The County's Free Soil Test Stops Taking Samples on August 14

Free lead testing for the Eaton and Palisades burn areas hands off to USC on August 15. Before it does: whether you need a test at all, what the county already found in the dirt, and what your number will actually mean.

If you have been meaning to get your yard tested and haven't, the calendar just got short. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health will stop accepting samples for its free post-fire soil lead testing program after Friday, August 14, and the program transitions to USC's CLEAN project on August 15, according to the county's own program page. Free testing is not ending. What ends is the county's drop-off table, and that is the part with a date on it.

The county page says Public Health has worked with USC since the program began, that both use a similar approach to soil lead testing, and that a coordinated transition plan is meant to keep access seamless. That is the reassuring version. The practical version is that if a labeled bag of dirt is sitting in your garage right now, this is the week it has somewhere to go.

What the county program is, and how a sample moves through it

Up to $3 million from the county's Lead Paint Hazard Mitigation Program funds free soil lead testing for residents living within and downwind of the Eaton and Palisades burn areas. You collect the sample yourself, following the county's posted sampling procedure. You print and complete the county's submission form and include it with the sample. You drop it off. A certified laboratory emails your results in seven to 10 business days, and the county publishes separate guidance on reading them.

Eaton-area samples go to the Public Health table at the One Stop Permit Center, 464 W. Woodbury Road, Suite 210, Altadena, open weekdays 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Palisades-area samples go to the Palisades Recovery Coalition, 15233 La Cruz Drive, weekdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an outside drop container the county says can be used any time. We checked both sets of hours against the county page on August 7.

You're wondering whether your address qualifies, because the county's map draws squares and your street may fall between two of them. The county's answer is on the same page: samples from properties inside the burn scar, downwind of it, and just outside it can be submitted even if the property doesn't land inside a highlighted square.

Six questions that decide whether you need a test at all

Not every household does, and a test you don't need is a month of worry you didn't have to buy. The questions below come from the recommendations a group of local scientists assembled after the fires — the CONSORTIUM soil remediation guide, written by lead author Dr. Danielle Stevenson with the group's soil remediation working group — and from the county's own findings.

One: did your house burn? Then test. The guide's position is blunt on this point: soil testing is the only way to know whether remediation is necessary at all. Everything downstream — cost, method, whether you do anything — depends on a number you do not currently have.

Two: did ash reach your property during the fires? Then test. Sujeet Rao, health and well-being practice director at USC's Public Exchange, described the guide's logic to LAist as a way to help fire-affected families navigate exactly this question. Ash on your side of the fence is the trigger; the fire's official boundary is not.

Three: was there no ash on your property, and no burned homes near you? Then testing is likely unnecessary, per the same guidance. This is the question most people skip, and it is the one that saves the most households a step.

Four: does a child under 6 or a pregnant person live at the address? Then test, even if questions two and three came back reassuring. The guide singles out those households, and the county's remediation money follows the same priority.

Five: how old were the burned houses near you? This is the one nobody thinks to ask. The county's final report attributes the lead it found to burning houses that carried lead-based paint, which it notes was common before 1979, and cites USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate finding that more than 70% of houses in the Eaton Fire Region were built before that year. Older neighborhood upwind of you, more reason to test.

Six: have you already tested — once, from one spot? Then consider testing again, in more places. USC's CLEAN project reported in August that lead levels vary sharply inside a single property. "Lead levels can vary substantially even within a single yard," principal investigator Josh West said in the project's summary of its findings. The CONSORTIUM guide's own sampling advice for residential lots under 3,500 square feet is at least three composite samples from each area of concern — the vegetable bed and the side yard are different questions.

One limit worth knowing before you pack a bag: the county program screens for lead. The guide's fuller recommendation is a panel — CAM 17 heavy metals, lithium, hexavalent chromium and PAHs, the last being polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the combustion byproducts that come with anything burning. A private lab will run that panel; a free lead screen will not.

What your number will actually mean

Two numbers get quoted in this conversation and they are not the same kind of number. California's Department of Toxic Substances Control uses a residential screening level for lead of 80 milligrams per kilogram, which is what the county compared its samples against. The U.S. EPA's figure is 200 parts per million — lowered from 400 in January 2024 guidance that also recommends 100 ppm where another lead source is identified, such as lead water service lines or lead-based paint.

Here is the part that gets flattened in the retelling: the EPA number governs how the agency's regions evaluate federal Superfund and RCRA corrective-action cleanups. It is a screening tool for deciding what needs further evaluation, not a cleanup standard anyone can enforce on a private yard. California's 80 is the stricter of the two, and the stricter number is the one your county results were read against.

