FeuerwehrAusland

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FIRE DEPARTMENTENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

SEARCHING FOR CLUES AMONG THE ASHES

Once a fire has been extinguished, the work continues – and that is also the case in the US. As soon as a major fire such as the devastating

Camp Fire in Northern California has been put out, the hazardous materials experts from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) move in.

TEXT STEFFAN HEUER   PHOTOS PATRICK STRATTNER

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A number of weeks after the most devastating forest fire in Californian history, the working day follows a som-ber routine for Jeremy Johnstone from the EPA. His ten-person team has a well-practiced rhythm on this cold and damp December day as it makes its way around the remains of Old Magalia, a neighbor-ing community of Paradise, which was engulfed in flames in November 2018. The conflagration destroyed around

19,000 structures; almost 90  people lost their lives.

One parcel of land after another, the experts in white protective suits always tick off the same points on their check-list: Search for sources of danger, secure hazardous waste, and prepare it for trans-portation to a disposal site. “I’ve seen many fires,” says Johnstone, “but this one has affected people especially deep-ly because the magnitude of destruction is so much bigger.” Accordingly, the team turns its attention in the first instance to the charred trees that now line the desert-

ed streets. A tree specialist inspects the trunks and marks them with white sym-bols. A “T” gives the all-clear, while two horizontal lines advise caution and an “X” indicates a source of danger. Even though many of the pine trees are still standing, they may pose a hazard to the environmen-tal experts as they work their way around the site. After an initial walkabout with a radiation measuring device, which warns of potential radioactivity from disused mil-itary technology, a handful of specialists begin to spread out. Since the houses were made of wood and plastic panels and had

DEVASTATINGThousands of buildings like this

family home suff ered the same fate in Paradise. The blaze consumed

the wooden and plastic houses surrounded by coniferous woodland

at lightning speed

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FIRE DEPARTMENTENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

no basements, there is generally only a square area of ash and melted debris left behind after the fire. The ash footprint is used in the first instance to identify the areas where the experts suspect there might be hazardous waste – primarily for-mer garages and kitchens. “We are look-ing for the usual suspects,” explains John-stone, while his colleagues carefully poke around in the ashes wearing a breathing apparatus. “Mainly for propane gas tanks, aerosol and paint cans, batteries, contain-ers filled with acid and oil, munitions, or panels that may contain asbestos.” The team enters every cleared parcel of land into a notebook and a tablet, before it ends up in the “digital cloud” and turns up a little later on the EPA website highlight-ed in green. This allows former residents to track almost in real time whether the all-clear has been given for their particu-lar street. By mid-January 2019, the envi-

ronmental experts had cleared almost 50 percent of the area in this manner and marked it with white wooden stakes fea-turing two signs that have been laminated to protect them from the wind and weath-er. A green tick on one of the signs signal-izes that the hazardous household waste has been removed, while also warning that there may still be hazardous materi-als concealed among the ashes. The other sign advises people how best to deal with hazardous materials that are still present.

RACE AGAINST TIMEFor the roughly 400 EPA employees who have been working in the disaster area in 28 different teams since the start of December, the clean-up operation is a race against time. Rain and landslides may wash hazardous substances (such as asbestos, mercury, and lead) contained in the ash into nearby streams, which means they could end up in the groundwater. On top of this, following the lifting of manda-tory evacuation orders, the residents want

to inspect what is left of their possessions and take them to a safe place. On the oth-er hand, five other authorities (at the fed-eral level and from California) are work-ing to prepare the town of Paradise for the second phase of the clean-up operation. Once 13,000 parcels of land had been suf-ficiently cleared of hazardous materials, the excavators and bulldozers got down to work in January. They have a year to remove the ash and debris as well as a 15-centimeter layer of soil so that each of the former residents who wish to move

SENSITIVE HAZARDOUS WASTE MAY BE LURKING ON EVERY PLOT WRECKED: Hundreds of burned-out cars left

behind by the fl eeing residents must be disposed of by environmental protection experts

