Sue or Settle: Choice Before LA Fire Victims Rubs Wounds Raw (1)

Days after her Altadena, Calif., home burned in the Eaton Fire, Ellen Soll moved into a hotel in nearby Arcadia. Representatives for a law group were waiting for her in the lobby.

At first, they took pictures with her dog, a Pomeranian-Yorkie mix named Joie. Then, they brought Joie a stuffed animal. Then, over more meets and greets, came the business card. Soll started attending what the lawyer groups call “town halls,” mass meetings to discuss lawsuits against Edison International’s Southern California utility, whose equipment was suspected of causing the wildfire that killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings.

Soll felt emotionally worn out. She’d lived in Altadena for decades, and just wanted to find her way back home. But after weeks of appeals from the lawyers, Soll signed on to have the legal group represent her in February. She would later reconsider.

Squeezed by a fire insurance crisis, fueled by California’s vulnerability to natural disasters, many displaced residents have exhausted their payments to cover the cost of temporary relocation. A year after the fire, only 19% of Altadena residents are living in their undamaged or repaired pre-fire homes, according to a study by the Department of Angels.

At a point when many are desperate, they’re faced with either taking their chances in court against Edison, which is widely blamed for the blaze but hasn’t accepted fault, or applying for the utility’s settlement offer now. Hundreds of victims have filed lawsuits in Los Angeles state court.

Some say their choice—without a way to directly compare the alternatives—comes down to who they trust and whether their desire to seek justice exceeds their fatigue from what some call “fire brain.”

“It’s a big decision. It’s basically going to dictate what I’m doing with myself for the next, well, forever,” said Adam Teraoka, a semi-retired community-college professor and son of Japanese-American artist Masami Teraoka, who lost his home and artwork created by his father worth up to $1 million.

‘Not a Mystery’

Dozens of plaintiffs’ firms have descended on the community, joined by Erin Brockovich, the victims’ advocate famous for her portrayal in the eponymous Oscar-winning film. Billboards hovered over the area’s business corridors; larger-than-life attorneys leaning against bright red and orange text: “Fire Lawsuit Demanding Billions.” “Real Attorney No Call Center.”

More than 150 lawyers have taken on Eaton Fire cases, plaintiffs’ attorneys in the area estimate. They’re emboldened by videos that appear to show the fire sparking at the base of an old transmission line, and the knowledge that Edison’s ability to pay damages—even tens of billions of dollars, if necessary—would be supported by the state’s new wildfire fund.

“The thing about this case is, it’s not a mystery. It’s not a whodunnit,” said Gerald Singleton, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who helps lead the state court case against the utility. “I mean, it’s on video. You know exactly where it started, when it started.”

Between the Thomas and Woolsey fires that erupted in 2017 and 2018, Edison paid out close to $7.5 billion in settlements, the company told investors in 2021. Still, there are no guarantees in litigation. The first trial isn’t scheduled until 2027 and settlements could take even longer. Lawyers will claim a slice of the payout, likely at least 25%, although Singleton said prevailing plaintiffs would be able to recover fees from Edison under California’s inverse condemnation law.

Edison’s settlement offers have a number of variables. But Edison estimates total damages on a 1,500-square-foot house worth $1.2 million before the fire would be more than $2 million, and that its offer to the household would be about half of that, at $1.058 million. Plaintiffs’ lawyers call those offers lowballs.

“They want you to call them, so they can get their hooks into you,” Doug Boxer, an attorney with the plaintiffs’ advocacy group LA Fire Justice, said at a December meeting of dozens of fire victims, imploring people not to talk to Edison. The compensation program is “just bad,” Boxer said.

The lawyer billboards are interspersed with signs that say “We Are Altadena Strong” and “Altadena Is Not For Sale,” representing community efforts to prevent developers and land speculators from buying burned lots.

To longtime resident Charles Thomas, the lawyers’ arrival “felt like buzzards circling over the carnage.”

What most of the community wants is “what they had before,” Thomas said. “And I think what most of these attorneys want is to get them a bunch of money, and make a bunch of money, and get the hell out of here and move back to where they came from.”

Purple Mountains

Altadena is part of Los Angeles County, but far from the glamour of Beverly Hills. At the edge of town and nature, coyotes and the occasional bear lumber through the yards. At sunset, the San Gabriel Mountains glow purple.

