Pasadena City Council Monday, Oct. 6, unanimously voted to terminate the public health emergency related to January’s windstorm and the resulting Eaton fire.
Pasadena Health Officer Dr. Parveen Kaur issued the declaration of a local health emergency on Jan. 15, eight days after the Eaton fire ignited in Altadena and spread into areas on the east and west of Pasadena.
The emergency was ratified by the City Council on Jan. 17. It was a declaration supporting the city’s requests for state and federal assistance to expedite recovery activities. And it established eligibility for state and federal reimbursement for expenses incurred by the city, according to a staff report.
The recommendation to end the health emergency was made, according to the report, based on conditions in Pasadena reaching a point where the most immediate public health threats posed by the Eaton fire have subsided.
A firefighter from Costa Mesa works to extinguish a fire burning a home on Valleylights Drive during the Eaton fire in the Hastings Ranch community of Pasadena early Wednesday morning Jan. 8, 2025. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)In response to City Council questions on Monday, Pasadena Public Health Director Manuel Carmona said about a quarter of the properties sampled in zip codes 91103 and 91104 found lead levels about at the Environmental Protection Agency threshold of 200 parts per million. In the 91107 zip code, about 5% of properties exceeded that threshold.
Carmona encouraged residents to participate in Los Angeles County’s soil testing program, as soil toxicity can vary drastically from home to home.
The county program came as a result of a county study that found elevated lead levels on standing parcels downwind of the Eaton fire burn area.
“What we find is that when you look at one property, the test results for that one particular property is not indicative of what you might find immediately adjacent, and so what we’re struggling with is trying to figure out how to make sure that people have access to the services and that if there’s a trend that we’re able to identify it,” Carmona said.
Councilmember Steve Madison and Mayor Victor Gordo agreed that the city should continue to monitor the potential health impacts on first-responders who may have been exposed to the toxicity in the course of responding to the fire and provide testing.
Blood lead level testing is still available, Carmona said. As of Sept. 2, out of the approximately 1,800 people tested through free LA County Public Health’s partnership with Quest Diagnostics, nine adults have been found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
Gordo also requested that the city create some kind of map or visual that showed where in Pasadena the highest levels of lead have been found.
A city staff report covered the steps taken in areas of soil testing, air quality monitoring, blood lead level testing and debris removal that led to the decision to recommend terminating the public health emergency.
Since the fire, city facilities were deemed safe from the environmental impacts, lead levels at city parks were below health screening levels and air quality monitoring remains ongoing.
“The recommendation to terminate the local health emergency reflects the assessment of staff that current public health response efforts can be absorbed within existing department operations,” the staff report read. “To be clear, the recommended termination of the local health emergency is not a recommendation to end the City of Pasadena Eaton Fire emergency response.”
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