Wildfire Smoke, Ash and Soot Cleanup

The homes that burned get the coverage. The homes that stayed standing get the argument. After the January 2025 fires, roughly one thousand seventy three structures in the Eaton footprint and about one thousand in the Palisades were damaged rather than destroyed, and those are the properties where smoke, ash and soot are the entire loss. More than thirteen thousand of the roughly forty thousand claims from those fires involve smoke damage, and a large share of them are still unresolved.

Wildfire residue is not the same material as residue from a house fire and it does not behave the same way. A structure fire burns the contents of one building. A wildfire burns whole neighborhoods, which means the ash settling inside a standing house downwind carries what those buildings were made of. Los Angeles County public health guidance for returning residents flags wildfire ash as potentially containing asbestos, arsenic and lead. That is why the first move is testing rather than cleaning.

Ash also travels differently. It arrives as fine particulate through every gap in the envelope, so it ends up in the attic insulation, inside the ductwork, on top of the ceiling fan blades, in the linen closet, and inside the drawers. Surface cleaning the visible rooms and calling it finished is why so many of these houses still smell six months later. The residue causing the odor is usually the residue nobody could see.

Cleaning happens under filtration and containment. HEPA air scrubbing runs throughout, HEPA vacuuming lifts settled particulate before any wet method touches a surface, and the work moves from the top of the room down so nothing already cleaned gets recontaminated. Where the ductwork is affected, that has to be addressed or the system will redistribute the problem every time it runs.

There is now a written standard for this work. The first edition of ANSI/IICRC S700, published in 2025, is the fire and smoke restoration standard, and it explicitly addresses large-scale wildfire events and testing protocols for lead and asbestos. Our technicians hold the IICRC fire and smoke restoration and odor control certifications, which map onto that standard. It also means there is something objective to point at when a scope gets questioned.

The claim side of this has been genuinely contested and it is worth understanding before you file. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled the California FAIR Plan smoke damage policy illegal, the policy that required damage to be visible to the unaided eye or detectable by the unaided nose and excluded laboratory testing. The state insurance commissioner opened a market conduct examination after more than two hundred consumer complaints. Los Angeles County sued a major carrier over smoke claim handling in September 2026. Two bills sitting with the Governor as of September 2026 would set detection and remediation standards and create a presumption that smoke, ash and soot found in a home inside a fire perimeter came from that fire. Our explainer on the Smoke Damage Recovery Act covers what those bills actually do.

What that means practically is that documentation decides smoke claims. Photograph everything before you touch it. Keep the receipts for anything you have already spent. Do not clean, discard, or air out the property before it has been assessed, because the condition of the house is the evidence. If you have already cleaned, say so and document what you did.

If you are documenting a smoke claim yourself, several things are worth doing before anyone arrives. Photograph each room wide, then close on any visible deposit, on window sills, on the tops of door frames, and inside a closet. Photograph the air filter, because a loaded filter is dated evidence. Write down when you first returned and what you smelled. Keep every receipt, including hotel nights, air purifiers, and cleaning supplies you bought yourself. Note any health symptom and when it started. None of that replaces a professional assessment, and all of it strengthens one.

Ash outside the house matters too. Deposits on the roof, in the gutters, on patio surfaces, and in the pool get tracked back inside on shoes and pulled in through the envelope every time the wind comes up, which is why an interior cleaning that ignores the exterior tends to need a second visit.

Our part is our own scope of work. We assess the property, document conditions with photographs and readings, write the scope for the cleaning we would perform, and can bill your carrier directly for our services. We are not your adjuster and we do not interpret your policy, and the insurance page says exactly where that boundary sits.

Testing comes before disturbance in any building where regulated material is a possibility, and in pre-1978 Los Angeles housing that is most of them. If asbestos or lead is identified, we contain the area and coordinate a specialist abatement firm that holds the required state certifications. We do not perform abatement, and any company telling you otherwise without those certifications is worth checking on.

We dispatch from Sylmar, which has its own fire history. The 2008 Sayre Fire burned more than eleven thousand acres and destroyed over six hundred structures, most of them in a single mobile home park, and the burn scar above the foothills is still the reason debris flow follows heavy rain in this part of the Valley. Wildfire work reaches further than our normal water damage radius because the demand does, and we work in English and Spanish.