The day before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completed its part in debris cleanup for the Eaton and Palisades wildfires, Tara Fitzgerald stood at the Altadena Golf Course staging area, answering questions. She’s answered countless the 40-some days she’s been the EPA’s incident commander to the disaster.
Since arriving days after the two wildfires decimated a large swath of Southern California, Fitzgerald, 44, has done everything from leading more than 1,600 personnel in the cleanup in four staging areas to meeting local leaders and fielding criticism and questions at community town halls.
There was no trade off of speed over safety in the EPA cleanup, she said.
“There’s a much bigger risk in these materials staying in the burn zone and being at risk to people coming back home and being in the open environment,” Fitzgerald said.
That said, the agency has an excellent track record in responding to a disaster, and there may be a misconception that this is novel, when it is standard practice, said EPA spokesperson Julia Giarmoleo.
This assignment is certainly bigger in scale and tighter in deadline than any others Fitzgerald has led in her almost seven years with the EPA.
“The scope and the number of personnel we had here, we had 1,600 at one point and over 100 teams working on the field in a daily basis, the speed with which we did it, even the number of staging areas, that’s the biggest scale we’ve done for wildfire response in the U.S.,” Fitzgerald said.
Unprecedented range aside, the mission was always to protect human health and the environment.
“That’s our only mission statement,” Fitzgerald said. Post-cleanup, “we’re going to leave the place as we found it or better. We’re going to collect the samples we did promise to collect and be able to discuss those results and show we did not impact the properties.”
Fitzgerald has honed a helpful response to others’ struggles.
“I mostly just try to listen,” she said. “People will want to talk to you about it. They’re going to have their own story. When you listen to people, they open up and have the time to express their grief. We came so early, there was still a lot of shock and to some extent, anger, of how it could happen. It’s hard to hear that and all you can do is try to do your part to help. That’s basically what you focus on.”
When community meetings from both fires devolved into anger or criticism, Fitzgerald reminded staff that the EPA’s mission is twofold: protecting the community and the environment.
“She’s really led and made sure the EPA is doing the right thing,” said Liv Trombadore, incident operations section chief for the agency.
“It makes sense that you would panic first because all of a sudden your entire life has changed, whether it be because you lost your home or all of a sudden the government’s moving in and doing something like this,” she added. “It’s a big deal and we don’t take those concerns lightly.”
Trombadore, who has known Fitzgerald for six years, admires her stoic leadership and resolve to keep at the job.
“I’ve always seen Tara as a bit of a mentor, she’s taught me a lot on how to do this job,” Trombadore said. “Her ability to keep showing up and doing the right thing every day, continuing to listen, continuing to go to the community meetings, to be responsive and then provide to all of us at the EPA a clarity of vision and clarity of purpose so that we can execute the mission, she’s really impressive.”
Born in Lakewood, Fitzgerald grew up in Van Nuys and Long Beach before moving up north for college. A graduate of UC Berkeley who majored in chemistry, Fitzgerald later earned a master’s degree in environmental management from the University of San Francisco.
She taught middle school for a year then worked as a chemist and project scientist before accepting a job with the EPA in 2018.
“I really wanted to do more work outside the lab helping with the environment,” she said.
During her first year as an on-scene coordinator, with a record fire season sparking more than 7,500 fires which burned more than 1.6 billion acres, Fitzgerald mobilized the EPA response for the Tubbs, Mendocino, Lake County, Woolsey and Camp fires.
In 2024, Fitzgerald won the “Oscars” of public service with colleagues Steve Calanog and Pete Guria. The three were awarded the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal for their leadership directing more than 300 EPA personnel in removing tons of hazardous materials from the Maui wildfires “while respecting local cultural norms and setting standards for federal response teams that followed.”
Innovations they pioneered in Maui included a streamlined process to de-energize and transport lithium ion batteries used in electric and hybrid vehicles, charging stations, and solar power systems. It’s a system they modified for the Eaton and Palisades burn areas, with crews collecting a record number of batteries from the 13,612 residential properties and 305 commercial properties in both sites.
Cesar A. Garcia, mayor of Duarte, admits he didn’t have the most congenial introduction to Fitzgerald in January. Finding out from media reports that the EPA was going to use nearby Lario Park as a staging area to collect household hazardous waste from the burn areas wasn’t ideal.
“She took responsibility for that,” Garcia said. Since then, he has found Fitzgerald knowledgeable and, most importantly, accessible.
“She wanted to answer questions and it shows she has a passion for her craft, and she was able to answer my questions. She heard me out, which speaks to her leadership,” he added, noting a smaller meeting after contentious community town halls allowed for more productive conversations. “Kudos to Tara and the EPA for working so fast and thanks to the residents for being on top of this.”
Fitzgerald said she is taking away better ways to communicate with the public, such as leaning more to one-on-ones with residents and community leaders, opening a hotline people can call and battling misinformation on social media.
She’s also learned new ways to be more efficient, considering the 30-day deadline the EPA was given by President Donald Trump. Staff from the agency’s 10 regions signed up to deploy to the area, bringing years of expertise from other emergencies.
“That was really inspiring to me, that we asked and they came,” she said.
She may have to ask more often, as wildfires have increasingly impacted dense residential areas in the region since 2015.
“It’s worth remembering New Mexico recently started having EPA involvement because of wildfires, and we were in Oregon in 2020, so it’s happening in other parts of the country outside of this state,” Fitzgerald said.
Based in San Francisco, she does have a day job which includes reporting to oil spills, mercury spills and tanker trunk rollovers, among other emergencies. A project she is working on involves stopping oil from a railyard going into the Sacramento River.
“We find a lot of meaning in making things better,” Fitzgerald said. “This is a bigger scale in helping the community recover and keeping this stuff out of the environment and I find a lot of meaning in that.”
As she prepares to transition her team to hand off to phase two of the cleanup to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fitzgerald said she can offer one lesson learned amid the flames.
“I’m really hopeful is we don’t have to keep relearning this lesson, we can keep the wildfires from impacting such large amount of residents and really understand how it works, taking the lessons learned from all this so that it doesn’t happen in the first place. That’s where it’s going to really be key for the changing environment we live in.”