California’s elected insurance commissioner has asked the state’s insurers to make maximum payments for the contents of homes destroyed in last month’s Southern California fire disaster without requiring policyholders to provide a complete inventory of all they lost.
Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s office encouraged insurers to make the payments, saying the companies should report back by Feb. 28 whether they have gone along with the request.
“It is inhumane to require wildfire survivors who have lost everything to list every item of personal property in order to receive the full replacement cost under their policies,” Lara said in a statement Thursday. “They need to focus on the larger task of rebuilding their lives.”
While some homeowners reported already receiving maximum payments for personal property lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires last month, others said they have received nothing.
Most policyholders have been asked to provide a detailed inventory of the contents of their homes, a requirement that many have struggled to fulfill, as they deal with myriad other challenges, including finding temporary housing, directing property cleanups and preparing to rebuild.
State law requires insurance companies to make at least initial payments for personal property without completion of an inventory. The amount of that required initial payment can be up to $250,000 and should be no less than 30% of the policy’s dwelling limit, the commissioner’s office said.
Insurers are supposed to inform their customers about the requirement. After the advance payment, the law says that policyholders should receive the full value of their possessions, up to their content policy limits, once they have provided documentation.
Several Altadena homeowners who lost everything in the Eaton fire welcomed Lara’s initiative, saying on Saturday it would be a struggle to fully account for all that they lost.
Daniel Morales, a retired small business consultant, said it will be almost impossible for him to calculate the value of his possessions — more than 2,000 books, artwork and a collection of keepsakes from the world’s religions, some of them hundreds of years old.
“How do you put a value on those things? It’s a judgment call,” said Morales. “So much of it is intangible.”
Morales said his insurer has told him they will pay him 80% of his coverage limit, without documentation, and the rest if he can prove the loss. He said it would be “great” if his carrier, which he declined to identify, would pay him the full coverage. “Because it was a total loss.”
Morales said he got almost none of his possessions out of his West Altadena home and he also lost the desktop computer that stored many of his records.
An Altadena engineer who lost everything in the fire said he is yet to receive any payment, or even a promise of payment, for the contents of his home. He declined to give his name, saying his employer would not want him speaking on the record about the fires.
The engineer said he had so far received nothing from the California Fair Plan for the contents of a home that held $40,000 in ham radio equipment and more than a dozen guitars, many of them collector’s items, including “ a ‘59 Les Paul, a 2006 Martin, a 1967 Martin D-28, from the last year of Brazilian rosewood.”
He praised any push to streamline payment to homeowners, like him. “There is just so much stress,” he said. “I am dealing with insurance on every aspect of this.”
Jennifer Gray Thompson, an expert on post-fire recovery, praised Lara’s move to hasten insurance payouts.
“Itemizing is such a burden that it stalls recovery times for many families,” said Thompson, who founded After the Fire USA after fires burned near her Sonoma County home. “It re-traumatizes them and is intensely laborious.”
Reiterating the advice of insurance companies, Thompson recommended that people make a video of the contents of their houses and apartments.
“Open drawers and closets; garage, outdoors, sheds,” she said, via text. “Because who can possibly remember every single thing in your home otherwise?”
