Photo: Heal the Bay
Los Angeles Public Health Department officials have lifted ocean water advisories for beaches impacted by January’s massive wildfires. The advisory was lifted on Wednesday and posted on the health department’s “Beach Water Quality Advisories” page, where it shares the status of ongoing tests around the county.
While water samples have shown it’s safer to be in the ocean in these areas, however, the department still advises avoiding beaches near properties that had been burned in the Palisades fire that began January 7, 2025, and burned a total of 23,707 acres. Thirteen other fires ravaged the county for weeks, totaling 57,636 acres burned in the region and creating a massive runoff hazard.
“Beachgoers may now enter the ocean water and recreate on the sand in these areas, but they are still advised to avoid fire debris in the water, and to avoid being on beaches on or near burned properties, as the fire debris may contain harmful substances and physical hazards such as glass, metal, and sharp wooden debris,” the Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday.
The news comes with room for skepticism, however. For starters, there was no emergency cleanup effort following the fires. Also, Los Angeles saw its heaviest winter storms just as the fires were finally being fully put out.
“They don’t get in the water, they don’t surf,” says L.A.-based shaper and environmental activist, Ryan Harris, who calls waves like Topanga and Surfrider Beach “Ground Zero” for water hazards. “I don’t think it’s gonna be safe for a while.”
Harris, who lives in the South Bay where no water quality advisories were ever made, has been keeping an eye on conditions at his own local beaches. He only started surfing locally again in the past month, keeping his sessions to once a week, and says he’s already gotten sick twice.
His most glaring sign it hasn’t been safe in the past three months though has been the number of sick and dead animals he’s seen on local beaches. He’s made several trips to the Marine Mammal Center in nearby San Pedro and says they usually treat around 300 animals a year, but they’ve already treated around 200 so far in 2025, he says.
“I’ve been surfing here 25 years. That’s not normal. The algal bloom is getting worse, it’s not getting better, and that was partly sparked by the runoff,” he says.
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Meanwhile, Ashley Oelsen of the California Coastal Alliance shared a message with some bleak findings the same day the county’s health department changed its advisory. The conservation biologist has independently collected more than 100 sand samples from different parts of the Santa Monica Bay, including pre-fire samples and samples following the area’s heavy storms in late winter.
“The results are alarming,” she says. “This is not just pollution, this is an unfolding environmental and public health disaster right before our eyes.”
Oelsen says arsenic levels were far above what’s safe — 80 times the safe screening level, to be exact — during the fires. A month later they had risen to 128.6 times what would be considered safe. She also warns that mercury levels and chromium levels both rose after the fires too.
“These poisons are linked to cancer, neurological damage, and developmental disorders,” she says, warning that they can all be absorbed through the skin by surfers, swimmers, and beachgoers. “Longterm exposure, even at low doses, builds up in the body causing irreversible damage.”
Oelsen compares the damage caused by the fires to the scale of an oil spill. Thus far though, the county hasn’t established or coordinated any kind of official effort to clean up and protect the Santa Monica Bay from further damage.
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