ON THE SCENE FAST: EPA manager Steve Calanog has been chasing one natural disaster after the next for several years

THE MOST DEVASTATING FIRE in California around the area of Paradise in November 2018 reduced about 19,000 buildings to ash and rubble – and claimed almost 90 lives

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back here will at least have a parcel of land cleared of all hazardous materials by 2020. Most of the costs for this operation are being met by the state of California. “We have been doing this kind of work for many years and are now an experienced team,” reports Steve Calanog, who hur-ries from one disaster to the next as the on-scene coordinator for the Region IX in the Western part of the US. Over the past twelve months, he has tried to mitigate the direct environmental consequenc-es of nine major fires. “That’s not even including other disasters such as Hurri-cane Maria in Puerto Rico or the typhoon on the Pacific island of Saipan.” Calanog compares the work to searching for clues at the scene of a crime. “We have learned to recognize where the hazardous materi-als are located and how to dispose of them in the safest way.” Every major fire is none-theless different, because the settlement

structure and the topography differ from one place to the next.

WITH ALL AVAILABLE MEANS

“Paradise presents us with new challenges, because it is a very mountainous and dense-ly forested area with just a few roads lead-ing to it. And also because many people over the age of 55 lived here, who pursued their hobbies restoring cars, collecting guns and munitions, or using old equipment for gold mining that contained mercury.”

In contrast to other disaster areas, in a completely destroyed town like Par-adise there is also no telling when people will be able to live and work here again – even though individual buildings such as schools, churches, and hospitals were saved from the flames and were able to open again at the beginning of 2019. “All of these factors have to be taken into consid-eration when planning the clean-up oper-ation,” says Calanog, taking stock. And yet they didn’t really have much time to plan, because one devastating major fire has

been swiftly followed by the next in Cal-ifornia in recent times. The Tubbs Fire in October 2017 ravaged the counties of Napa and Sonoma – both famous for their vineyards – and reduced more than 2,800 homes in the city of Santa Rosa to rub-ble and ash. In July 2018, the Mendoci-no Complex Fire consumed around 1,800 square kilometers of mostly uninhabited land north of San Francisco. Shortly after-wards, in August 2018, the Carr Fire in the north of the state raged on an area cov-ering some 929 square kilometers. Then, on November 8, 2018, in addition to Para-dise going up in flames, the Woolsey Fire broke out north of Los Angeles. The crime scene cleaners from the EPA are called upon after each of these major fires. “If you learn anything from these disasters, it’s that you have to be completely ready

ON THE SAFE SIDE: Well protected and equipped with special rubber boots and a Geiger counter, EPA specialists scour every single parcel of land

REMAINS: Among most of the buildings in Paradise only metal parts remain, like this staircase. A thick layer of ash lies all around, under which hazardous goods and dangerous holes may be concealed

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FIRE DEPARTMENTENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

with existing maps and other data from geographical information systems. If the mobile communications network is still (or once again) working, these updates occur almost in real time; otherwise they occur in the early evening when the teams are within range of the command center again. Calanog himself juggles two smart-phones, a tablet, and a laptop twelve hours a day, seven days a week to keep up to date.

FRUSTRATION AND DISILLUSIONThis is all the more important, because in a disaster area there is always plenty of input, all kinds of questions, and no short-age of surprises – for instance, when it was discovered in May 2019 that the drinking water pipes had been contaminated with benzene. The EPA teams also work with the specialists at California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), communicate with the county, or are out and about with the employees of the power company PG&E, the telecommunications

for action very quickly,” says Calanog, who sums up this advice in one sentence: “Go big, go early!” This means mobilizing a cri-sis management team of specialists as soon as a fire breaks out and immediately decid-ing which experts and subcontractors need to be dispatched as soon as the firefight-ers and other emergency teams have extin-guished the fire. “We want to get all of the staff and equipment to the scene quick-ly instead of just mobilizing our resourc-es gradually,” explains the EPA manager. He controls the clean-up operation from a command center located in an empty office next to the small airport in Chico, around half an hour west of Paradise. This is where the lines of communication con-verge for the operation to clean up the haz-ardous materials. Software experts and app developers enter the measurements and notes gathered by the individual teams in the field into databases and link them

