Survivors fear smaller payouts from PG&E with each fire
But she woke up a year ago to a phone call and hurried evacuation orders, and in a matter of hours nearly every trace of her life was incinerated: the Christmas ornaments her children made when they were little, the sculptures and artwork she spent her career creating, the home where she hosted family gatherings for more than two decades.
“It’s not just that you’ve lost things. You’ve lost validation of your existence for all those years,” Kennedy said. “You can replace furniture. But you can’t replace baby books, wedding albums.”
Kennedy is one of thousands of survivors of the
Attorneys believe as many as 100,000 people are eligible to receive payments for damages they suffered during the devastating wildfires of recent years.
But wildfire victims of previous years must wait for
“The more victims there are, the smaller the slices of the pie. That’s just the way it’s going to be,” said
Recovery has been particularly hard for
“I’m still trying to get a job and I still have stuff in storage and I’m not economically stable,” Taft said.
In its bankruptcy plan,
It’s unclear how much the total liabilities for wildfire victims will amount to, and the matter is being litigated. Attorneys for wildfire victims hope for a full recovery, but some bankruptcy experts are skeptical.
“They’re not going to get anything like a complete recovery,” Ray said. “It won’t be anything like enough to solve all the problems. At this point I don’t see the money.”
Complicating matters, debts that
That means victims of blazes such as the one last month in
“It doesn’t make sense to me. You’d think it would be based on what’s oldest, and obviously the Paradise fire was the most destructive,” Taft said. “It’s very unfair.”
Attorneys for wildfire victims — many who represent victims of blazes before and after the bankruptcy filing — are trying to change that.
“It’s not going to be fair to (those) victims, because they would have to file within a very short period of time,” he said.
In Kennedy’s case, she and her husband grabbed a few photos and their cats as they fled. They spent the next 110 days moving from one hotel to the next as they figured out how to rebuild. An insurance settlement covered the value of her home and its contents, but it wasn’t enough to buy again in the area, where home prices were skyrocketing. She and her husband eventually bought a fixer-upper that needed extensive work while her husband undergoes dialysis treatments three times a week.
“I feel cheated, of course. Everyone considered their loss as a great loss, and that it shouldn’t be diminished, but I also know reality,” Kennedy said. “You can kick and scream all you want, but it’s just going to happen the way it’s going to happen.”
Some wildfire victims didn’t have insurance or received insurance payouts that were too small to afford anything in the area.
“There are people who have ongoing mental or emotional issues, and they can’t get comfortable anywhere, because they fear getting burned out again,” said
Continued fires also threatened the bankruptcy plans. Each of the competing proposals gives financial backers an out under certain conditions. For example, if
“Everything they thought that they had worked out is now being challenged, because the numbers are now being stressed,” said
An eventual payout from
“I keep hoping that as time passes it will soften, it will blur the edges,” Kennedy said. “I think we all are trying to move forward. It’s just been extremely challenging.”
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