Only a fraction of fire cleanup workers are protecting themselves against toxic debris. One community center is fighting to change that

A crew of 10, many sporting bright orange National Day Laborer Organizing Network T-shirts, funneled out of a Mexican restaurant on the edge of the Eaton burn scar.
Four months — to the day — after winds smashed a tree into a car next to NDLON's Pasadena Community Job Center and soot blanketed the neighborhood, a University of Illinois Chicago professor, NDLON staff and volunteers sorted into cars under the midday sun and began discreetly traveling every road in fire-stricken Altadena.
They watched nearly 250 crews, working long hours (for good pay) under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, remove the toxic debris covering the landscape in the wake of the fire.
Of the over 1,000 workers they surveyed in the burn area on May 7 and 9, only a quarter wore gloves, a fifth wore a protective mask, and a mere tenth donned full Tyvek suits, as required by California's fire cleanup safety regulations, the group's report, released Thursday, found.
For Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director and co-founder of NDLON, the results aren't surprising.
NDLON — a Pasadena-based, national network of day laborer organizations, focused on improving the lives of day laborers, migrant and low-wage workers — has been responding to post-disaster worker safety issues for decades. Alvarado couldn't help but remember the laborers he and NDLON supported during the cleanup following 9/11 over 20 years ago.
'Those workers are no longer alive. They died of cancer,' he said. 'These are workers I'd known for decades — their sons, their cousins.'
As Alvarado watches a new generation of laborers get to work in the aftermath of the L.A. fires, his call to action is simple: 'I just don't want to see people dying.'
NDLON has seen lax PPE use time and time again following disasters. Since 2001, NDLON has dispatched to countless hurricanes, floods and fires to support what the organization calls the 'second responders' — the workers who wade through the rubble and rebuild communities after the devastation. Eaton was no different.
'We always respond around the country to floods, fires, no matter where it is,' said Cal Soto, workers' rights director for NDLON, who helped survey workers in the burn area. For the Eaton fire, 'we just happen to be literally in the shadow of it.'
When wildfires push into developed areas like Altadena, they chew through not just trees but residents' cars, plastics, batteries and household goods like detergents and paint thinners, releasing hosts of toxic chemicals previously locked away.
They include heavy metals like lead and mercury, capable of damaging the nervous system and kidneys, as well as arsenic and nickel, known carcinogens. Organic materials like wood and oil that don't fully burn can leave polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — or PAHs — which can harm the immune system and cause sickness in the short term and cancer in the long term.
Read more: The L.A. wildfires left lead and other toxic material in the soil of burn zones. Here are their health risks
Their primary opportunities to enter the body are through the inhalation of toxic air or through ingestion, after collecting on the hands of a person who then touches their face or uses their hands to eat. They can also, to a lesser extent, absorb directly through the skin.
Masks and disposable head-to-toe coverall suits act as a barrier against the dangerous contaminants.
The responsibility to ensure workers are using those protective barriers on the job ultimately falls on the employer, said Soto.
However, the breakdown of the safety standards can happen anywhere in the chain: The state's OSHA division can fail to communicate rules to companies and enforce them. Employers can fail to educate their employees or provide the correct PPE. Workers themselves — despite it all — can choose to remove their PPE on long, hot days where a plastic suit and heavy duty mask feel suffocating.
'Sometimes it's uncomfortable to wear all of that crap — particularly when it's hot," said Alvarado, who was a day laborer before founding NDLON. "Sometimes you feel like you're suffocated.'
NDLON and its Pasadena Community Job Center, within hours of the Eaton fire, became a hub for the community's response. Its volunteers handed out PPE, food and donations to workers and community members. By the end of January, it had hundreds of helping hands clearing Pasadena's parks and streets of debris to assist overwhelmed city employees.
At the same time, day labor, construction and environmental remediation workers quickly rushed into the burn zone along with the donations, media attention and celebrities. Like clockwork, so did the labor safety violations.
