{"id":83996,"date":"2026-09-17T22:25:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T05:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=83996"},"modified":"2026-09-17T22:25:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T05:25:27","slug":"l-a-fire-survivors-launch-insurance-accountability-survey-to-help-get-billions-owed-to-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=83996","title":{"rendered":"L.A. Fire Survivors Launch Insurance Accountability Survey to Help Get Billions Owed to Families"},"content":{"rendered":"
First-of-its-kind survey will reveal which insurers delayed, denied, underpaid or delivered<\/strong><\/div>\n
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LOS ANGELES, Calif.<\/strong>\u00a0Every Fire Survivor’s Network (EFSN), in partnership with a UCLA research team, has launched the\u00a0L.A. Fire Survivor Insurance Survey<\/strong>, a first-of-its-kind effort to create an open public record of how insurers perform for families after disaster.<\/div>\n
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FireSurvey.org<\/u><\/a><\/div>\n
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The survey will close once enough survivors have responded to create statistically meaningful results. Survivors who want their experience represented when their insurer’s performance is measured should participate now.<\/div>\n
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Nothing less is at stake than whether Los Angeles fire survivors are able to recover.<\/div>\n
The Los Angeles Times\u00a0studied<\/u><\/a>\u00a0the five biggest California wildfires before 2025 and found that eight years later, only\u00a038%<\/strong>\u00a0of families who lost homes had rebuilt. The #1 factor determining who rebuilt was whether insurance paid fully and on time.<\/div>\n
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Recovery follows the money. And the biggest source of recovery money is supposed to be insurance.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Yet Department of Angels\u00a0reports<\/u><\/a>\u00a0that\u00a070% of insured L.A. fire survivors are facing delays, denials or underpayments<\/strong>\u00a0that are holding up their recovery.<\/div>\n
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Insurers still owe L.A. fire survivors tens of billions of dollars. The survey will show where that money is getting stuck, which problems are isolated, which are patterns, and which insurers are keeping their promises.<\/div>\n
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\u201cSome insurers count on wearing families down until they run out of money or energy to fight back,\u201d said\u00a0Joy Chen, Executive Director of Every Fire Survivor’s Network<\/strong>. \u201cOne family can’t know whether what happened to them is happening to thousands of others. But when survivors come together, we can see what’s really happening and hold insurers accountable.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The Data Can Show Where Billions in Insurance Payments Are Getting Stuck<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Until now, there has been no comprehensive public dataset capable of answering some of the most consequential questions about insurance recovery from the Eaton and Palisades fires:<\/div>\n
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\u2022 Did some insurance companies systematically underinsure their policyholders?<\/div>\n
\u2022 How is each insurer handling smoke-damage claims?<\/div>\n
\u2022 Did some insurers systematically nonrenew policyholders and move them onto the FAIR Plan before the fires?<\/div>\n
\u2022 Which insurers show patterns of delays, underpayments or denials that warrant further investigation?<\/div>\n
\u2022 Which insurers are communicating effectively and sending capable adjusters?<\/div>\n
\u2022 And which insurers fulfilled their contracts, paid survivors fully and on time, and did a stellar job helping their customers recover?<\/div>\n
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The L.A. Fire Survivor Insurance Survey is designed to answer those questions, insurer by insurer.<\/div>\n
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EFSN retained\u00a0Aimery Thomas, Managing Director of The Future Organization and a research expert with experience serving insurance industry clients, as the survey’s design and security consultant.<\/strong>\u00a0Thomas advised on survey architecture, methodology and data security, and will analyze and report on survivors’ experiences with their insurers.<\/div>\n
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Every question was designed to answer one of two things:\u00a0Is the insurer fulfilling its legal and contractual obligations? And how well is it actually serving its customers?<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Questions developed with\u00a0law enforcement and insurance bad-faith litigators<\/strong>\u00a0capture facts that can reveal patterns of potentially unlawful conduct. Questions designed by The Future Organization measure the customer experience, including trust, satisfaction, communication and adjuster competence.<\/div>\n
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Together, the answers can reveal which patterns warrant investigation, enforcement or litigation, and which insurers did right by their customers.<\/div>\n
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Families Paid for a Promise. The Survey Will Show Who Kept It.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Insurers spend billions each year promising they’ll be there when disaster strikes. Families pay premiums for years counting on it.<\/div>\n
