 Thanks for joining us. I'm Brian May in the Cal OES newsroom, and I'm joined by Sean Smith who is the statewide debris coordinator for Cal OES We're talking a lot about the debris removal. That's the next big phase that we need to talk about So I just want to ask you some of the questions that we're getting I know you're hearing a lot and we can kind of talk about the first one really is When and where are you deciding to start this debris removal process? Okay? So as the debris removal process progresses what we're doing is we're identifying sensitive facilities. I'll call them that schools hospitals daycares Care facilities things that that we wouldn't want burned ash anywhere near right? So we're looking at those and we're going to identify those first as we identify those those will be the areas Which the teams will start doing the debris removal in we're also going to be looking at in the environment We're gonna be looking at waterways streams creeks. If there's any burn structures that are directly threatening those those creeks rivers and streams Those will be also prioritized But first focus is life and safety. So we're gonna be looking at those Those sensitive facilities first and as far as when I know there's more than one phase to this We've already kind of begun part of the process. But can you talk about that? Absolutely? So it's a two-phase process. It's it's the first phase is what we call our household hazardous waste sweeps That's where the teams are going in and they're removing things like propane tanks paint cans pesticides herbicides Things they can physically see on the surface. They're going in and removing those bulk asbestos Those teams will go in a phase two will come right behind them as phase two progresses The debris teams will go in and remove that debris that debris then will be Trucked to an appropriate landfill and then we'll scrape that property down and test that soil to make sure the soil on that property is cleaned My next question was what physically are you doing and that's kind of the process is removing everything that could possibly be there Absolutely, if there's any burn material any burn structure any ash anything like that is going to be removed off that property We will take it out. It will stay Very wet So it doesn't contaminate anything while we're trucking it right and we'll go to a designated landfill for that material One of the big questions that we're hearing a lot is how is this going to work with my insurance and who's paying for this? Okay, so If a homeowner has insurance and they have a dedicated portion of their insurance for debris removal That portion of the of the insurance proceeds will need to come back to the program That's what we describe as a duplication of benefits. Basically the insurance company is paying folks For work that we're going to do for right now We know that that debris clearance costs more than what their insurance proceeds or what their insurance gives them for debris So at that point there's no there's no other expense to the homeowner Accept what their insurance has given them for debris the rest the rest of the cost or any cost to any Uninsured or underinsured facilities or burn homes will be funded both by the federal government and by the state government Just to be clear. I get $10,000 from my insurance for debris removal. It cost you 40 000 to clean my property You're not coming after me for that or the 30. That's what you're saying No, that other 30 will be covered by the federal and the state Just out of the insurance that you're good. All right So we talked about kind of what you're testing for talk about the process You want the the ground to be returned to the property owners as clean as it was before the fire happened That's a long process. Can you just describe that a little bit? Yes So the big thing is once we get the the structural debris and ash cleared We have to scrape off about six inches of dirt now That's on the average on a property some some more some less right but about six inches after we scrape that six inches We're going to test that soil on that property. We're going to test To make sure that there's nothing in that dirt that shouldn't be there And what we do is we set a standard outside of the fire area outside of the burn structures We test the soil outside of those structures to see what is supposed to be in that soil The example as we talked about earlier is some areas may have naturally occurring asbestos They may have naturally occurring other other items like arsenic So we know that that's supposed to be there But but we want to make sure that we cleaned anything that was left over from the structural debris Because even within one county one part of the county may be completely different soil structure than the other That's what you're saying. Absolutely. We use Napa County for example We have the tubs fire on the west side of the county right nuns fire in the center of the county and the atlas fire on the east side All three of those have different geological Formations and right so each one of those will have a different soil composition So there'll be each one of them will have a separate cleanup standard This is the cleanup effort is unprecedented. We've never had numbers like this in the state of california. It was 8,700 structures burned What's the time frame for you handing clean properties back to homeowners? Okay, the our final cleanup to get it all done is early 2018 However properties will be completed sooner as we start a property each parcel It's about a 30 day from start of that parcel to the end of that parcel the cleaning We will have hundreds of crews So there'll be hundreds of properties released back to the homeowners and batches Throughout the whole process over the course of all the counties You talk about hundreds of crews if you live in one of the burned areas Just be aware. There's going to be a lot of trucks moving in and out of the areas, correct There's going to be a huge amount of traffic. I mean we we we're going to work on our traffic routes We're going to post them everybody's going to know whether whether trucks are going to be going One of the things we would always ask folks to do is hey if you don't need to be on that road That we're going to be running those trucks on please stay off of it because it's going to be very congested The trucks are going to be going to multiple locations. They're going to be leaving that that that central location of the fire However, they're going to disperse out to different landfills So there will be a large amount of heavy equipment traffic coming out So we just ask people to please be safe watch for the heavy equipment and give them their room Sean, thanks for joining us. I know you have a lot of work to do. Thanks for watching. Thank you