Altadena-Founded Survivor Network Opens Insurance Survey to Build a Public Record of How Insurers Performed

The Altadena-founded Every Fire Survivor’s Network opened a survey Monday asking Eaton and Palisades fire survivors to document how their insurers handled their claims, with results to be published insurer by insurer.

The survey lands in the middle of an active fight. The California Department of Insurance filed legal action against State Farm General Insurance Co. on May 4 citing 398 violations found in an examination of 220 sampled claims, Los Angeles County sued the insurer on Aug. 31, and State Farm has denied wrongdoing.

The network, which describes the effort on its own site as the nation’s first open-data survey of wildfire insurance behaviors by insurer, says the questionnaire takes about 15 minutes and adapts to each household, going deeper on underinsurance, smoke damage and the FAIR Plan while skipping questions that do not apply. It is offered in English, Spanish, Chinese and Korean, and asks for one response per household. It is posted at firesurvey.org.

The survey will stay open only until enough responses are collected to produce what the network calls statistically meaningful results, meaning the window is set by response volume rather than a calendar date.

The network says it retained Aimery Thomas, managing director of The Future Organization, as the survey’s design and security consultant, and that he advised on architecture, methodology and data security and will analyze and report on the results. According to the network, one set of questions was developed with law enforcement and insurance bad-faith litigators to capture facts that could reveal patterns of potentially unlawful conduct; another, designed by Thomas’s firm, measures trust, satisfaction, communication and adjuster competence.

A UCLA research team is to aggregate and analyze the responses and lead development of the public data tools, the network says. Gabriella Carmona, senior research analyst at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, is named in the announcement as part of that team.

Three products are planned, according to the network: an open dataset, an interactive visualization allowing users to filter by insurer and issue, and a public report on insurer performance that would rank companies where the data supports meaningful comparisons. The network says responses will be de-identified and combined with those of other survivors so that no individual household is identifiable, with additional protections where combinations of information could risk identifying a household.

The organization behind it is a survivor-led nonprofit founded in Altadena in the weeks after the January 2025 fire, when it was called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network. It says it now serves more than 10,000 survivors and allies, that about 1,600 firsthand accounts it collected earlier helped power the county’s lawsuit against State Farm, and that its work has helped unlock more than $100 million in insurance payments.

“If your insurer delayed, denied or underpaid you, say so. If they kept their promises and helped you recover, say that too,” Executive Director Joy Chen said in the announcement, calling the survey a chance for survivors to “create the record none of us had when the fires happened.”

The numbers behind the effort are large on both sides. Insurers had paid more than $23.7 billion to policyholders affected by the two fires as of March 3, and the state insurance department had recovered more than $280 million for survivors through direct intervention since January 2025, according to the department. State Farm says it received more than 13,700 claims from the fires, has closed 78 percent of them and has paid more than $6.2 billion, about $1 billion of it on smoke-damaged homes, the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time of the county filing. State Farm spokesperson Sevag Sarkissian said the company “strongly disagrees with Los Angeles County’s characterization of our wildfire claims response” and fully cooperated with the state investigation, the Chronicle reported.

The network’s own framing rests on its statement that 70 percent of insured Los Angeles fire survivors have reported delays, denials or underpayments, and on a Los Angeles Times analysis of the five most destructive California wildfires before 2025, which the network says found that only 38 percent of destroyed homes had been rebuilt eight years later.

The group has been pressing the same fight through the courts. It petitioned the insurance department on June 16 for full party status in the state’s enforcement case against State Farm, and has sued Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to keep that case from being settled before survivors are heard.

The survey is at firesurvey.org.

L.A. Fire Insurance Survey, open now and closing once enough responses are collected. Every Fire Survivor’s Network, Altadena. Online at firesurvey.org and efsurvivors.net. Free to participate.