Artists and activists have long been drawn to the area. Altadena is one of the county’s most racially diverse communities: 18% of residents are Black, 27% are Hispanic or Latino, 46% are White, and 17% are multiracial.

Nearly three-quarters of Black Altadena households own their homes, an outgrowth of discriminatory housing laws in the 1960s and 70s that pushed people into the area. Most of these homeowners are older than 65. The fire hit them particularly hard, flattening or significantly damaging nearly half of Black residents’ homes, a significantly higher rate than non-Black households, according to a UCLA analysis.

“People move up here to get away from the big city traffic and the noise and craziness,” said Camille Dudley, a former town council member and an Altadena resident of almost 50 years. “It’s a slower pace of life.”

An unburned stretch of the Angeles National Forest became a refuge after the fire for kids who lost their homes, guided there by the outdoor education nonprofit where Thomas is executive director. Thomas lost not just his home, but four houses where he was raised.

With his home nestled in an area where regular insurers don’t provide fire coverage, Thomas uses the FAIR Plan, California’s insurer of last resort. The $20,000 he received in loss-of-use payments ran out after he’d moved six or seven times.

A doctor told Thomas that he’d developed a form of alopecia because of fire-related stress, after a perfectly round chunk of his hair fell out. He finds himself looking for things he lost in the fire, like shirts and tools.

“You’re looking for something that you remember, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Who Can You Trust

“Are you going to trust the company that burned down your town to do right by you now?”

Boxer, the son of former US Sen. Barbara Boxer, and other members of LA Fire Justice have given this speech all over the area impacted by the Eaton Fire. LAFJ is led by former state Assemblymember Chris Holden and a handful of prominent wildfire lawyers, including Boxer.

Brockovich, who didn’t respond to an interview request, is part of the team. So is Rico Reyes, a Texas-licensed lawyer who said fire litigation is dear to him because his in-laws lost their home in a fire.

On this night in December, Boxer was leaning against the podium at a YMCA community room in Sierra Madre, which neighbors Altadena, voicing over videos of the start of the fire.

After nearly an hour, an audience member prodded Boxer to compare Edison’s offerings to what they might get in a court settlement.

Boxer described how emotional distress damages are typically calculated, graded along levels of severity, in contrast to the flat rates Edison’s offering. He offered hypothetical reasons to take Edison’s offer: “were you a renter without insurance and you’re living in your car or you’re couch-surfing? Or, the only way you can find a roof over your head is to move to Ohio, and I don’t want to move to Ohio?”

But, he said, “my general view, our general view, is that you are just giving up too much.”

Residents’ individual recoveries vary widely, depending on losses, living arrangements, and insurance coverage. That makes identifying the “average settlement” a challenge. Some residents are meeting individually with their attorneys to get a more tailored view of whether the Edison offer makes sense.

Fire victims’ concerns about not having hard numbers to compare stem from confidentiality provisions in most settlements. University of Georgia law professor Elizabeth Burch, who studies mass torts, said in an email, “You can occasionally get access to settlement docs, but it’s rare. It’s a super frustrating part of the job—not having real data on outcomes.”

‘Cost of Doing Business’

An October dinner at the Pasadena Convention Center was set for hundreds of people, with dessert and floral centerpieces at each table.

Altadena resident Crystal Nerone remembers it for LAFJ’s announcement it was lowering its contingency fee from over 33% to 25% of recoveries, given the competition for clients, but also for the floral arrangement she took home. It had to have cost $100, she said.

She said she appreciated LAFJ’s offerings of mental health services along with community gatherings. They remind her and other residents what they’re fighting for, she said. But that night, she said, “all I could see was dollar signs.” She wondered who was paying for it.

Reyes, who is based in the group’s Pasadena office, said the group won’t pass event expenses on to clients. It’s a cost of doing business, he said.

“We always are happy to invite you to our town halls,” Reyes said. “That’s perhaps one of our biggest avenues of client outreach.”

Reyes said he’d be “very surprised” if a representative solicited anyone, like Soll, who said a law group representative was waiting for her when she moved into a hotel. He said he was unaware of LAFJ staff members sitting in hotel lobbies, “but I would not be surprised if one of them showed kindness, and, you know, gave a dog toy. That seems like a nice thing to do for somebody who’s suffering.”

