The California Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) sprang into action during the Woolsey Fire, and its efforts toward recovery are ongoing—even as burned-out property owners grow increasingly impatient to begin the next stage in their rebuild.
During a tour of a debris removal site on March 15, the state was shooting to be done with clearance by the end of May, but the timeline has since been moved.
“Our goal is to complete the removal of debris by the end of June—there probably will still be erosion control, soil sampling and some of the other later aspects of the program still going on, but our goal is to remove all the eligible debris by the end of June,” CalOES spokesperson Greg Renick explained to The Malibu Times during a phone interview on Tuesday, April 16.
In addition to a wet winter slowing progress, Renick described a “learning curve” when it came to clearing debris from neighborhoods like Malibu Park, which is located on a steep slope.
“I think the most difficult aspect of this, from what I’m told, is we typically don’t see very many mountainside properties, so the number of mountainside properties that we’re dealing with is challenging,” Renick described, “and with that, as with any operation, there’s always a learning curve. So we’ve had to learn a … new set of skills for debris removal.”
Led by CalRecycle, the debris removal program is the “opt-in” option for fire victims to have rubble removed from their properties by the state, without hiring their own private contractors to conduct debris removal.
The order of operations for the program goes as follows:
• Site assessment
• Asbestos assessment
• Asbestos abatement, if necessary
• Debris removal
• Soil samples collected/analyzed
• Erosion control methods installed
The City of Malibu provided statistics for debris clearance within Malibu city limits: 64 properties have been cleared, out of 323 approved program applications, as of the evening of Tuesday, April 16.
According to Renick, 55.4 percent of eligible properties (that opted in to the program) in LA County had been cleared as of Tuesday morning. Debris was completely removed from 476 properties in the county and 860 site assessments had been completed.
By Tuesday, 141 final inspection reports had been submitted for properties in Los Angeles County.
Renick reported a whopping 19,988 truckloads of debris had been removed from destroyed properties across both counties where the fire burned—17,208 truckloads in LA County alone.
In Ventura County, numbers were much lower: Site assessments had been completed on 107 properties, 48 properties had undergone debris removal and 11 final inspection reports had been submitted. Those numbers reflect the smaller impact Woolsey had on Ventura County residents. Renick said just about eight times more right-of-entry permits were filed for properties in Los Angeles County, compared to Ventura.
As of April 12, the state was fielding a total of 44 taskforces—teams of five to six workers clearing lots, plus two more workers handling traffic management. On Wednesday, April 17, two more teams will be added. Most of the taskforces are made up of private contractors.
