Kareem Ali's home in Altadena is one of the few left standing on his cul-de-sac. He and his wife have not been able to move back into it. Since August 2026 they have been living in a donated RV on their own property, behind the house they still own and still insure. Levi Sumagaysay reported their account, and the others from Altadena that follow, for CalMatters on 5 September 2026.

State Farm paid for them to live in other places from January 2025 until April 2026, when the insurer refused to reimburse them for rent on an $8,000-a-month one-bedroom it had recommended to Ali. He stopped paying at that point, and the rent for May, June and July went unpaid. When the couple asked the company to test their house for contamination, the request was denied, so they paid $3,000 for the testing themselves. The insurer declined to reimburse them, and has since delayed and denied their claims for cleanup, Ali said. Part of the reason, he told CalMatters, is that State Farm has assigned at least six or seven adjusters to the case. An adjuster is the person an insurer puts in charge of investigating a claim and deciding what it is worth.

"Every time we got some sort of momentum on our claim, they'd randomly switch," Ali said.

They spent the money the company had paid out for their personal belongings on contractors, who cleaned, pulled out insulation and replaced the carpet. When they told State Farm more work was needed and that they had run out of money, the claim was denied, according to Ali's account. Through all of it they have kept paying their premiums. Ali said he asked his adjuster: "What are we paying for if we're not going to get coverage?"

The harder outcome

A house that burns to the slab settles its own question. The loss is visible from the street, and the argument that follows is about money rather than whether anything happened. A house still standing has to be argued about. Somebody has to establish that the smoke left something behind, that the something is harmful, and that removing it is covered by the policy.

The January 2025 fires around Los Angeles destroyed more than 16,000 structures and burned for nearly a month. The state Insurance Department puts the total at roughly 40,000 claims and estimates more than 13,000 involved smoke damage. Both are departmental figures, reported by CalMatters; neither is a count anyone has audited. What burned was a mixture of vegetation and manufactured material, so what settled indoors is a mixture too.

The vocabulary of a claim is not built for this. Every term in a policy assumes the damage can be described. Ash on a windowsill can be photographed. Whether it is dangerous is a laboratory question.

What a result is worth

Elisa Jacobs Nixon's family has also been unable to return to their Altadena home, mainly because of months of back-and-forth with State Farm over testing and cleanup, CalMatters reported. She paid $6,000 for environmental testing in May 2025. The insurer initially ignored the results.

Her public adjuster — a licensed professional a policyholder hires to run the claim from their own side — advised her to get a contractor's bid for the work the findings required. That worked. Within days, Nixon said, State Farm sent its own industrial hygienist — a specialist who samples buildings for hazardous substances. The two reports came back with similar findings, including high levels of contaminants. The later one also found asbestos.

"This has completely hijacked my life, my kids' lives, it's just taken over everything," Nixon told CalMatters.

Notice what the second test achieved. It did not change what was in the house. It changed who had produced the number. Nixon's report and the insurer's report broadly agreed, which is the sort of agreement that ought to end a dispute. Her results changed nothing while they were only results. They moved once they arrived attached to a contractor's price.

AB 1642, the contamination bill from Assemblymember John Harabedian, a Pasadena Democrat, defines the missing thing with unusual clarity. A screening level, its text says, is "the threshold concentration of a chemical that serves as a comparison value for exposures to soil, air, and tap or drinking water and below which further site assessment for that single chemical alone is often not warranted." A comparison value. Without one, a lab result is a quantity of lead in micrograms per square foot and nothing more. It cannot be high or safe. It can only be a number two parties describe differently.

This is where the absence stops being a scientific gap and becomes an allocation of cost. The party that has to prove the house is dirty is the party living in an RV, paying premiums on a building it cannot occupy, and drawing down whatever coverage remains. The party that gets to wait for proof is the one that wrote the policy and controls when payments are made. Delay is how the missing threshold does its work. CalMatters reported that fire survivors, experts and insurers have all pointed to the same lack of standards, which is a rare thing for opposed parties to agree on.

The suit, and the reply

On 31 August 2026 Los Angeles County sued State Farm in Superior Court, County Counsel prosecuting on behalf of the People alongside Consumer Watchdog. Everything the County says about the company's conduct is an allegation in a pending case.

