8 months after Tustin hangar fire, why some residents are gripped by toxic uncertainty

Eight months after a World War II-era blimp hangar spewed toxic smoke and rained asbestos-laden debris over the community as it burned to the ground in Tustin, some nearby residents are still living with deep concerns about their long-term health and safety.

"I literally drive 40 minutes to take my kids for walks," said Sean Storm, who lives in Tustin’s Columbus Square neighborhood about a quarter-mile from the charred remains of the hangar. Storm, his wife, and four young children had to temporarily move out late last year after fire soot inside his home tested positive for elevated levels of lead, which can cause long-term damage to a child's brain and nervous system, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

Many residents were, and still are, unsure just how concerned they should be about the health consequences of the fire.

Now, a new stage of the cleanup is beginning, bringing potential new risks for contamination, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency: This month, Navy contractors began dismantling what remains of the hangar and removing debris from the burn site. The work will be done inside negative pressure tents to keep asbestos, lead and other potentially toxic particles from escaping into the air, according to an update on the Navy's website for the former base.

Meanwhile, residents near the former Tustin military base where the fire broke out on Nov. 7 have had to wade through a mess of seemingly conflicting information about the toxicity of the fire fallout and the potential consequences to their health.

They watched for weeks as crews of hazmat workers combed their neighborhoods picking up fire debris. In December, city contractors applied a chemical compound called a tackifier around the footprint of the destroyed hangar to keep dust and ash in place, and wrapped what remains of the structure in reinforced plastic nylon sheeting. The county removed all the wood chips in several nearby parks after the fire, swapping them out for clean ones.

And then, in May, the city of Tustin announced the results from testing the homes of 50 randomly selected volunteers, saying they "found no lead or asbestos contamination in both Tustin and the surrounding community."

Mayor Austin Lumbard called the results "reassuring" during the city council meeting where they were presented.

Why reassurances haven’t reassured everyone

The announcement of the rosy results left some perplexed, and others angry. Just last week, the state legislature — with Mayor Lumbard's support — asked President Joe Biden and Congress to declare the hangar fire a national emergency, and dedicate $100 million for the cleanup effort, "to address the ongoing impacts on public health, the environment, and the local economy."

They're "talking out of both sides," Tustin resident Lana Clay-Monaghan said of city leaders. "They're going to fall on their knees to ask the [government] for money, and they're trying to say that there's nothing wrong. It just contradicts itself," she said.

Clay-Monaghan lives in the Columbus Square neighborhood, one of the hardest hit with debris from the fire. She is skeptical of the way the city went about testing the 50 homes, which was done months after the fire, in late February and March, and included a random sampling of homes that volunteered to be tested. She thinks the testing should have taken into consideration factors that might have increased or decreased a household's risk of contamination — and tested those households most likely to have contamination.

"They didn't ask people, 'Do you have kids? Do you have dogs? Do you go in and out of your garage?'" she said.

Clay-Monaghan, her husband, and two toddlers temporarily moved out in November after private testing found elevated levels of lead inside their home, she said.

The condo association where she and Storm both live had the outside of their buildings tested in December. The testing found lead and asbestos fibers in fire soot on light fixtures, awnings, and window casings — on all 20 buildings, according to results reviewed by LAist.

Oladele Ogunseitan , a public health professor at the University of California Irvine, said residents are understandably confused by the mixed messages.

"There's a lot of lessons we could learn from how to not communicate well," he said.

In some instances, he said, public officials have failed to pair newly released information with ways people can take action to protect their public health. In others, like the May announcement of the city's test results, key details get lost or muddled.

"The city did not say that contamination of homes did not happen," Ogunseitan said, "it's just saying months after the event, there's no new contamination found in households that volunteered to participate in the sampling. But that's a fine detail that may not appeal to somebody who still feels vulnerable."

Some contamination went undisclosed

A few days after the fire broke out, city leaders and local public health officials announced that physical debris from the fire contained asbestos and could be dangerous to public health.