company AT&T, and the local cable opera-tors, who are rebuilding the infrastructure in Paradise on a piecework basis. Anyone who drives through the disaster area will see teams on virtually every corner mark-ing, felling, and chopping damaged trees as well as erecting new masts and laying new cables that were destroyed in the fire. Like almost everywhere else in the USA, the cables are not laid underground for time and cost reasons. As a result, they may be quickly destroyed in natural disasters, but they can also be quickly relaid. The haz-ardous material that accumulates in the course of the work ends up at a collec-tion point on the outskirts of Chico. Every evening, EPA trucks arrive here to dump the loads they have collected throughout the day from several hundred parcels of land – everything ranging from empty pro-pane tanks and pipes containing asbes-tos packed in airtight drums to burned-

ALL CLEAR: Each parcel of land from which hazardous materials have been removed is marked with a sign so that the owners can arrange for the rest of the debris to be disposed of

GHOST TOWN: Until November 2018, this was the site of Ridgewood Mobile Home Park, a modest settlement for pensioners who wanted to live out their remaining years in Paradise

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out ammunition boxes and car batteries. Hazardous waste and recycling materials are sorted by specialist staff and prepared for removal in large drums and contain-ers. In certain cases, suspicious contain-ers and substances may be subjected to a more thorough examination with mea-suring equipment (such as the Dräger X-am 5000 or the Dräger Chip Measure-ment System), although this seldom hap-pens in Paradise compared to other major fire sites, because almost exclusively resi-dential homes burned here and no indus-

trial buildings, which means that all vol-atile materials have long since escaped. “We have the necessary equipment with us, but we haven’t had to use it yet,” says EPA spokesman Rusty Harris-Bishop. For the survivors of the catastrophe, the remov-al of the hazardous materials is just one small step towards returning to everyday normality. Julie Banwellund and her fam-ily fled on the morning of November 8, 2018 with everything that could fit in the back of their car. They only just escaped the disaster. The family was lucky. Just a month later they found a house a couple of hours’ drive away, whose rent is being cov-ered by the insurance company. Since the fire, although they have inspected the ruins twice, they most likely will not rebuild their destroyed house there. “We lived in Para-dise for two years and also felt at home there, but the risk is just too big for us to start again from scratch in the town,” says the artist and yoga teacher. Months later, she is still trying to allay the fears of her two children – aged seven and three and a

half – when they see fire and hear sirens. The EPA experts are also suffering, despite all the professional distance that is a basic requirement of their job: “Anyone who spends hours every day seeing nothing but burned-out ruins and the remains of a family’s life can’t get rid of those images that quickly,” says Tony Honnellio. The specialist, who is also a trained radiation safety expert, is one of several counselling psychologists who work on the ground with the teams. Along with other mem-bers of the Critical Incident Stress Man-agement (CISM) team, he regularly visits the workers in Paradise and Magalia and, above all else, listens carefully to them. “We are kind of like first aid for the mind and soul. Since we are all in the same boat, we are very good at identifying those who are suffering as a result of the job and need to talk about it,” says Honnellio. On this particular afternoon, he and his col-league are checking that everything is OK in Jeremy Johnstone’s team, which is working its way through the ashes along Cascade Drive. The more disasters that strike within short spaces of time, the more important the psychological support becomes, says EPA colleague Rusty Harris-Bishop in agreement. “Anyone who does this kind of job often sees themselves as a tough person – someone who runs towards the fire as soon as it burns. Yet beneath that hard shell you have to take a step back and realize that you have a family at home and that there are also good things in life and not just debris and ash. Talking about it helps, before putting on the protective suit again the next morning.”

“THE RISK IS TOO BIG FOR US TO

START AGAIN FROM SCRATCH HERE”

Julie Banwellund, former Paradise resident

IN DEMAND: As a counselling psychologist, Tony Honnellio encourages his colleagues to talk