At a packed public meeting in the basketball gym at Santa Rosa High School on Saturday, some residents said they worried that the cleanup could go on for years and asked state officials if they could proceed on their own. The answer they got was a qualified yes. An approved contractor can be hired, if one is available. Otherwise the cleanup should be free in most cases, residents were told, paid for with taxpayer money or private insurance if a homeowner has a debris-removal clause in the insurance policy on the house. But state and federal officials said on Monday that many of the details of how this cleanup would work remained unsettled. That is partly because the focus has been on response to the fires and the fatalities, and the 40,000 people still evacuated from their homes, but also because of the complex mix of properties affected on both public and private lands. “There are more questions than answers,” said David Passey, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He said, for example, that FEMA, the federal government’s lead disaster response agency, typically concentrated on public property, not private, unless individual counties declare the private properties a public health and safety risk. Counties and cities can also take the lead on cleanup, he said, and that too has not been fully sorted out. “We don’t know yet which of those solutions, or mixture of those solutions, the cities and counties will choose,” Mr. Passey said. Mark Oldfield, a spokesman for the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, which administers state-managed waste handling and recycling programs, said a typical situation for cleanup would include a kind of triage, with the most hazardous materials as a site handled first, typically by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. That agency would evaluate and remove hazardous debris, which can range from asbestos siding or pipe insulation to paints, batteries, flammable liquids and electronic waste like computers and monitors.
Dr. Karen Anderson has heard reports of people digging into the rubble of their burned homes in recent years without gloves , wearing only shorts and T - shirts , looking for sentimental items that might have survived California ’s horrific wildfires . And as the chief public health officer in Napa County , one of the hardest - hit places , she has used her office as a bully pulpit to get them to stop , immediately .