Many people who have lost their homes and all belongings to the LA wildfires are likely overwhelmed by the multitude of tasks demanded of them at a point in time when all they want to do is crawl under a borrowed blanket and cry. I would be. Heck, I am, if under a blanket I own, given that I sit safely at home in PDX while my kids try to navigate the unknown after the Eaton inferno.

How do you find accommodations? Where do you buy a change of clothes, diapers, food? With what do you pay? How do you deal with your employers, how are you even able to work if sitting in cramped quarters or emergency shelters or can’t breathe for the smog? What do you tell your children why they can’t go home, or to school, or see their friends? How do you make it clear to the many well meaning people who inquire, that you have no clue what the immediate, much less far, future will bring?

And, importantly, who do you contact for insurance questions? Do you have even the names and numbers you need?

Here are a few pieces of information that were either handed down to me by people in the know or found on official websites, just my summary from what I gleaned that would be helpful.

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

• For lots of information about getting help after the Eaton (or any) wildfire go here: the non-profit United Policyholders website guides you through various steps towards recovery and also FEMA applications if you are not insured. They have step by step practical and legal information that is extremely helpful.

• The California Department of Insurance (DOI) has a website as well. It gives you instructions on how to approach and deal with your insurer.

Their top ten tips include advice how to obtain a copy of your full policy in the first month (they HAVE to give that to you) and answers to your general questions about rebuilding, loss of personal items, and current living expenses (for which they have to give you an advance.)

They remind you to track all your expenses after the fire ( keep receipts!), and to document all the interactions you have: “Record conversations with your insurer/adjuster about your claim and policy limitations in a dedicated claim diary. If your adjuster says something is excluded, limited, or subject to certain conditions, ask the adjuster to point out the specific provision in your policy being cited.”

And this: Get at least one licensed contractor’s estimate or bid on the cost to rebuild your home just to get a reasonable sense of the actual cost as compared to your coverage limits (for more considerations on contractors, view the CDI’s electronic brochure Don’t Get Scammed After a Disaster and check the California’s Contractors State License Board website.) While your insurance company may provide its own estimate, it may contain errors or fail to reflect local conditions or demand surge. Demand surge reflects price increases following a major disaster when contractors and materials are in short supply. (Will be a huge issue in Altadena, no doubt.)

Many more suggestions can be found on their page, including the possibility that you might want to have a public adjuster assess the damage and help you deal with the insurer, rather than the insurers’ own adjuster who knows who they work for. This is a bit of a dilemma – if you hire your own, you have to pay, often a hefty percentage of the reimbursements you eventually receive. Also you need to find one who you can trust, which can be problematic because there are unfortunately scammers out there, lurking at the borders of disaster.

You can, however, look at your insurer’s conduct record to see if they are pretty reliable or if you should have outside help. Here is a website that lists the 50 most frequent insurance companies and their complaint history (the list is conveniently graded from top (best and most reliable) to bottom (worst) by looking a the ratios of justified complaints to number of complaints, as of 2023.

Here is something else to be aware of: The insurer is required to give you their most recent breakdown of their cost estimate for rebuilding your house. Ask for it! You then have to make sure that the info about your house is actually correct.

“Did they ever check with you? Did they ever give you that breakdown to review before now? The breakdown will have a “quality grade”- usually standard, above average, or custom. Above average is supposed to be for tract housing communities. Any house that was built individually and designed by an architect is supposed to be at least “custom.” This one piece of data alone affects your insurance coverage by at least 30%. If they got it wrong, start digging into it NOW. Was your house built on a slope? Increases the cost about 15%. On a long and remote road? Another 15%.”

So what to expect – and bring to – the first interaction with the adjuster?

• Contact info and description of current stay (friends, airbnb, shelter etc)
• Basics of the lost property: estimated square footage, type of construction.
• Try and have a list of all the property you remember in each room ( Oregon folks, for earthquake or fire PREP, it helps to video tape each room slowly with a description of furniture, instruments, artwork, jewelry, library, good china, household appliances, electronics, garage contents, sports equipment like skis or kayaks, clothes etc. Don’t forget ,comforters and linen cost money; so does rain gear and winter boots.) Writing up a list after the fact will be psychologically hard since it makes you remember all that you lost, but it will help to get funds for replacement.
• Find out which fire department district protected your home
• Info about additional insurance
• Bank account number for transfer of funds
• Info about your mortgage company

In turn, ask them, again, to give you the full policy details and also an advance for the immediate necessities, rent, clothing, food. They might have recommendations about provisional housing and will need to tell you how much your policy allots. Here the demand surge is likely a problem – it will not increase your stipend for expenses. Housing issues, already such a huge problem, will right now explode exponentially. As did the fires. As did the silence, in much of the mass media coverage of the catastrophe, about the role of climate change in generating ever more frequent and more destructive environmental disasters. Zip. Nada. But that we will discuss in another blog.

For now, tackle the loathsome business of dealing with the administrative burden of insurance. Then take your time in making a decision, DO NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING.

Rebuild? Relocate? So many factors need to be evaluated. The longing for familiarity, the place once home, for the community you cherish and want to recreate, is strong. That is why people return to floodplains and fire-prone areas in the first place. But you also have to consider, if the community can be reestablished given the rebuilding obstacles for many who were underinsured or not at all. This is particularly relevant for Altadena that was an unusually diverse and low-income town. (Historically it attracted Blacks because wealthier White folks avoided the local bad air quality due to the geographical trap for smog that the San Gabriels backdrop provided, catching the north- and westward drift.)

Fear of the unknown and inertia when you are trauma stricken are heavy burdens. But there is also the question of toxicity of the environment, for kids in particular, and the issue how schools and childcare availability will be impacted.

Importantly, there is also the looming threat that further insurance will be unavailable in fire zones exposed to future more frequent and intensifying catastrophes, so close to the canyons.

Insurers are leaving disaster-adjacent states like FL and CA in droves, or hiking rates up so they become unaffordable. Being a climate refugee is unimaginably hard, but being among the first still provides you with affordable options. A decade from now that picture will have changed.

I hope some of this will be of help. I’m crawling back under my blanket.

Bluebird photographs from November at Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery where Octavia E. Butler is buried. She was an astute observer of our society and a brilliant analyst of our history, all of which allowed her to write the Parable of the Sower, not mystically prescient, but thinking things logically through to a likely end, deadly fires and fascistic rule, set by her in 2025.

Music: Here is Pärt’s De Profundis.