The announcement lists "unreasonable delays in investigation and processing of claims" and "systematic underpayments of claims even where the rightful amount of the claim was clear," along with improper reassignment of adjusters and illegal suppression of smoke damage claims. For homes that were not total losses, the complaint alleges, State Farm "typically sent a preferred restoration provider such as Servpro that offered an inadequate and unsafe cleaning method," and said it would not cover testing for lead, asbestos or other toxins.

The County is not the only source. On 4 May 2026, after an investigation opened the previous June, the Insurance Department filed its own accusation: 220 claims examined, violations in 52 percent of them, 430 alleged violations in all. It is seeking penalties and a hearing that could suspend the company's licence for a year.

State Farm "strongly disagrees" with the county lawsuit's characterization of its claims response, spokesperson Sevag Sarkissian told CalMatters. Responding to the suit, it said it had paid more than $6.2 billion on claims from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, about $1 billion of that for smoke-related damage, and had closed about 78 percent of claims — the company's own figures, offered by a party in its own defence. It is the state's largest home insurer, with what CalMatters calls about 20 percent of the market — a share the reporting does not define by premium, policies or exposure.

What the Legislature actually did

Two bills passed the Legislature in response, and as of 6 September 2026 neither is law. AB 1795 cleared its final concurrence vote on 31 August; the governor has until the end of the month to sign both, CalMatters reported. Their dependence is written into the text: AB 1795 conditions the operation of its own provisions on AB 1642 being enacted, so the insurance rules do not switch on unless the contamination rules do.

AB 1642 would put the Department of Toxic Substances Control to work. By the end of 2028 it must adopt regulations on lead and asbestos testing, remediation and restoration, including the lead dust concentrations at which a home interior is clear for human occupancy. By the end of 2029 it must publish guidance on a longer roster: CAM 17 heavy metals, cyanide, lithium, manganese, dioxins and furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Harabedian called it "a first-in-the-nation standard for testing and remediation."

That is the science. It arrives at the end of the decade.

Two clocks run later still. AB 1795 gives Cal/OSHA until 1 July 2029 to propose rules protecting the employees who work on smoke- and fire-damaged homes; adjuster certification carries the same date, pushed back from January 2028. Until then, the workers pulling insulation out of Altadena houses are doing it under general rules written for other hazards, and the adjusters deciding whether that work is covered are doing it under none.

The vacuum is not quite total in the meantime, and the bill is honest about it. Section 25402.3 sets interim standards until the later regulations arrive: for lead, the federal clearance level for dust written for lead paint abatement; for asbestos, the California standard and the federal emission rules. Real numbers, written for other purposes, pressed into service until California writes its own. For cyanide and lithium and the rest of the 2029 list there is no interim figure. And the 2028 regulations must include their listed contents only "to the extent there is, in the department's discretion, sufficient supporting scientific evidence." A legislature can put a date on a standard. It cannot put a date on the knowledge the standard depends on, and this bill says so in its own text.

The presumption

AB 1795, the Smoke Damage Recovery Act, comes from Assemblymember Mike Gipson, a Gardena Democrat, sponsored by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. Its first operative sentence: "There is a rebuttable presumption that if wildfire smoke, ash, soot, char, or combustion byproducts are present in a surviving residential property in the wildfire impact zone after a wildfire, then smoke damage in the property is the result of that wildfire."

A rebuttable presumption is a starting assumption the other side is free to disprove. Nothing in that sentence names a toxin, a concentration or a threshold. It decides only who begins the argument holding the weaker position: under it the insurer arrives needing to show the soot came from somewhere other than the fire, where today the homeowner arrives needing to show it did, and pays for the sampling that might show it.

The rest runs on clocks, with interest on late payment. The policyholder "shall have the right to select the vendor or contractor." Insurers carry the cost of testing. And additional living expenses — the coverage that pays for somewhere else to sleep while a home cannot be lived in — cannot be terminated until the home has been restored to preloss condition and cleared for human occupancy, the statutory phrase for an official finding that people may live there again.

That clause is the hinge, and it points back at AB 1642: the duty to keep paying for temporary housing ends when the house is cleared, and clearance is defined by the standards the other bill would create. The consumer protection is anchored to a document that mostly has not been written.