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But until now, there has been\u00a0no public data showing how individual insurance companies actually perform when disaster strikes.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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\u201cInsurance companies sell policies, but what they are really selling is trust,\u201d\u00a0Thomas\u00a0<\/strong>said. \u201cFamilies pay premiums for years believing their insurer will be there when they need them most. This survey is designed to measure what happens when that promise is finally tested, and show which insurers delivered.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Through previous data collections, EFSN has turned more than\u00a02,200 firsthand accounts from L.A. fire survivors<\/strong>\u00a0into evidence for action. That evidence enabled\u00a0EFSN’s lawsuit against the California Department of Insurance and State Farm<\/u><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Los Angeles County’s lawsuit against State Farm<\/u><\/a>, helping unlock more than $100 million in additional payments from State Farm.<\/div>\n
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Now EFSN is taking that model public. Through the L.A. Fire Survivor Insurance Survey, thousands of individual experiences will become public data that survivors, journalists, regulators, law enforcement and policymakers can use to evaluate insurer performance and hold insurers accountable.<\/div>\n
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UCLA Will Turn Thousands of Survivor Experiences Into Actionable Data<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The\u00a0UCLA research team<\/strong>\u00a0will aggregate and analyze the survey results and lead development of the public data visualization tools.<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe are honored to partner with Every Fire Survivor’s Network on this survivor-led effort,\u201d said\u00a0Gabriella Carmona, Senior Research Analyst at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs<\/strong>. \u201cOur role is to help turn thousands of individual experiences into rigorous public data. When that evidence is in the public domain, survivors, researchers, journalists and decision-makers can see the patterns, and use that knowledge to help families get home.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The data can provide leads for\u00a0law enforcement investigations and potential prosecution, litigation, investigative journalism and regulatory enforcement<\/strong>, as well as evidence for policymakers considering insurance reforms.<\/div>\n
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The survey has already drawn interest from law enforcement and journalists at leading national, state and local news organizations<\/div>\n
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Individual Households Will Not Be Identifiable in the Public Data<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Survey results will be anonymized and aggregated so no individual household is identifiable, with additional protections where combinations of information could risk identifying a household.\u00a0Read EFSN’s Insurance Survey Data Handling and Management Policy<\/u><\/a>.<\/div>\n
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Anyone Will Be Able to Explore and Analyze the Results<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The survey will create\u00a0three free public resources<\/strong>\u00a0that put the results directly into people’s hands.<\/div>\n
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1. Open data.<\/strong>\u00a0An unprecedented public dataset will let survivors, researchers, journalists, regulators, attorneys and the public uncover patterns and compare insurers, with data aggregated so no individual household is identifiable.<\/div>\n
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2. Interactive data visualization.<\/strong>\u00a0Anyone will be able to select an insurer, issue or survivor experience, filter and combine variables, and instantly turn the results into clear charts and comparisons. Millions of data points will become a searchable picture of insurance recovery across Los Angeles.<\/div>\n
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3. A public insurer performance report.<\/strong>\u00a0EFSN and UCLA will report results insurer by insurer and, where the data supports meaningful comparisons, rank insurers to show where serious problems emerged and which companies served their customers well.<\/div>\n
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Eaton and Palisades Fire Survivors Can Participate Now<\/strong><\/div>\n
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\u201cIf your insurer delayed, denied or underpaid you, say so. If they kept their promises and helped you recover, say that too,\u201d Chen said. \u201cThis is our chance as survivors to create the record none of us had when the fires happened. Make sure your experience counts when your insurer’s performance is measured.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The survey will remain open only until enough responses are collected to create statistically meaningful cohorts for the insurers and groups being studied.<\/div>\n
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Without the billions insurers still owe survivors, Los Angeles risks becoming a place where only families wealthy enough to finance their own rebuilding can get home.<\/div>\n
\u201cPhilanthropy and government cannot fill a gap of tens of billions of dollars, and they shouldn’t have to,\u201d Chen said. \u201cThese are dollars insurers owe their policyholders. This survey will build the evidence, transparency and accountability needed to get those dollars moving so families can get home.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The approximately\u00a015-minute survey<\/strong>\u00a0adapts to each household’s experience, going deeper on issues such as underinsurance, smoke damage and the FAIR Plan while skipping questions that don’t apply. It is available in\u00a0English, Spanish, Chinese and Korean<\/strong>\u00a0and asks for one response per household.<\/div>\n
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Survivors who want their experience represented should participate now:<\/strong>
\nfiresurvey.org<\/u><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First-of-its-kind survey will reveal which insurers...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ca-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83997,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83996\/revisions\/83997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}