At the same time, health officials said that asbestos was not detected in air samples taken around the hangar site and in the surrounding community in the days after the fire broke out. Similarly, daily air quality testing has not shown elevated levels of lead, arsenic or other heavy metals.

But whether the fire led to asbestos and lead contamination in indoor s paces has been less clear. And for weeks after the fire, health officials’ public statements left many residents with questions about how best to mitigate their exposure to contamination. As a result, for example, residents fretted in the days following the fire about whether or not they should run their HVAC systems.

As for indoor contamination, in a Dec. 13 letter to Tustin officials, Orange County's health officer, Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, wrote "that testing indoor spaces is not necessary, thanks to reassuring test results from nearby facilities," including public schools, local parks, and community centers.

Indoor air and dust samples were ordered by public health officials at the two schools closest to the fire, Heritage Elementary and Legacy Magnet Academy, in late November. Asbestos was not detected in any of the samples — eight interior air samples and nine dust samples at each school.

Some other indoor test results, however, were not publicly disclosed at the time. Test results from the city's contractor Envirocheck showed that asbestos fibers were found on Nov. 12, five days after the hangar fire started, inside the city-run Tustin Family and Youth Center — in dust on classroom floors and on the kitchen countertop, according to documents from the Orange County Fire Authority. An email from an Envirocheck employee to city officials said the levels were high enough to require cleanup.

Orange County Fire battalion chief Mike Summers noted the need to clean up the youth center "ASAP" in a Nov. 22 activity log, the day before Thanksgiving: "Per TUSD [Tustin Unified School District], they are passing out turkeys out [sic] tomorrow."

Elevated levels of asbestos were also found in dust in the restroom of the Magnolia Tree Park, about a mile northeast of the hangar site, according to emails between city officials and Envirocheck employees.

In a statement to LAist, a spokesperson for the O.C. Health Care Agency wrote that the environmental team guiding the hangar fire response had reviewed these and other results and determined that indoor testing was "not necessary," as stated in Chinsio-Kwong's letter to Tustin officials. The environmental team included representatives from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Navy, and the emergency response contractors hired by the city to oversee the hangar Incident.

How to make sense of asbestos exposure risks

So is there a problem, or isn’t there? It depends upon who you ask.

Asbestos is polarizing, said Frank Ehrenfeld , an asbestos expert who worked on the response to the World Trade Center building collapses and, recently, the East Palestine train derailment . He said it's not unusual to have differing opinions, like in Tustin, over the risks to people's health.

"Some people think you can sprinkle asbestos on your breakfast, others think we don't regulate enough," Ehrenfeld said.

Asbestos is also scary. That's in part, Ehrenfeld said, because asbestos fibers in the air — where they could be inhaled — are generally not visible. Plus, diseases like asbestosis , a chronic lung disease caused by inhaling asbestos fibers, and mesothelioma , a type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, usually don't show up until many years after exposure.

"We used to joke about the A word, it's like Voldemort. … People hear that word, you think of the worst," he said.

It's difficult to pin down the risk associated with the kind of asbestos exposure likely experienced by residents living near the Tustin hangar fire.

On the one hand, the hangar was huge — covering an area larger than five football fields — and asbestos was used extensively throughout the building, according to the Navy and other public documents. But the size of the asbestos release pales in comparison to the hundreds of tons of asbestos that were discharged into the atmosphere when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City.

Asbestos is also naturally occurring — it's a major component of serpentine, California's state rock , which is widespread throughout the state. And for decades, it was widely used in construction, which meant that "millions of American workers have been exposed to asbestos," according to the National Cancer Institute.

"There is hardly a soul that hasn't been exposed to asbestos at some point," said Tom Laubenthal , an expert in asbestos and lead detection and regulatory compliance.

And yet, asbestos is now highly regulated to minimize exposure — the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration allows workers to be exposed to no more than one asbestos fiber per cubic centimeter over a 30-minute period.

The EPA recently finalized a ban on ongoing uses of asbestos.

But there are no official hazard thresholds for asbestos in dust or ash, a fact that has made it difficult for the public to assess the public health risks from the hangar fire fallout.

