Shortly after the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out in Los Angeles Jan. 7, 2025, engineers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering mobilized across burn zones to support recovery efforts and implement immediate mitigation strategies, including field reconnaissance, soil and water testing and infrastructure mapping.
Shortly after the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out in Los Angeles Jan. 7, 2025, engineers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering mobilized across burn zones to support recovery efforts and implement immediate mitigation strategies, including field reconnaissance, soil and water testing and infrastructure mapping. Some of those initial efforts have expanded into work focused on understanding the fires’ lasting effects and improving preparedness and response to future disasters.
The following is an update on some of these efforts:
Soil Testing: Civil and environmental engineering associate professor Sanjay Mohanty has been testing soils through the Community Action Project Los Angeles, or CAP.LA. As of late December, his students and collaborators had collected and tested samples from more than 1,000 Los Angeles residential properties impacted by the fires, analyzing them for toxic metals including lead, arsenic and hexavalent chromium.
Read more at: University of California Los Angeles
Civil and environmental engineering master’s student Lexy Flores and undergraduate researcher Vasalisa Kellogg collect soil samples in June 2025 from a property in Altadena for laboratory testing and analysis. (Photo Credit: Nouh Sepulveda)