$34 Million So Far

Pedro Pizzaro, the CEO of Edison International, made his pitch for Edison’s wildfire compensation program to an audience of more than 100 community members in John Muir High School’s auditorium the day after Halloween. Edison had just opened applications for its settlement offer on Oct. 29.

“It’s designed for eligible and impacted community members to recover and rebuild faster,” he said. “And it allows those impacted to refocus on recovery, rather than drawing out litigation.”

People can apply to the program and see within 90 days what their payout would be, according to Edison. If they decline the offer, they can still sue. Edison’s program allows lawyers to recover an additional 10% of their clients’ net damages in the settlement.

Just under 1,800 applications were filed as of Jan. 5, Edison spokesperson Scott Johnson said Jan 6. Eighty-two offers totaling about $34 million have been extended, and no offers have been declined yet. Twenty-eight claims have already been paid, reflecting Edison’s “commitment to swift and meaningful relief,” he said.

“There was a sense of urgency for those people who really wanted to get this done through this calendar year,” he said in December.

Edison created its program with Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros, the duo known for their work on the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

Unlike with the 9/11 program, Feinberg and Biros aren’t overseeing the payments. Biros said she and Feinberg decided in the past couple of years that “at this stage in our careers, we really enjoy the design aspect, but we’re not really interested anymore in the actual administration.”

Edison’s offer is part of an emerging trend of corporations and government entities offering speedy out-of-court settlements, with feedback from victims, in the wake of a disaster, said Adam Zimmerman, a law professor at the University of Southern California. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have to believe a settlement offer is fair enough for them to steer clients toward it, he said.

“The only way that a corporate settlement system like that can work is if it comes as close as possible to the ultimate awards that would be reached in a normal settlement process,” said Zimmerman, who also worked on the September 11th fund.

If attorneys “believe they need more leverage, then they’ll hold out and that might increase the chance that we might see the case not being resolved through this fund, but through some other type of settlement process,” he said.

More than 20% of applications to Edison’s program submitted by the end of 2025 were by a plaintiffs’ attorney.

Edison’s Johnson said the settlement efforts reflect lessons learned from previous wildfires, when settlements occurred through litigation and took far longer.

“SCE established the Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program so eligible community members have a way to receive fast payments and fair resolutions, while reducing the time, costs, and uncertainty associated with litigation,” he said.

‘Fix What You Broke’

Rose Robinson, the niece of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, said she still has nightmares of people engulfed in flame. Her home burned and she spent several days in a hospital. The Olympic silver medal won by her father, Mack Robinson, was lost in the fire.

“Edison has proposed $25,000 in total for tenants like you, who’ve lost everything. Is that enough to help you completely recover and move forward?” asked Joy Chen, executive director of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, at a Jan. 7 press conference. Grim laughter rippled over the group of about 100 wildfire survivors standing behind Robinson.

“$25,000 is literally like 25 cents,” Robinson responded. “It’s barely—that’s not even one good appliance, probably.”

Before Edison finalized its offer, EFSN condensed community members’ recommendations for the program into a 52-page document titled “Fix What You Broke.”

They pointed to inadequacies covering renters, small business owners, and residents with smoke damage, and said Edison’s reliance on a firefighter’s map to determine eligibility left out a mass of survivors whose homes were filled with toxic smoke.

The plan would pay for children’s emotional distress and trauma at one-quarter or one-half the rate of adults, they said.

Edison changed its final offer to cover almost twice as many residents with smoke-damaged homes, departing from the firefighter’s map. It continues to value non-economic damages for adults higher than children. And it’s “still woefully inadequate,” the group said.

EFSN is pushing Edison to provide emergency housing relief that isn’t tied to waiving litigation, something that’s “not an element of the program that’s currently being considered,” Johnson said.

It’s happened before: Pacific Gas & Electric offered victims of the San Bruno pipeline explosion in 2010 up to $50,000 in emergency relief with no strings attached.

“There’s incentives not to do it, because it means that the company’s financing litigation against itself a little bit, but it can be really important for victims of any type of mass tort to get it so that they don’t get pressured to take a lowball offer,” Zimmerman said.