The condo association where Storm and Clay-Monaghan live paid for an extensive cleaning operation of the exterior of their buildings, which took place in recent months. But that doesn't necessarily mean the condo residents' health was at risk, Ehrenfeld said. "There are actuaries at insurance companies who might say, 'Hey, it's better to clean than be sued,'" he said.

The distress of 'toxic uncertainty'

Camila Alvarez, a sociology professor at the University of California San Diego, has a name for the confusion among Tustin residents over the level of toxicity in their environment and the associated health risks: "toxic uncertainty." (The concept was coined in a 2008 book by sociologist Javier Auyero and anthropologist Debora Alejandra Swistun.)

"You have everybody sort of saying different things and measuring different stuff," Alvarez said. "It adds to the confusion and it makes it hard to act. … because there isn't a dominant narrative."

Even public officials have seemed to waver about the consequences of the fire. Lumbard, Tustin’s mayor, told LAist that residents' concerns about the toxicity of the fallout are "real and warranted." But, he added, "based on the feedback that we got from the environmental agencies, I don't think that risk was as high as some thought."

For many nearby residents, life has moved on. On a recent afternoon, the pickleball courts were packed at Veterans Sports Park, which sits directly across a barren dirt field from the torched hangar.

For others, normal routines have been paralyzed since the fire started.

Elizabeth Sigel was living in a cluster of senior apartments known as Coventry Court, about a half mile from the hangar, when it caught fire. She found out from news reports in subsequent days that the small pieces of fire debris littered across her balcony could contain asbestos.

She told LAist she hadn't opened her windows or stepped out on her balcony since the fire. For months, she wore an N-95 mask and covered her hair anytime she stepped out of her apartment. And rather than going for daily walks in the neighborhood, like she did before the fire, she drove to Old Town Tustin, three miles away, to walk, she said.

"I'm terrified," she told LAist, her voice tremulous, "terrified by all of this."

It was enough to make her move out. She's now living in Texas.

"I'm not going to spend the next five years of my life wearing a hood and a mask," she said.

What's next: Hangar demo and lawsuits

Storm, the Columbus Square resident, said the whole experience — the fire, navigating the cleanup, wondering if it's safe — has been "overwhelming and exhausting."

He said the total cost to clean and remediate his home of toxins, including throwing away porous items like drapes, which can't be fully cleaned, came to a little over $48,000. His insurance covered it, he said. Other residents told LAist they've had to foot the bill themselves.

While the crews hired to clean up neighborhoods are mostly done with their work, debris from the hangar fire and what remains of the burnt-out hangar itself still sit on the Navy property next door. It will be removed as part of the Navy's recent plan to dismantle and clean up the hangar.

The plan also includes sampling of remaining hangar materials to identify contaminants, according to the Navy's website for the former military base. Dust suppression and air quality monitoring will take place throughout the cleanup, which is expected to take up to 12 months.

Legal action over the fire and the toxic fallout are likely. Jonny Hornberger, a lawyer with Callahan & Blaine, said his firm had filed two class action claims and individual damages claims on behalf of clients whose health and home values were allegedly affected by the fire. The claims were filed with the Navy, the state of California, Orange County, and the city of Tustin, he said.

The Tustin City Council will discuss one case of anticipated litigation related to the hangar fire at its upcoming Tuesday meeting, according to the agenda .

The fire has also sparked efforts to oust local leadership: In March, Clay-Monaghan officially declared her intention to run for city council. She told LAist the way the city has handled the cleanup pushed her to run. In the future, she said, "let's be proactive instead of reactive."

Ogunseitan, the UC Irvine public health professor, said it's become "increasingly clear" that many places aren't prepared for potential disasters. He said given the known vulnerability of the massive, wooden hangar in Tustin, planning for a potential fire would've made sense, including how and where to sample for toxic fallout. He hopes the authorities involved in the Tustin fire response and other communities will learn from the mistakes.

"If it's not planned ahead of time, you will have gaps," he said.