Wildfire Claims: Suing the Utility Behind the Fire

A wildfire that destroys a neighborhood is, legally, rarely just “a disaster.” Increasingly, it is a liability case against a specific, identifiable, well-insured defendant: the utility whose power line arced onto dry grass, whose tree-trimming budget fell behind, or whose equipment kept running during a red-flag wind warning. Understanding how that liability actually works — and how differently it works depending on which state the fire happened in — is the difference between assuming there’s no one to hold responsible and understanding exactly who is.

Quick answer: In California, a doctrine called inverse condemnation can make a utility liable for wildfire damage its equipment substantially caused without any proof of negligence at all. Almost everywhere else, a claim requires proving ordinary negligence — a vegetation-management or equipment-maintenance failure that caused the fire. California’s 2019 AB 1054 created a roughly $21 billion Wildfire Fund and a new safety-certification standard, but did not eliminate utility liability itself. Property damage, personal injury and wrongful death claims from the same fire are legally distinct and often proceed together. Where the defendant is a public utility, an inverse condemnation claim is exempt from the short government-claims notice deadline that an ordinary negligence claim against that same entity would otherwise require.

Two Very Different Legal Standards, Depending on the State

California: inverse condemnation — liability without negligence

California is the significant outlier, and understanding why matters even for readers outside the state, because so much of the current, highest-profile wildfire litigation runs through it. Inverse condemnation is a doctrine rooted in the California Constitution’s takings clause (Article I, § 19), not in ordinary tort law: where a public improvement — including a utility’s power lines and equipment — substantially causes damage to private property, the entity that owns and operates it can be held liable regardless of whether it was negligent. The policy rationale is straightforward: the cost of a public benefit that happens to fall disproportionately on a few property owners should be spread across the whole benefiting community, not absorbed entirely by the unlucky few.

California courts extend this doctrine to investor-owned utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric — on essentially the same footing as a government-owned utility, because both perform an inherently public function and both hold the power of eminent domain. This is a large part of why California wildfire litigation looks so different from wildfire litigation almost anywhere else: a claimant generally does not need to prove the utility was careless, only that its equipment substantially caused the fire that damaged their property.

Nearly everywhere else: ordinary negligence

Outside California, wildfire liability against a utility almost always requires proving conventional negligence: that the utility failed to properly inspect, maintain or replace equipment; failed to clear vegetation to the required clearance distance from its lines; or failed to de-energize lines during a documented period of extreme fire danger, when a reasonably prudent utility would have. This is a materially higher bar than California’s inverse condemnation standard — causation alone is not enough; the claimant also has to show the utility’s conduct fell below what a reasonable utility would have done.

AB 1054 and the California Wildfire Fund

California’s 2019 legislative response to a wave of utility-caused fires — most prominently PG&E’s bankruptcy after the 2017 and 2018 fires — created two connected mechanisms:

• The California Wildfire Fund, a roughly $21 billion state-backed fund financed jointly by participating utilities and ratepayers, which a qualifying utility can draw on to help satisfy wildfire liability rather than absorbing it entirely on its own balance sheet or passing it directly to ratepayers through a rate case.
• A new Safety Certification process that changes the standard used to judge a utility’s conduct. A utility holding a valid safety certification at the time of a fire is presumed to have acted reasonably unless a challenger raises serious doubt — shifting the practical burden onto whoever disputes it. A utility without a valid certification instead bears the burden of proving its own conduct was reasonable.

It is worth being precise about what this legislation does and does not do: it does not eliminate inverse condemnation liability, and it does not mean a certified utility cannot be found liable. It changes how the utility’s own cost of that liability gets financed and, separately, adjusts the evidentiary burden in a prudence review — two different things from whether a fire victim has a valid claim.

Multiple Defendants, Contested Causation

Major wildfire litigation is rarely simple, single-defendant negligence, and three recent, extensively documented California fires illustrate why:

• The 2025 Eaton Fire (Altadena/Pasadena) is attributed, in the litigation to date, to alleged negligence by Southern California Edison, a private investor-owned utility. SCE has disputed liability while also opening a voluntary compensation program as an alternative to litigation — a structure our companion guide on wildfire settlement mechanisms covers directly.
• The 2025 Palisades Fire, by contrast, involves a public utility defendant — the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — and a genuinely contested causation picture: the fire’s origin was still under official investigation as of the most recent reporting, with some evidence pointing to a possible human-caused reignition from an earlier, smaller fire, while separate lawsuits allege a downed, energized LADWP power line caused a second ignition point hours after the fire had already broken out, and that the agency initially gave inaccurate information about whether that line was even energized.
• Both illustrate the same practical point from opposite directions: causation and the identity of the responsible party are not always obvious on day one, and a fire’s investigation staying open does not mean a claim cannot or should not be pursued now — plaintiffs’ own experts and discovery frequently develop the causation evidence a case actually needs.

Why the Defendant’s Legal Status Changes Your Procedure

This is one of the most consequential, and most overlooked, distinctions in a wildfire claim against a public utility like LADWP, as opposed to a privately owned one like SCE or PG&E:

• An ordinary negligence claim against a public entity generally triggers California’s Government Claims Act, requiring formal notice to the specific public entity — often within as little as six months — before a lawsuit can even be filed. Missing it can bar the claim entirely, the same short-notice trap our guide to suing a government entity describes in a different context.
• An inverse condemnation claim against that same public entity is expressly exempt from that notice requirement, under California Government Code § 905.1. This is a real, checkable, and frequently underappreciated procedural advantage of the inverse-condemnation theory specifically — one more reason the choice of legal theory in a wildfire case is not just about the standard of proof, it is about which deadlines even apply.
• A private, investor-owned utility defendant — SCE, PG&E — does not raise any of this. Ordinary limitations periods apply, without a government notice step.

