L.A. Homeowners Face Toxic Hazards After Wildfires

At first, the families whose homes were left standing thought they were the fortunate ones.

While their neighbors sifted through the ash and twisted debris left behind by devastating wildfires, they stepped through unbroken doors into living rooms where the throw pillows on the sofa rested exactly as they’d left them.

“Relieved,” some families said. “Blessed,” others said. Just about everyone said, “Lucky.”

But weeks later, a troubling realization set in: Their homes may have been damaged in ways that are invisible.

Everyday items become poisons when they are set on fire. A plastic shower rod releases formaldehyde. Burning rubber, whether from a garden hose or a car tire, emits benzene. Polyester, found in fleece jackets and upholstered chairs, unleashes carcinogenic gases. Printers, plasma TVs and LED lights melt into a cloud of cyanide.

Each of these toxic chemicals are known carcinogens or else dangerous to human health, and high exposure has been shown to have severe health consequences, including for American soldiers who were exposed to fumes from burn pits on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and developed bladder, lung, testicular and brain cancers.

Scientists have found that even those who are far from the source of smoke can be harmed. After 9/11, residents living within half a mile of the collapsed World Trade Center experienced chronic respiratory illnesses, and those as far as 1.5 miles away had elevated rates of cancer — just like the emergency workers at ground zero.

Now, as wildfires become more frequent, researchers are looking harder at what happens when smoke infiltrates a home. What does it do to the people who move back in?

In the aftermath of the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, the most destructive in the state’s history, a study found that residents in homes that were as far as two miles from the burn zone reported symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic smoke, including recurring headaches, itchy and runny eyes, a metallic taste in their mouths and a dry cough.

And yet, insurance companies often do not test for toxic substances, according to insurance industry experts, whistle-blowers and homeowners. When they do, they check for a few harmful substances and omit over two dozen others that researchers say can cause lasting harm. Some families who can afford it have taken matters into their own hands, paying out of pocket for private tests with the hopes of being reimbursed later. Other families have had no choice except to return to their homes.

More than 500 people who survived the recent fires in California — including homeowners and renters whose addresses fall as far as 1.5 miles from the nearest burned structure — responded to a New York Times questionnaire. A majority of those whose homes were still standing reported that their insurance companies had declined to pay for testing.

Dozens of respondents whose homes were damaged by smoke agreed to share the lab results, allowing The Times to review the toxicology studies for 56 homes — a total of 122 reports conducted by 64 different companies.

Nearly all showed some level of contamination. A father sent his toddler’s clothes to a lab and discovered that her dress was laced with lead. Comprehensive panels of tests, including swabs of surfaces, slices of furniture and extractions of drywall, showed the presence of a slew of heavy metals, toxic gases and other hazardous substances.

Last month, California’s insurance commissioner launched a task force to create statewide rules for handling smoke claims, acknowledging that there is no accepted standard despite back-to-back fires that have decimated communities.

But families say insurance companies have forced them to choose between their health and their finances.

“This is crazy, and so blatant,” said Melissa Morrow, 51, the mother of two teenage children, whose home in Altadena survived the blaze. “How do you get to go from being so thankful to wanting your house to burn down?”

Where There Was Fire, There Is Still Smoke

Worried that their five-bedroom home on a street dotted with soaring palm trees might be contaminated — the flames consumed their deck and melted their pool furniture but did not burn the house — Ms. Morrow and her husband, Jesse, asked their insurer to do a comprehensive test.

The insurer, Amica Mutual Insurance Company, declined and said it planned to send its own industrial hygienist. A crew sent by the insurer spent a few hours, swabbing 15 surfaces and taking a half dozen samples of the air, according to the report later sent to Ms. Morrow, a TV and film producer.

The insurance crew’s report showed three substances: char, soot and ash.

The insurer advised removing the insulation from the attic, but for the rest of the house, it recommended that the Morrows do little more than cleaning — the instructions included using a special vacuum and a “soot sponge.”

The couple felt that something was off, so they paid $17,000 to hire their own certified industrial hygienist, Dawn Bolstad-Johnson. The results could not have been more stark: After spending about 10 hours drilling into the walls and furniture, as well as collecting gases suspended in the air, Ms. Bolstad-Johnson’s team had 2,182 data points from hundreds of locations on the property — enough to determine that the home was contaminated with known carcinogens.