Restless and Displaced

One renter sorting through her options is Dudley, the former town councilwoman who works with Thomas at Outward Bound Adventures. Her friend Crystal Nerone, who calls Dudley “the town crier,” said Dudley alerted her when the fire erupted. “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be alive,” Nerone told her.

Dudley’s home, which she had rented for 20 years, survived the fire. But about three weeks later, on Jan. 24, 2025, an email arrived from her property management company.

“Hello Camille Dudley,” the Jan. 24, 2025 email said. “You or one of the residents from your unit has requested a Move Out.”

It wasn’t Dudley. The front duplex burned, Dudley wrote back hours later, but the rest of the units—including hers—were “basically untouched.”

During the fire, her apartment filled with smoke. A gas line by the property broke, and her unit was cut off from utilities. A Department of Angels reportthat came out nine months after the fires found that survivors with smoke damage faced more claim denials from insurance companies and ran out of coverage for temporary housing faster than people whose homes were destroyed.

By October, Dudley had exhausted her insurance payments living in hotels. She’s still in temporary housing, paying $2,150 a month plus a little over $800 a month to store her belongings. She paid $1,460 at her old place.

She misses the birds, the squirrels, even the raccoons and possums. In her new apartment, Dudley’s two cats are restless. They jump and whine at night.

“I haven’t had a good night of sleep since the fire,” Dudley said.

How to Get Home

Adam Teraoka remembers driving through a tunnel of flame to check on his property shortly after he evacuated.

None of the houses on his block, including his, were still standing. His father’s artwork burned with the house. Somehow, his old Ford truck survived, “just sitting out by itself, like a ghost.”

As a builder, Teraoka has run the numbers on how much it will cost to rebuild. He’ll install the floors, walls, cabinets, and other interior parts himself. In November he applied for a settlement, thinking if Edison got close enough to the replacement cost in his head, he might accept. But he said the utility was on “super, super thin ice” with him, remembering that his neighbor’s house burned down years ago after calls to remove a tree that was leaning on a power line went unheeded.

Two months later, he was still struggling to complete the application, saying that every couple of weeks, the utility asked for a new document. So he’s choosing an attorney and plans to sue.

“The application has been so infuriating that there’s nearly no chance we’re going to take the compensation,” Teraoka said in a Jan. 6 text message.

On Jan. 8, Teraoka said that Edison “just upgraded my application to ‘substantially complete.’”

Nerone decided to sue, but also implored her friend Dudley to at least walk through Edison’s offer with a lawyer. Dudley’s not interested.

“You don’t pal up with the people that have put you in this situation just because they’re going to throw a little money at you,” Dudley said.

Despite his reservations about the legal approaches, Thomas decided to sue.

Thomas worries that second- or third-generation Black homeowners will accept the program and—without enough insurance coverage, compensation money, or time to rebuild locally—will leave. Their exits could prompt others to follow and hollow out the community that was already dealing with gentrification before the fire, he said.

“I don’t know if SCE knows that they could potentially be doing that, but I’m seeing a lot of older Black people get out of here, and it’s really starting to bother me,” he said.

Johnson, the Edison spokesperson, said, “the intent is to help the community and everyone involved recover and return Altadena to the wonderful place it is and was.”

Soll, who was approached by the law group in her hotel lobby shortly after evacuating, said she changed her mind after initially deciding to sue, because Edison’s offer seemed appealing.

Lawyers are “constantly giving you information that Edison’s wrong. You need to fight for your rights,” Soll said. “You know the spiel. And you sit there going, ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ with tears in your eyes. But when you have the culprit saying, ‘Hey, we know we’re wrong, let us help you...’ Well, why not?”

Soll is looking at floor plans and intends to build her home as fireproof as possible. She owns her lot and would rather rebuild on it than look for something new.

“I want to go on with my life,” Soll said. “I don’t want to wait for the lawsuit. I’m not trying to get rich. I just want to get back into my house.”

Updates status of Teraoka's application in sixth paragraph under "How to Get Home." An earlier version corrected fourth paragraph under "$34 Million So Far" to reflect that, rather than all of Edison's offers being accepted, none have been turned down yet.