting. A neighborhood group, Eaton Fire Residents United, collected professional test reports from neighbors and mapped them. Lead turned up in 96% of the homes tested after cleaning. The group was upfront about what its data couldn't show. Only one home in five had tests from both before and after cleaning, and the reports came from people who had reasons to test and to share, so it isn't a random sample. The average floor reading, about 296 micrograms per square foot, hides huge swings from house to house. Even so, the map put scattered private reports side by side, and the residents who built it did the work on their own time.
What the adjuster will pay for
The adjuster's question sounds like the family's, but it's narrower: what does the insurance contract require the company to pay to restore this house?
Lawton Potelle's adjuster told her the debris was carbon from burned plants and that cleaning would take care of it. Her hygienist found metals. Elisa Jacobs Nixon paid $6,000 for her own testing in May 2025. After that, she said, her insurer, State Farm, sent its own hygienist, whose findings broadly matched hers and added asbestos. Her family still can't live at home. "This has completely hijacked my life," she told CalMatters. Kareem Ali said State Farm refused to test his house, so he paid $3,000 to do it himself, then went through a rotation of adjusters and fights over cleanup payments. Since August 2026, he and his wife have been living in a donated RV parked on their own property. "What are we paying for if we're not going to get coverage?" he asked.
Beutner is suing his insurer, Bankers Standard, which is owned by Chubb. He told NBC Los Angeles that the insurer's testing left out some contaminants and that additional testing he paid for found elevated arsenic, lithium, zinc and lead. He also said Chubb offered less than a quarter of his contractor's estimate and proposed cleaning half the rooms. "What you see today is a house that looks OK, filled with silent killers," he said. That's his description, not a medical finding. Chubb hadn't responded when NBC published.
In each of these cases, the family's own money paid for evidence the insurer's process hadn't produced. What a family can bring to its insurer depends partly on what it could afford to find out on its own, before anyone else agreed to look.
Parts of the insurers' case are about science, and they deserve a fair hearing. Their proposal to the task force points out that cooking, candles, tobacco and household chemicals put some of the same substances into homes nowhere near a fire. A study of air in 50 homes after these fires supports part of that: it traced most of the chemicals it measured to household products, building materials and ordinary outdoor sources. The proposal also argues that limits written for workplaces or toxic-waste sites don't belong in bedrooms, that labs should report how small an amount their tests can detect, and that finding a trace, without showing the house was physically damaged, shouldn't automatically trigger payment. The task force report records the split. Survivor advocates wanted testing before and after cleaning as "routine protocol in all cases," while insurers said that for light or moderate damage, "surface cleaning will often suffice." State Farm says it evaluates each claim on its own facts.
The adjuster also holds a power the other three sources don't. The insurer controls additional living expenses, the payments that cover rent while a family can't live at home. A February letter from standing-home groups, co-signed by a recovery group from Colorado's 2021 Marshall fire, described long waits for approvals followed by payments that simply stopped. Lawton Potelle's were set to end in June 2026. For the Malones, it was the end of those checks, more than the lab results or Nina's headaches, that settled whether they went home.
What the law will count, starting in January
California's Smoke Damage Recovery Act, AB 1795, was signed on September 15, 2026, and takes effect January 1. It defines a "restored" home as one where fire residues, chemicals, contaminants and odor have been removed, returning the structure, its systems and its indoor environment to pre-fire condition. Odor is part of that definition. Insurers must pay for the testing needed to restore a home and clear it for living. If they choose to inspect, they have 30 days to do it. And living-expense payments can't stop until the home is both restored and cleared, up to the policy's limit. When the Malones' payments stopped, there was no such rule.
The law doesn't say who decides that a particular house is cleared. The actual numbers are in a second law, AB 1642, which for now covers only lead, using the federal dust limits, and asbestos. State agencies have until the end of 2028 to write rules for those two and for indoor air. Guidance on the other metals, cyanide, lithium and smoke chemicals isn't due until the end of 2029, almost five years after the fires. The task force itself adopted no number for declaring a whole home clean, saying there wasn't enough data.
It's not yet clear whether the living-expense protection reaches families whose claims have been open since January 2025. The law's testing and payment rules are written for claims starting in 2027 or later. The living-expense section carries no such date, and the state hasn't said how it reads the difference. Before the bill passed, Lawton Potelle told CalMatters the standards would come too late to help her group directly, though she hoped they would shape lawsuits and settlements.
One more provision: if a cleared home gets contaminated again, that counts as a new claim with a new deductible. Many standing houses sit next to lots where burned homes are still being demolished and rebuilt, and that dust moves on the wind. A family whose house is cleared one month could be filing again, and paying another deductible, if dust from next door gets back in.
Holding all four at once
In the Malones' house, all four answers are on the record. Nina's headaches come almost daily. Lead stayed on the floors after a professional cleaning. The rent money stopped. And the law meant to keep those payments going until a home is cleared was signed thirteen months after they moved back in. Nobody in that chain is responsible for putting the four answers together except Nina and Billy.
If you're holding test results that don't agree, whether in Altadena or in a Colorado suburb that could face this next, the useful questions are plain ones.
- Where was each sample taken, and how?
- What limit was it compared to, and was that limit written for that surface?
- Who chose where to sample?
- How do you feel after a few days away, and after a few days back?
- And what is actually pushing the decision: the evidence, or the date the living-expense payments end?
Survivors have already turned those questions into demands. Beutner and six survivor groups from both burn areas wrote to the two candidates for California insurance commissioner, Ben Allen and Jane Kim, asking them to commit to insurer-paid inspections that reach into attics, wall cavities, ducts and heating systems, with testing for lead, lithium and arsenic. No reply from either candidate has been reported. The letter asks insurers to pay for inspections in the places families like Beutner's have been paying to check on their own.
- The commissioner candidates' answers: Survivor groups asked Ben Allen and Jane Kim to commit to insurer-paid inspections of attics, walls and ducts by October 26, and City News Service's report on the letter is the starting point for checking whether either one responds.
- Claims open since 2025: No notice yet posted on the state insurance department's workshop notices page explains whether AB 1795's living-expense protection reaches families whose claims date to the January 2025 fires.
- Caltech's resampled homes: Caltech researchers returned to Eaton fire homes in January 2026 to sample again for lead, and the university's account of that work has not yet published what the second round found.
- Standards for everything else: AB 1642 requires public workshops before state agencies issue lead, asbestos and indoor-air rules by the end of 2028 and guidance on other metals, lithium, cyanide and smoke chemicals by the end of 2029.
