For One Displaced Professor, Fire Research Is “Cathartic”

For one California Institute of Technology professor, sifting through ash and soot sparked flickers of relief in the wake of devastating wildfires earlier this year.

François Tissot, one of thousands of southern California residents who lost their homes in January, used his background as a geochemist to investigate the lingering health risks associated with the toxic chemicals unleashed by the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Tissot and his team’s work ended up informing post-fire public health guidance.

The research has gave him some reprieve from the logistical and emotional toll of losing his home to the fires, which simultaneously destroyed 13,000 homes and killed at least 30 people across southern California.

“It felt very cathartic,” he said. “It gave me and my research group something actionable to do in relation to the disaster, so we weren’t just passively waiting for things to unfold.”

Aside from that, he’s spent the last year focused on trying to rebuild his family’s life—and leaned on his institution in the process.

Tissot is far from the only person who turned to their university for help navigating the fire’s aftermath. Colleges and universities across the Los Angeles area launched relief funds and other efforts to help displaced faculty, students and staff.

“There hasn’t been a ton of time to stop and think about what [the loss] feels like: There’s just so much that needs to be dealt with related to the insurance company,” said Tissot, who’s still living in the apartment Caltech secured for his family after the fire. “I’ve had to manage that, the mental health of my wife and two daughters, and also make sure the research gets done in my group.”

In addition to securing housing, Caltech provided mental health resources and offered other support to the hundreds of students and employees affected by the fire. The university also put out a call to professors: If they wanted to conduct research that would be useful for the community, Caltech would find a way to pay for it.

Tissot and his team took Caltech up on that offer.

“We started investigating the risks that such a fire causes to human health and the surrounding population,” he said. “We were very surprised to find that there was almost no literature on urban fires of that magnitude.”

Those research gaps left area residents unsure about their safety in the aftermath of the fire: Was it safe to send their kids to school? Go outside at all? How should they protect themselves from fire-related pollution?

Support from the university, which has since raised some $250,000 for the newly created Eaton Fire Research Fund, allowed Tissot and his colleagues to answer those questions at scale. They immediately began collecting and analyzing more than 300 fire-related debris samples from more than 50 homes.

“We found a lot of heavy metals—lead, cadmium, arsenic—that had been released, transported and deposited in standing homes well beyond the burn scar,” he said. “My group is now very actively working on trying to quantify and understand how much of a risk that poses to human health, what needs to be done, and how insurance policies and guidelines should address such situations.”

For Tissot, the research is especially personal. Those toxic chemicals made him one of at least 300 Caltech employees—including 180 at the university’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge—who lost their homes to the fire.

High winds pushed him, his wife and two daughters, then 5 and 8, to evacuate their three-bedroom home the night before the Eaton Fire broke out Jan. 7. They grabbed a few changes of clothes, some undigitized family photographs and spent the next few weeks in temporary housing, wondering what had become of their home.

When they finally went back at the end of January, their home was one of the few in their neighborhood that was still standing.

California Institute of Technology

“Our house wasn’t lost to the flames, but it was lost to the fire,” he said. “From the outside, the house looks OK. But inside it’s completely covered with char, soot, dust and burn residue. I took some samples and ran them in my lab and the house is filled with arsenic, lead and asbestos. It’s completely contaminated.”

But he’s still trying to convince his insurance company that it’s too dangerous to move back in without rebuilding most of the house.

“As happy as I am that our house didn’t burn—it spared my kids from additional trauma—from a practical perspective, it makes everything much harder,” Tissot said. “We’re still just going through the motions of doing the tests that the insurance wants us to do. It’s taking so much time to get to the final point, which we know will involve at least removing the walls and rebuilding or demolishing and rebuilding. But it’s been almost a year since the fire and they still haven’t approved it. Our timeline is completely dependent on how long they can drag this out.”

‘It’s Not Home’

In the meantime, he and his family are planning to stay at the apartment Caltech secured for them soon after they evacuated.

“The university’s response [to finding housing for us] was so fast,” Tissot said. “It was an immense weight off our shoulders. … I’ve seen all of my neighbors struggle to find a place to stay, moving every 10 weeks because rents keep rising. I didn’t have to deal with any of that.”

Caltech in Pasadena, which is near the epicenter of Eaton Fire and one of the most hard-hit university communities, has provided hundreds of displaced workers with temporary housing and rental assistance, and also launched a fire relief fund. As of the latest tally, more than 4,325 donors have contributed $5.2 million to the Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund, and some 1,700 people have received grants of up to $10,000 each to help pay for housing, property and home repairs, child and elder care, cleaning smoke-damaged belongings, and other unanticipated expenses.

But university officials also understand that there’s so much that money can’t replace, and it’s offering ongoing counseling services and events to help disaster victims process their grief.

“At this time of year, maybe it’s about those special Christmas ornaments that have been passed down through generations,” said Julia McCallin, associate vice president of human resources at Caltech, who was temporarily displaced by the fires but has since returned home. “You can’t replace those of course, but it’s about building new traditions and recognizing how your life has changed.”

Access to mental health support has been crucial for Tissot’s family, especially his daughters, who he said were devastated and confused after losing the only home they’d ever known.

“For the first nine months of living in the apartment, they would correct us anytime my wife and I called it home. They’d say, ‘It’s not home. I hate it here. I don’t want to be here. I want to be in my room,’” Tissot said. “Only very recently have they started to say ‘my room’ when talking about the apartment. They say, ‘I like it here. I’ll miss it when we have to leave.’”