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Los Angeles Times (April 10, 2025)– Kathleen Jordan, her husband and young daughter, consider themselves fortunate. They not only managed to flee to safety from the Eaton fire, but the family’s Altadena home somehow escaped the flames, even though their chicken coop and detached storage units burned, like many homes on their street.

But three months after the fire, Jordan says the family isn’t close to moving back. And she blames one entity for that: the California Fair Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort.

Jordan says a door at their East Loma Alta Drive home swung open during the firestorm and the interior was coated with debris. Yet, she says, the Fair Plan has failed to properly investigate or pay for any remediation of the soot, ash and smoke damage.

It’s the first mass tort case against the plan that has arisen out of the Jan. 7 fires, though the insurer has faced litigation in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California over smoke damage claims.

The lawsuit accuses the Los Angeles-based plan of insurance bad faith and breach of contract through its refusal to properly investigate and pay for the cleanups as required by state law, even though “wildfire smoke had transformed their homes into toxic traps, with each room and surface caked with invisible, hazardous chemical residue.”

Also named as defendants are 10 large California home insurers, which operate the Fair Plan along with other licensed state home insurers as a means or providing insurance to property owners who can’t get coverage from regular carriers.

“We have already heard from hundreds of people who are facing denials and underpayments from the Fair Plan for the massive contamination in their home caused by these wildfires,” said attorney J. Eli Wade-Scott, global managing partner at Edelson in Chicago, which is representing the families. Read more here.