“Unsafe to inhabit,” the 177-page report concluded.

Ms. Bolstad-Johnson recommended that the Morrows wear full-face respirators attached to Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear filters, nitrile gloves, shoe covers and disposable coveralls just to step inside their home.

The Morrows would need to remove all the drywall, flooring, insulation and exterior stucco, and replace the cabinetry, the HVAC system and most of the appliances — a gut renovation. They also were urged to throw away all their furniture, bedding, carpeting, clothes and toys.

Except for items made of glass and metal, everything — from their daughter’s stuffed goose to their son’s “Dungeons & Dragons” books — had to be discarded. The Morrows shared the report with Amica Mutual, which said it wanted to re-enlist its original crew, according to Ms. Morrow.

In an emailed statement, Amica spokesman Brendan Dowding said that he could not comment on specific cases because of privacy concerns, but said the company is committed to handling wildfire claims “promptly, thoroughly and in good faith.” He explained that remediation typically begins with professional cleaning before moving on to more extensive repairs.

“Oftentimes, the cleaning by the qualified professional successfully removes and neutralizes any smoke and soot damage,” he wrote. “However, when that is not the case, we then continue the claims adjustment process by determining an alternative method of remediation and repair.”

The family is now staying in a bungalow about 15 minutes south of Altadena. They are continuing to fight with their insurer to pay the estimated $1 million for the renovations recommended in the independent report.

‘Smokers’

State Farm, the largest insurer in California, has its own term for homes like the Morrows’ — they call them “smokers,” according to Selina and Jay Clark, a husband-and-wife team who worked as third-party adjusters for State Farm.

The Clarks are among five current and former insurance adjusters who described a pattern of delays and denials across the industry going back years.

“They nickel-and-dimed the homeowners,” said Mr. Clark, 58, who worked for Pilot Catastrophe Services handling claims for State Farm’s Large Loss Unit from 2015 to 2021.

The couple were dismissed by State Farm after challenging what they believed were incorrect payments to policyholders, and they were among a roster of adjusters who submitted written testimony to a congressional hearing investigating the insurance industry last month.

In 2018, after the Woolsey and Camp wildfires in California, Mr. Clark’s estimates for complete tear-outs of contaminated material in two homes he inspected more than doubled the amount owed to the homeowners, from around $150,000 to upward of $300,000, he said.

“Every time I sent an estimate up for approval, it came back down. They’d ask, ‘Why remove the insulation?’ And I’d have to write a full report justifying tearing out drywall, doors, baseboards, everything,” he said.

In an email, State Farm said the company has already paid $4.1 billion to their customers in California this year, adding that each claim is evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine what tools will be used in the recommended remediation steps.

Ryan Mellino, the author of a report on how insurance companies restrict payments for smoke damage, said he began seeing the pattern of denial that the Clarks and other adjusters describe about a decade ago. It accelerated in 2017 and 2018, following major wildfires including the Tubbs, Camp and Woolsey fires. Insurance companies, he said, added riders and language in policies to exclude or limit recovery for smoke damage.

More recently, Mr. Mellino, a staff lawyer at the Los Angeles-based Consumer Watchdog, said that the insurers have declined to test for harmful substances, or have limited what they will test for.

In The Times’s questionnaire, 84 percent of respondents whose insurance company sent a contractor to test for contamination reported that they only tested for a handful of toxic substances — often soot, char and ash. A majority said that the estimate offered by their insurer did not fairly represent what they believed was the actual cost of repairing their homes — and nearly a quarter said that their insurer’s estimate covered 20 percent or less of what they believed they will need to spend to rebuild or remediate their homes.

Because the damage is invisible to the naked eye, its mere existence becomes “like a battle of the experts,” Mr. Mellino said.

What She Saw in the Smoke

In 2000 — a year before 9/11 reset the world’s understanding of airborne hazards — Ms. Bolstad-Johnson led a study of invisible risks by equipping a group of firefighters with air-monitoring gear. Not only did dangerous levels of toxic gases remain after a fire had been extinguished, but even after smoke dissipated, carcinogens including formaldehyde hung in the air.

Almost a decade later, scientists would find that embalmers who use formaldehyde to prepare bodies for burial have elevated levels of leukemia.

