Science Meets Wildfire Recovery
By Joseph Wakelee-Lynch
Fires in recent years have become an even more serious scourge to life in California than before. Two LMU projects have recently received funding to help nearby communities with fire restoration.
Large fires in residential areas, unlike those in forested regions, can leave high levels of dangerous chemicals, says Brianne Gilbert, managing director of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles and senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. She is leading LMU’s participation in a disaster recovery project funded with seed money from the R&S Kayne Foundation.
Project leaders from LMU, Purdue University, UCLA, and the R&S Kayne Foundation are collecting soil samples from properties damaged by the Eaton and Palisades fires of January 2025. In addition, they are conducting air quality and water testing, and surveying residents impacted by the fires.
“Large fires in residential areas,” says Gilbert, “leave toxic materials in the soil that originate in everything from building materials to electronics found in homes and businesses. It’s much more toxic than wildfires in forested lands.”
“A lot of evidence suggests that California is moving into a period of experiencing megafires, as distinct from historic fires,” Strauss explains.
The Leavey Center has created a registration process through which homeowners agree to have soil from their property tested for metals including lead, chromium, arsenic, and mercury, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are found in cleaning products and paints.
Gilbert says the team originally estimated that about 1,200 properties would be represented in the registration process. But some 3,500 have been received.
In addition to creating and managing the property database, the Leavey center will aggregate information and create a StoryMap to share findings, including maps and a data dashboard, that potentially can identify hotspots that help property owners as well as government agencies make decisions about personal planning and remediation efforts.
Gilbert says an important part of StudyLA’s mission is serving communities and the public good. In this case, she adds, helping people who are experiencing a major crisis is deeply satisfying. “We’ve heard from the LMU community — faculty, staff, and even parents of students and alumni — who told us how proud they are that LMU is a part of this project.”
While LMU expertise has responded to recent fires in Southern California, the Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) is helping to restore habitat damaged by the Thomas Fire in 2017.
Driven by Santa Ana winds, the Thomas Fire, the largest California fire since records were first kept in 1932, burned 281,893 acres and destroyed 1,063 structures in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. The Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve in Ojai, California, lost significant portions of its 250-acre preserve, including acres of oak woodland. CURes, through a project led by co-investigators Eric Strauss, executive director, and Michelle Romolini, managing director, is working to restore the coastal live oaks in the nature preserve.
The project includes planting up to 250 oak trees and improving the area’s hydrology through a new well, reservoir repairs, and drip irrigation systems. Lisa Fimiani, CURes Drollinger Environmental Fellow, is working with indigenous leaders, community organizations, and ecological experts to develop education materials about the stabilizing role of coastal live oaks in ecosystems.
The coastal live oak, found in the coast ranges from North Central California to northern Baja California, is an endemic native species in California. It is seen as a keystone species in the ecosystem, Strauss says.
“The coast woodland oak provides habitats for birds, animals, and insects, capturing rainwater and aerating the soil. In the wake of the Thomas Fire, a goal of the project is to reestablish and even improve as many of the ecosystem’s characteristics as possible.”
“A lot of evidence suggests that California is moving into a period of experiencing megafires, as distinct from historic fires,” Strauss explains. “Historic fires are a necessary and useful part of the natural environment, but megafires can permanently damage the land. Because the Thomas Fire is a recent fire, we can probably re-establish much of the pre-fire conditions, since even some of the oaks damaged by the fire are coming back. More oak woodlands spread out over the topography of a rural or even suburban area could provide the buffer needed to tamp down the effects of megafires, many times acting as ember catchers as well.”
To learn more or support the Leavey Center project, contact Brianne Gilbert, brianne.gilbert@lmu.edu, and Salvador Rivas, executive director of Philanthropic Partnerships, salvador.rivas@lmu.edu. To learn more or support the Taft Gardens & Nature Preserve project, contact Michele Romolini, michele.romolini@lmu.edu, and Kurt Brunner, director of Corporate and Foundation Philanthropy, kurt.brunner@lmu.edu.