In a dimly-lit Pasadena church in late January, dozens of day laborers watched as Carlos Castillo played the role of an impatient boss, barking directions at three workers standing before them.
'Hurry up,' Castillo told them in Spanish, handing out boxes of protective suits and masks. One woman, standing in front of the room, fumbled with the straps of a respirator.
Debora Gonzalez, health and safety director NDLON, eyed the day laborer's efforts before asking the crowd: 'What is our friend missing?'
'Gloves!' someone called out.
Gonzalez and other volunteers called on the crowd, who quickly pointed out more problems with the equipment that the three workers had hastily donned. One had a mask that wasn't sufficient for toxic cleanup; Gonzalez also pointed out that his beard would allow dust to infiltrate.
Castillo, a volunteer trainer and president of the D.C.-based immigrant worker-support nonprofit Trabajadores Unidos de Washington D.C., reminded them that when they are cleaning up an area after a wildfire, there could be a range of noxious chemicals in the ash. Gonzalez said she wanted them to be prepared.
'Tomorrow we'll practice again,' she told them.
NDLON set up the free trainings for any day laborers interested in supporting fire recovery after some laborers began picking up work cleaning homes contaminated with smoke and ash near the fire zones.
Employers are supposed to provide protective equipment to workers and train them on how to use it, but 'many times employers want to move quickly. They just want to get the job done and get the job done as quickly as possible,' said Nadia Marin-Molina, NDLON co-executive director. 'Unfortunately, workers' health goes by the wayside.'
As NDLON worked to educate day laborers, another group of workers moved in: The Army Corps of Engineers' contractors. Alvarado quickly noticed that many of the corps' workers were not wearing the required PPE.
Never one to let the 'Day Laborer' in NDLON's name limit his compassion, Alvarado reached out to a longtime collaborator, Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies labor standards enforcement, to do something about it.
A week later, Juan Pablo Orjuela, a labor justice organizer with NDLON, made sure the air was recirculating in the car as the team drove through the burn zone, surveying workers for the NDLON and University of Illinois Chicago report in early May. He watched an AllTrails map documenting their progress — they'd drive until they had traced every street in northeast Altadena.
Read more: When FEMA failed to test soil for toxic substances after the L.A. fires, The Times had it done. The results were alarming
Orjuela spotted an Army Corps crew working on a home and pulled the car to the curb. 'Eight workers — no gloves, no Tyvek suit,' he said.
Nestor Alvarenga, a day laborer and volunteer with NDLON, sat in the back, tediously recording the number of workers, how many were wearing protective equipment and the site's address into a spreadsheet on an iPad with a beefy black case. One worker walked up to the car; Orjuela slowly lowered the window.
'Do you guys need anything?' the worker asked.
'No, we're OK,' Orjuela said, 'we'll get out of your way.'
Orjuela rolled up the window and pulled away. 'I don't really have to tell anybody what I'm doing,' he said. 'I'm not being antagonistic, but you know … I'm just not saying anything to anybody.'
Theodore and NDLON hope the window survey, spanning 240 job sites with more than 1,000 total workers, can raise awareness for safety and health concerns in the burn areas, help educate workers, and put pressure on the government to more strictly enforce compliance.
'This was no small sample by any means,' Theodore said. 'This was an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible and the patterns were clear.'
For Soto, the results are a clear sign that, first and foremost, employers are not upholding their responsibility to ensure their workers' safety.
'It's the responsibility of the employer,' he said. 'I want to be clear that we have that expectation — that demand — always.'
Yet the window survey found even job sites where the PPE requirements are explicitly listed by the employer on a poster at the site, usage was still low. The reality, NDLON organizers said, is that the state must step in to help enforce the rules.
'I understand that the disaster was colossal, and I never expected the government to have the infrastructure to respond immediately,' said Alvarado, 'but at this point, making sure workers have PPE, that's a basic thing that the government should be doing.'
Former Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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