Confirming, immediately, whether any defendant in your case is a public entity — and if so, whether a claim is being pursued on a theory that requires early notice — is a genuinely urgent first step that has nothing to do with how strong the underlying facts are.

Property Damage, Personal Injury and Wrongful Death — Together, But Legally Distinct

A destructive wildfire routinely produces more than one kind of claim from the same household, and it is worth understanding that these are analyzed, and sometimes timed, differently:

• Property damage — the home itself, its contents, and often the underlying land value where rebuilding costs exceed what a policy or settlement actually covers. Where your own insurer paid out and is separately pursuing the utility to recover what it paid, see the FAQ above on subrogation; a policyholder facing a real coverage gap after a total loss faces the broader underinsurance problem our guide to total loss and diminished value claims describes in the vehicle context, which raises a comparable underlying issue for a home. Your own homeowners policy claim runs on entirely different rules than any utility claim — see our guide to what your homeowners insurer actually owes after a wildfire for the actual-cash-value holdback, living-expense deadlines, and FAIR Plan mechanics that apply regardless of who caused the fire.
• Personal injury — smoke inhalation, burns, and injuries sustained during a chaotic evacuation, each requiring its own medical documentation exactly as in any other injury claim.
• Wrongful death — where the fire killed a family member, a legally separate claim with its own beneficiary rules and its own damages analysis, covered generally in our guide to wrongful death settlement amounts. Recent major wildfires have produced substantial wrongful death litigation alongside the property claims, and the two do not compete against each other for a fixed pool in the way multiple property claimants against a single small auto policy might.

Insurance Subrogation: A Parallel Track

Once an insurer pays a policyholder’s fire-damage claim, it frequently steps into the policyholder’s shoes to pursue the responsible utility directly for what it paid out — a subrogation claim, covered generally in our guide to medical liens and subrogation in a different context. In a major utility-caused wildfire, insurer subrogation claims can be enormous in aggregate — often larger in total dollar terms than the sum of individual survivor claims — and they draw against the same underlying pool of utility liability and, eventually, the same settlement fund. This is part of why the total size of an eventual settlement, not just your own damages, ends up mattering so much to what an individual claimant actually receives — the subject of our companion guide to how the PG&E, Edison and Hawaiian Electric wildfire settlements actually pay claims.

Evidence That Decides These Cases

• Physical evidence near the fire’s suspected origin point — utility equipment, downed lines, vegetation conditions — which is disturbed or destroyed by cleanup, rebuilding and weather far faster than most people expect
• Utility maintenance and inspection records for the specific equipment and line segment involved, along with vegetation-management and clearance records for that same area
• Weather and red-flag warning data for the relevant period, and whether the utility had a public safety power shutoff protocol in place and whether it was followed
• The utility’s own safety certification status at the time of the fire, in a California inverse-condemnation or prudence-review context
• Photographs, video and any available drone or satellite imagery of the fire’s spread pattern, which experts use to work backward toward a probable origin

Practical Steps

1. Prioritize safety, and document what you can only after it’s safe to do so.
2. Preserve any physical evidence on or near your property connected to the fire’s path or a suspected ignition point, before cleanup or rebuilding disturbs it.
3. Identify every defendant and every legal theory available — a public utility may face both an inverse condemnation claim and an ordinary negligence claim, with different deadlines attached to each.
4. Confirm immediately whether a government claims notice deadline applies, and to which specific public entity, if any defendant is publicly owned.
5. Document all three potential categories of loss — property, personal injury, and, where applicable, wrongful death — since each has its own evidentiary needs.
6. Check whether your insurer has paid a claim and is pursuing subrogation, and understand that this does not substitute for or limit your own separate claim.
7. Consult an attorney experienced in utility wildfire litigation specifically, given how state-specific and procedurally unusual this area is compared with ordinary personal injury practice.

Sources & Further Reading

• California Constitution, Article I, § 19 — the takings clause underlying inverse condemnation; California Government Code § 905.1 — exempting inverse condemnation claims from the Government Claims Act’s presentation requirement
• Assembly Bill 1054 (2019) — creating the California Wildfire Fund and the Safety Certification process under California Public Utilities Code § 451.1
• California Public Utilities Code § 451 — the general “just and reasonable service” standard underlying utility negligence and prudence review in wildfire cases
• Reporting and court filings on the 2025 Eaton Fire (Southern California Edison) and 2025 Palisades Fire (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) litigation, both still developing as of this guide’s publish date — confirm current status against the relevant court’s own docket rather than any single summary
• See our guides to suing a government entity for a fall on public property for how government claims notice deadlines generally work, wrongful death settlement amounts for how a death claim from the same fire is valued, medical liens and subrogation for the general subrogation mechanism insurers use here, total loss and diminished value claims for the underinsurance problem a destroyed property can face, and our companion guide to how the PG&E, Edison and Hawaiian Electric wildfire settlements actually pay claims for what happens once a case like this reaches resolution