In 2022, a study in Canada found that people living as far as 30 miles from a wildfire had a nearly 5 percent higher incidence of lung cancer and a 10 percent greater risk of brain tumors.

“It’s not about the science. It’s about the money. If they really follow the science, every single standing home would be toast,” said Ms. Bolstad-Johnson, 58, who has been deposed as an expert witness in lawsuits against insurers and has tested nearly 70 houses damaged in the L.A. fires.

“It’s like a burn pit,” she said. “Smoke came through your house and then settled in your couch, settled in your mattress, settled in your drywall. And we’re saying, you know, just mop it up. It’s no big deal.”

Ms. Bolstad-Johnson and other industrial hygienists have faced pushback from the insurance industry. Vendors hired by insurers argue that because samplings showing carcinogens are taken from specific parts of the house — a section of drywall in one room, a piece of insulation in another — the results are preliminary, and that more testing is needed to determine that the entire home needs to be gutted.

That kind of testing for the whole house “could exceed the rebuilding cost of the property,” wrote Anna A. Stec, a professor in fire chemistry and toxicity at the University of Central Lancashire in England, who agreed to review both Ms. Bolstad-Johnson’s findings and a rebuttal by the insurance-appointed examiner at the Times’s request.

Cyanide in the Car Seat

Ms. Bolstad-Johnson was booked solid in February when Korinna Sehringer reached out to her.

While Ms. Sehringer’s neighborhood in Altadena was still cordoned off in the days after the fire, she sneaked past the police tape and discovered that her three-bedroom home was still standing. The SUV she had left parked in the driveway appeared unharmed, until she realized she had to wear a mask inside and keep the windows down just to drive to a friend’s house.

Ms. Sehringer, a real estate agent, said she paid over $1,000 in January to have the car detailed, including a deep clean of her 4-year-old son’s car seat. The following month, on a road trip, her son began coughing. The cough returned each time they went on a long drive, she said.

She reached out to Ms. Bolstad-Johnson, who agreed to test the car. A piece of the car seat was cut out, and weeks later the testing revealed cyanide in the foam cushion.

“We had been driving around in it for eight weeks,” said Ms. Sehringer, 54.

Her insurer, Mercury Insurance, which covers both her house and her car, sent an adjuster who found that the car was a total loss based on the discovery of the cyanide, and issued her a $22,000 check.

But a different adjuster assigned to assess her home in March initially declined to do testing, according to the complaint Ms. Sehringer later filed with the California Department of Insurance. Weeks passed before the insurance company agreed to look for two substances: lead and asbestos.

“Look, if my car tests positive for cyanide and it’s sitting in front of my house, it is highly likely that cyanide can be found in my couch and in our mattresses,” said Ms. Sehringer.

She said that when she entered her house wearing an N95 mask, she quickly got a burning sensation in her mouth, a headache and nausea, symptoms that she said lasted for days. She ended up in Urgent Care, where she says a doctor detected a “rumbling” in her lungs and advised her that it was because of the toxic air from the fire.

Mercury Insurance paid for Ms. Sehringer’s temporary housing as well as other expenses, a spokesman for the company wrote in an email. “If our customers have a covered claim and their residences aren’t habitable, our first priority is to ensure they have a safe place to live while repairs and remediation take place,” he wrote.

According to the complaint Ms. Sehringer filed — one of hundreds the California Department of Insurance has received regarding the handling of smoke damage claims following the recent fires — it was months before she received financial support to cover rent after paying out of pocket to cover her temporary housing and amassing nearly $18,000 in debt. She and her son are living a short drive from the home.

Families who are locked in a dispute with their insurer say they have emptied their savings, maxed out credit cards, tapped retirement accounts and drained pensions as they try cover both a mortgage and the cost of a rental or other temporary home, according to the hundreds who replied to The Times’s questionnaire.

Unable to find a suitable rental, the Morrows bought the bungalow they are living in now. The arrangement has left them with a maze of insurance reimbursements and payments that they say are unsustainable. What they want is to return to their home safely.

On a recent evening, Ms. Morrow began writing yet another email to her adjuster — one of at least 50 she estimates she has sent to the insurance company so far. Suddenly, she got an alert on her Apple watch. Her heart rate had shot up to 132 beats per minute.

“An elevated heart rate while you’re not active may indicate important changes to your health,” said the alert.

Jonah Smith, Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière, Susan C. Beachy and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.