Neither number is a verdict. A screening level is a threshold for looking harder, and the county said so itself: because Los Angeles soil has many potential lead sources, it noted, further assessment may be needed to sort fire lead from the lead that was already there. Set against that, CONSORTIUM's screening-limits table states the harder fact plainly — for children and pregnant people, no level of lead is considered safe, and asbestos has no safe threshold at all.

What the county already found

The final findings, released September 12, 2025, are the baseline your own result will sit next to. Roux Associates sampled for the county between February 18 and March 26, 2025, testing soil and ash for heavy metals, PAHs and dioxins and furans across sampling grids in both fire regions.

In the Eaton Fire Region, 23 of the 70 sampling grids contained intact homes. Ten of those 23 averaged above the 80 mg/kg lead screening level, ranging from 80.2 to 167 mg/kg — houses that never burned, downwind of houses that did. The county called the pattern consistent with elevated lead measured in air samples in the days right after the fire. The Palisades Fire Region produced no large-scale fire-related soil impacts, including for lead; testing there found two isolated areas above screening thresholds, cadmium and thallium in one and arsenic and PAHs in the other, and the county said their source, and whether the fire caused them, is unknown.

USC's CLEAN project has since tested more than 6,000 soil samples countywide, alongside more than 900 seawater samples, and reported in August that it found no countywide post-fire contamination signal for arsenic, mercury or hexavalent chromium. Lead is the contaminant that keeps showing up, and older housing keeps complicating the question of where it came from.

If the number comes back high

Public money for the cleanup itself now exists, and it is not available yet. The Board of Supervisors approved the Altadena Soil Remediation Program on July 21, 2026 — $3 million total, $1 million from Supervisor Kathryn Barger's Fifth District and $2 million from the 2025-26 state budget, administered by the Los Angeles County Development Authority with CONSORTIUM, CAP.LA, USC CLEAN and the LA Fire HEALTH Study among its partners. It prioritizes households with standing homes where pregnant people or children under 6 live, and it is expected to launch this fall. "Families whose homes survived the Eaton Fire have faced obstacle after obstacle," Barger said in the county's announcement. Enrollment instructions had not been published as of August 7; if your result is high and you fit the priority group, the useful move this month is a documented test result, ready for a program that opens later.

Paying for it privately is the other path, and the guide prices four methods. Excavating and hauling the soil away runs up to $50,000 or higher, takes days to weeks, needs no maintenance afterward and carries the guide's highest confidence rating. Capping — sealing the contaminated soil in place under a clean barrier layer — runs roughly $10,000 to $100,000 per site and needs annual inspections. Immobilization, which binds metals in place chemically, runs roughly $10,000 to $50,000 but is rated high-maintenance and low-to-moderate confidence. Bioremediation runs in the same range and takes weeks to years; the guide rates it high confidence for PAHs and moderate for metals. Note what that table is really saying: the cheapest options are the ones you have to keep maintaining.

Two things cost nothing while you wait. The exposure advice in the guide is the unglamorous kind — take shoes off at the door, wet-mop rather than sweep, wash hands after yard work. And blood lead testing is separately free: the county page directs residents to ask their medical provider, which most insurance including Medi-Cal covers, or to call 1-800-LA-4-LEAD for a no-cost appointment through Quest Labs. Soil is the question; blood is the answer that matters.

Why this is your errand in the first place

Federal debris crews cleared destroyed properties and scraped six inches of soil from the ash footprint, per the county's description of the Army Corps' scope, and did not test what was left underneath as part of that work. As CalMatters reported, no federal or California rule requires post-fire soil testing, and FEMA departed from its earlier practice of routine post-fire soil sampling — which is why a county department, a university and a volunteer consortium ended up splitting a job that used to arrive with the cleanup.

The federal government did eventually go back and look. In a May 19, 2026 release, the EPA reported sampling 100 randomly selected Eaton Fire properties that the Army Corps had already cleared, taking 4,200 soil borings, and found lead to be the only fire-related contaminant of concern: 98% of properties met the federal subsurface lead screening level and 95% met it at the surface, with median lead of 31 mg/kg in the top inch and 21 mg/kg at six to seven inches.

Read those two findings together before you decide anything, because they are not in conflict. The EPA looked at lots the federal cleanup had scraped, and graded them against the federal 200 mg/kg screening level. The county looked at intact homes downwind — properties no cleanup crew ever visited — and graded them against California's 80. A yard can pass one of those tests and fail the other, and the yards most likely to fail are the ones nobody ever came to.

So: you're wondering whether to rush a sample in before Friday or wait for USC. If you have soil in a bag, drop it — the tables are open weekdays through August 14. If you don't, USC CLEAN accepts free self-collected samples now and continues after the handoff, which is the county's own stated reason for making it. Either way the sample takes an afternoon. The waiting is the long part, and it is shorter than the waiting you are doing right now.