Dawn Bolstad-Johnson, a certified industrial hygienist, opens a utility panel in the attic of a house while testing for hidden toxins, in Los Angeles. Photo / Tag Christof, the New York Times
At first, the families whose homes were left standing after the Los Angeles fires in January thought they were the fortunate ones.
While their neighbours 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 realisation 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 tyre, 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.
These toxic chemicals are known carcinogens or similarly dangerous to human health, and high exposure has been shown to have severe health consequences.
United States soldiers who were exposed to fumes from burn pits on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan 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 a kilometre of the collapsed World Trade Centre towers experienced chronic respiratory illnesses, and those as far as 2.5km 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?
After the 2021 Marshall fire in Colorado, a study found that residents in homes as far as 3.2km 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 industry experts, whistleblowers 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 2.5km 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 New York 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.
In May, California’s insurance commissioner started a task force to create statewide rules for handling smoke claims, acknowledging that there is no accepted standard. 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 children, whose home in Altadena, about 25km northeast of downtown Los Angeles, survived the blaze. “How do you get to go from being so thankful to wanting your house to burn down?”
Worried that their five-bedroom home might be contaminated — the flames consumed their deck and melted their pool furniture but did not burn the house — Morrow and her husband, Jesse, asked their insurer to do a comprehensive test.
The insurer, Amica Mutual Insurance Co., 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 half a dozen samples of the air, according to the report.
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 US$17,000 ($28,000) 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, Bolstad-Johnson’s team had 2182 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.
Bolstad-Johnson recommended that the Morrows wear full-face respirators, nitrile gloves, shoe covers and disposable coveralls just to step inside their home.
The crew sent by the insurance company took 21 samples.
The crew hired by the family took hundreds of samples. This testing revealed alarming levels of carcinogens including formaldehyde, and poisons including lead and cyanide.
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 were also urged to throw away all their furniture, bedding, carpeting, clothes and toys. The Morrows shared the report with Amica Mutual, which said it wanted to re-enlist its original crew, according to Morrow.
An Amica spokesperson, Brendan Dowding, said the company was committed to handling wildfire claims “promptly, thoroughly and in good faith”. He explained that remediation typically began with professional cleaning before moving on to more extensive repairs.
“Often-times, the cleaning by the qualified professional successfully removes and neutralises any smoke and soot damage,” he said.
“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 south of Altadena. They are continuing to fight with their insurer to pay the estimated US$1 million for the renovations recommended in the independent report.
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 Jay Clark, 58, who worked for Pilot Catastrophe Services handling claims for State Farm’s Large Loss Unit from 2015-21.
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 in May.
In an email, State Farm said the company had paid US$4.1 billion to their customers in California this year, adding that each claim was evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine 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 described about a decade ago.
It accelerated after major wildfires in 2017 and 2018. Insurance companies, he said, added riders and language in policies to exclude or limit recovery for smoke damage.
More recently, Mellino, a staff lawyer at the Los Angeles-based Consumer Watchdog, said insurers had declined to test for harmful substances, or had limited what they would test for.
In the New York Times’ questionnaire, 84% of respondents whose insurance company sent a contractor to test for contamination reported that they tested only for a handful of toxic substances — often soot, char and ash.
A majority said that estimates offered by their insurers did not fairly represent what they believed was the actual cost of repairing their homes — and nearly a quarter said that their insurers’ estimates covered 20% or less of what they believed they would 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”, Mellino said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Blacki Migliozzi, Rukmini Callimachi and K.K. Rebecca Lai
Photographs by: Tag Christof
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The leftovers were taken from Erin Patterson's bin.