The objections that hold up

The first objection is the one the industry does not quite say out loud. A screening level for mixed combustion residue is not the same kind of object as a lead dust threshold. Lead has one toxicology and one number. What comes off a burning house is an open-ended mixture — the 2029 roster alone runs to CAM 17 metals, cyanide, lithium, manganese, dioxins and furans, and PAHs — and a comparison value would be needed for each. On that account the vacuum is not a regulatory failure but a ceiling, and no statute legislates past one.

Three things in the record answer it. The interim standards were not invented; they were borrowed, from federal lead clearance levels and asbestos rules, in about the time it takes to draft a section. A number borrowable all along was a number nobody was obliged to adopt. State Farm's own hygienist sampled the Nixon house and came back broadly agreeing with the report she had paid for: the science was adequate to produce agreement the moment one side wanted it. And survivors, experts and insurers all describe the same hole — contested science produces contested findings, not unanimity about an absence. What is missing is not knowledge but anyone under a duty to write the number down. Where the ceiling is real, in dioxins and cyanide, the bill concedes it, in the clause making the 2028 regulations contingent on sufficient supporting scientific evidence.

The second objection is broader. The industry remains "technically opposed to the bills," Karen Collins told CalMatters. Collins is a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and sits on the smoke claims task force the Insurance Department formed after the fires. She allowed that the bills create a framework, and said the standards that follow should "remain grounded in science."

Soot is not self-dating. A presumption that operates on the presence of combustion byproducts, without a concentration attached, cannot tell the ash from January 2025 from a decade of kitchen grease and a poorly drawn fireplace flue. That ambiguity has already been used in the other direction: last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that in at least a few cases insurers hired experts whose reports attributed the soot and ash to candles and fireplaces rather than to the fire. The presumption applies across a wildfire impact zone, defined as "a ZIP Code within or partially within the fire perimeter" — a postal routing convention, drawn without reference to where the plume actually went. A house that never saw the smoke can sit in the same ZIP code as one that filled with it. Every claim paid because the presumption was not rebutted comes out of a pool. Homeowners who never filed a smoke claim pay for that in premiums. Calling the objection self-serving does not make it wrong.

The drafters saw part of this coming: AB 1795 excludes soot from "agricultural, industrial, or commercial operations or routine residential activities unrelated to a covered wildfire," and the presumption is rebuttable. But rebutting requires the same measurements nobody has. The company's ability to disprove causation now runs through the identical vacuum that used to work in its favour.

Brian Haden, an adjuster, is skeptical for a different reason. He told CalMatters the bills lack specifics and that both sides will use "whatever's approved as a weapon." He questioned whether the Insurance Department will enforce them, and said he expects litigation to remain the way these disputes actually get resolved.

This is the strongest objection in the record, because a vague standard is a new surface to fight on. Once a property is cleared, the bill provides that "A claim for recontamination shall be considered a new claim, subject to policy provisions and a new deductible." In a ZIP code that has burned once already, that sets up an argument about whether soot found in year three is old soot never properly removed or new soot from a later fire. The presumption will sit on one side. The clearance certificate on the other.

A rule that has not happened yet

There is an awkwardness in this for the people whose ordeal produced the bills. Section 2060.2 applies the new rules "to all residential property insurance claims that occur on or after the operative date of this section." Both households here filed after the January 2025 fires. The law written in response to what happened to them would not reach them.

Jane Lawton Potelle founded Eaton Fire Residents United, whose data helped inform Harabedian's bill. She acknowledged to CalMatters that the bills will not necessarily solve enforcement problems, and that their standards will not arrive in time to help her or her fellow survivors directly. She thinks the approach could still affect lawsuits or settlements now.

"Insurers are relying on people not to know information," she said. "Living in a contaminated home can make you sick. And it can devalue your property."

That is an advocate's judgement about how negotiations move, and untested. But the mechanism is real, and strange. A regulation due in December 2028 cannot govern a claim filed in 2025. It can change what a settlement in 2026 is worth, because both sides can see the number coming and guess whether it will be kinder than the silence they are negotiating in now.

If the governor signs both bills this month, the first clearance number available for lead in a standing house will be the one borrowed from lead paint abatement. For cyanide and for the dioxins that come off burning plastic, there will be no number to borrow. Under AB 1795, additional living expenses cannot be switched off until a home is restored and cleared for human occupancy, which is to say until somebody can produce the number that does not exist. Kareem Ali's rent for May, June and July is still unpaid.