Shortly after, the 7 On Your Side investigative team was able to get lead and arsenic testing for three homeowners. The results for one of those homeowners was pretty concerning.
But now that her property has been remediated, how does that soil test now?
How safe is the soil in Palisades and Eaton Fire burn areas? ABC7 tested some samples
It's not easy for Sandy Dennis to see nothing left of the Altadena home she had for 25 years.
Her lot has been scraped clean, but when we first met her in February, the burned and charred remains of her home were still there.
Back then, we collected an 8-inch-deep soil sample from her front garden and took them to a lab at USC.
That original testing showed at the 4-inch-deep mark, there was 276 parts-per-million, or PPM, of lead in Sandy's soil.
The EPA marks anything over 200 PPM as showing potential lead contamination. The California benchmark is 80 PPM.
Now, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has shaved off six inches of soil where her home once stood and we wanted to test again.
Using the same probe we did before, we collected an 8-inch core of soil, and then sliced it into 1-inch chunks.
But this time, we wanted samples from more than one spot in Sandy's lot.
We also collected a 4-inch sample before hitting bedrock from where Sandy's home once stood and where it is clear the corps removed inches of soil.
We also took a third sample from an area of Sandy's yard where the corps didn't appear to remove much soil.
And again, we took the samples to USC where they are put in an X-ray machine that in seconds sent Earth Sciences Professor Seth John lead levels.
In that first sample we took roughly in the same spot we did months ago, Professor John found the highest lead concentration to be in the top inch of soil at 180 PPM.
So still above the California benchmark, but now below the EPA mark and below the previous reading of 276 PPM.
"So it does seem that the lead concentrations have come down quite a bit," said Professor John.
For the results from the second sample, where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers clearly scraped away soil, the lead levels were very low.
At the 3-inch-deep mark, there's only 10 PPM of lead.
Sample three, taken from where it didn't look like the corps removed soil, also had very low levels of lead.
The highest being the 3-inch mark with just 41 PPM.
"This just goes to show how much variability there can be in lead concentrations even on an individual property," said John.
Since we first went into this USC lab, Professor John has tested thousands of samples of soil from across the Altadena and Palisades burn zones.
He's noticed lead levels higher in and around the Altadena burn scar, possibly because there's older homes there with more lead paint.
But in spots he and his students test every month in Altadena, he says lead levels are getting lower, likely because of rain and remediation.
"I think that it shows that we've had a problem," said John. "There was lead released into the environment, but that there really is a possibility to remediate these properties and bring them back to safe levels of lead."
Sandy has put her lot up for sale and has made the tough decision to rebuild her life outside of Southern California.
But even with her land looking nothing like it did when she bought it... it's never easy to leave home.
"I just want to say thank you because a lot of the community, at first, we weren't sure if we were going to get soil testing and I think your story at the beginning - that was one of the things that prompted the other places to do soil testing so I think that has really helped," said Dennis.
When Professor John's lab did first test samples from Sandy's soil back in February, preliminary testing did show possibly concerning levels of arsenic in one of the samples.
But in these new samples, he didn't see anything in the preliminary testing for arsenic that raised concerns.