Coming Home, Changed: Reflections One Year After the Palisades Fire

By Tracy Quinn, President and CEO, Heal the Bay

One year ago, fire tore through Pacific Palisades and forever altered my relationship with the place I call home.

Like so many of my neighbors, I was displaced by the January 2025 Palisades Fire. For nearly a year, I lived in limbo, grateful that my house was still standing yet unable to return to it. That dual reality has stayed with me: relief and grief, gratitude and guilt, hope and heartbreak all existing at the same time.

I did not lose my home. Many did. And that truth has been one of the heaviest things to carry.

Survivor’s guilt is a quiet companion. It shows up when I drive past empty foundations, when I talk to neighbors mourning the loss of family heirlooms, when I unlock my own front door knowing others no longer can. Moving back to the Palisades has been both joyful and deeply sad. It has been wonderful to finally unpack my suitcase, to walk familiar streets, to watch the marine layer creep up the canyon. It has been sad because the neighborhood I returned to is not the same one, I left.

And yet, from the very first days after the fire, I also knew this: standing still was not an option. Not just because my insurance company would not approve long-term housing, forcing me to move every couple of weeks, but because the impacts of a wildfire do not end when the flames are out.

In coastal communities like ours, they flow downhill—into storm drains, creeks, lagoons, and ultimately the ocean.

I am grateful to have had a way to channel heartbreak into action at a time when the fire left so many feeling powerless. I am proud to be part of the Heal the Bay team that jumped in immediately, launching water quality testing to understand what the fire meant for beachgoers and for marine life that can’t escape our coastal waters. In the absence of clear regulatory standards for wildfire contaminants, our scientists used every available tool to assess potential risk and just as importantly, to explain what we still do not know.

When we learned that the EPA planned to use a site adjacent to Topanga Creek and Lagoon to sort and stage hazardous materials, we demanded a meeting. We raised concerns about placing hazardous waste operations next to an ecologically and culturally sensitive area and pushed for stronger protections and safer alternatives.

A year later, this is what we’ve learned.

We still do not know enough about the impacts of fire-related pollution on human health. In the absence of state or federal public health standards for wildfire contaminants in recreational waters, Heal the Bay scientists relied on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Screening Level Calculator, a tool originally developed to evaluate exposure to individual contaminants in air, drinking water, and soil. While it was not designed for complex, multi-contaminant wildfire scenarios or recreational ocean exposure, it is currently the only published framework available to help contextualize this type of data.

Water quality data collected by Heal the Bay and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board between January and May 2025 indicate that potential risk to people recreating in ocean water appears low when compared to EPA Risk Screening Levels. However, these screening levels are not safety thresholds. They do not account for cumulative exposure to multiple contaminants, pre-existing health conditions, or sensitive life stages such as pregnancy. Without clear regulatory standards, it is not possible to make definitive statements about safety, underscoring the need for clearer state-level guidance on post-fire water sampling, standardized testing protocols, and public health benchmarks for recreational exposure following wildfires.

While potential risk to humans from ocean recreation appears limited based on available screening tools, early monitoring raises greater concern for marine life. Unlike people, marine organisms remain continuously immersed in coastal waters and often have a lower tolerance for contamination. Wildfire-related pollutants can accumulate over time within marine sediments and move through the food web, potentially affecting fish, wildlife, and people who consume locally caught seafood. These impacts may unfold gradually and are not always visible in short-term water sampling.

The EPA hazardous waste sorting and staging sites at Topanga may have contributed to elevated pollutant levels at Topanga Beach. Shortly after operations began, water sampling detected a spike in several contaminants on February 6. While this timing does not establish causation, it raised serious concerns about whether hazardous waste handling activities may have played a role. Following advocacy and operational changes, subsequent sampling showed improvement, but it may take years to fully understand the long-term impacts on our coast and marine life.

What this past year has made painfully clear is that wildfires are no longer rare emergencies. They are recurring features of a changing climate. If we do not learn from this experience and make meaningful changes, the next disaster could be even more devastating.

For the coast, that means four urgent actions:

• Fix stormwater infrastructure.
  We must improve systems to divert the first and most contaminated stormwater flush to wastewater treatment facilities instead of allowing toxic runoff to flow directly into the ocean and increase stormwater capture throughout LA County.
• Establish clear post-fire testing protocols.
  This must include identifying all pollutants associated with urban wildfires and designating a responsible authority for timely ocean and sand sampling.
• Set public health standards for recreational exposure.
  Communities need clear, science-based benchmarks for contact with fire-related contaminants like lead, arsenic, and chromium.
• Continue monitoring.
  With ash coating the ocean floor and rain continuing to carry sediment from burn areas, sustained monitoring is essential to protect both human health and marine life.

In an era of climate change, true recovery means learning from what you have lost and being better prepared for what is coming next. It requires clear leadership from government agencies, proactive plans to protect public health and ecosystems, and sustained funding so nonprofits are not left filling critical gaps alone.

The Palisades Fire changed me. It changed our community. And Heal the Bay is working to make sure it also changes policy, so the next community facing a climate disaster is better protected.

-Tracy Quinn, President and CEO, Heal the Bay 

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Photo Credit: LA County Fire Department

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