Wildfire Victim AdviceBy Lisa Mattson, Tubbs Fire SurvivorSanta Rosa, CAlisa@lisamattsonwine.comFile updated: 12/9/2018

My home was badly damaged in the Tubbs Fire of 2017, and my garage and yard destroyed. I feel as if I could write a book on handling insurance claims, dealing with smoke damaged personal property and rebuilding in a disaster zone in California. More than one year after the fire, we are still not home—nowhere close. After the fire, we kept hearing officials say the phrase, “This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.” Boy, did they mean it. Below is a compilation of advice I’ve given to other fire victims based on my experience. I am not an attorney, and this document in no way should be taken as legal advice. Also, every company and claim is different. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories of people in Sonoma County getting jerked around by their insurance, but also heard about pretty good experiences. We were lucky in some ways, unlucky in others.

This does not include advice about how to write an insurance policy if you’re worried about losing your home in a disaster—or tips for how to prepare a defensible space around your home to protect it from a fire. I have plenty of recommendations for those areas too, but I’ll leave that for another document.

YOUR HEALTHFirst and foremost, it is so important not to forget about your health— especially right after a disaster when the fire is still not contained. The toll taken on your mind and body while being under a high-stress disaster alert for days, unable to see your home, is easy to ignore. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus on work. I drank lots of coffee. My muscles ached. I started to have trouble concentrating. I began to forget things. I would swear on my life that I’d done something but had not. I couldn’t have a basic conversation with my husband without both of us getting angry. We could hardly speak in full sentences at times. I felt like we weren’t on the same page. Take a deep breath and remember that this is how your mind and body are reacting to the disaster. Try not to give in to the anger or the fatigue. Try to find the time to meditate, to take deep breaths. See if there is a way to get to a safe place where the air is clean, and you can see beauty again. Try to reflect on the positive. Go get a massage if you can. And most importantly, don’t forget to talk about your feelings. Talk to neighbors, friends, family, strangers. Talking is one of the easiest way to start to cope and to heal.

ACCEPTING DONATIONSI felt guilty applying for any aid/accepting donations right after the disaster since my home didn’t burn down. What I didn’t realize is that it would take four months to determine that we were around $200,000 underinsured. And the number keeps going up every month. By the time we realized that we could use some financial help, the wildfire relief fund organized by Redwood Credit Union had been closed

and the remaining around $30 million was moved to charities that we did not qualify for (senior citizens, children, etc.). I complained to the RCU about it, and they tried to find us some help, such as a local rotary that was giving out grants to help take out dead trees and replant others. Their deadline had also passed 30 days before I contacted them. The Red Cross contacted us the summer after the fire and said they’d like to give us $1,500. That was awesome. I also found a local wine company that was giving out $500 gift cards, and I applied for one of those. The moral here is that even victims who didn’t lose everything shouldn’t feel guilty about accepting help because it may take you many months to really understand the full extend of your losses. You could always re-gift the donation to someone else in six months if you find that your insurance actually did cover all of your losses.

INSURANCE: GENERAL ADVICEFirst, request an email copy of your full policy. I’ve heard that some fire victims have trouble getting insurance companies to send the total policy with all coverage outlined. You need to start there. We weren’t allowed back into our neighborhood for 12 days, and we did not have any issue with getting our insurance company to activate our Loss of Use to pay for housing. If you are getting jerked around by your insurance saying that they cannot pay any longer for a hotel until they can survey your probably, contact United Policyholders and see if one of their attorneys can talk to for quick advice. Phone: (415) 393-9990 or https://www.uphelp.org/about/contactus. Their FAQ page is a great place to start: https://www.uphelp.org/pubs/faqs-about-home-insurance-claims-california. Personally, knowing what I know now, if I had enough Loss of Use insurance and my insurance company staffers were being this cold this early in the claim, I’d go straight to filing a claim against them with the State Insurance Commissioner’s office. See links below on your legal rights surrounding insurance in California below, as well as the link to file a complaint. When communicating with our insurance about the claim, we had to ask for clarification of our coverage on EVERYTHING. Our insurance agent was not proactive or thorough in communicating the full scope of our insurance policy. Read your policy thoroughly. See if you can get an attorney to review it for free to give you advice on what questions to ask your insurance. When you ask in writing, they have to respond. Get everything in writing.

It's important to familiarize yourself with your rights, especially the California Fair Claims Settlement Practices Regulations. Carefully ready CA. Ins. Code sec. 790.034 (b) and Cal. Insurance Code sec. 790.03. Understand the 15-day and 60-day requirements, and make sure you communicate with your insurance company that you know your legal rights and their requirements under the law. https://www.uphelp.org/pubs/guide-your-insurance-legal-rights-california?fbclid=IwAR0A7SGaeL7H99casGLeYmgsTVuSOFSAmHk273MOuh-g8nbH28uQfPtYJ-M http://www.search-california-law.com/research/section/ca/INS/2.2.1.21/index.html?

fbclid=IwAR16yN9c8lLQ04ImdEXiMHQD9XrkQhsmWrsLBAOuy58dKciL13kRT2iwn-M http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/130-laws-regs-hearings/05-CCR/fair-claims-regs.cfm#settlements

If your insurance hasn’t paid after 60 days of you filing your personal property damages spreadsheet, and if they are giving you the run-around, don’t feel guilty about reporting them to the California State Insurance Commissioner’s office. You can file a complaint online: http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0500-about-us/05-contact/. I was surprised how quickly we got checks and an apology letter once I’d filed a complaint with the state. Remember: The longer the insurance company holds onto the money you’re entitled to, the more money they make off interest. They work for their employer, not for you, so their loyalties lie there. Don’t forget that.

LOSS OF USE INSURANCE COVERAGEMake sure you understand your Loss of Use coverage. Some of our neighbors had policies that allowed them to rent a home of equal living standards—Fair Rental Value. That means their insurance companies were paying $10,000-$15,000 per month in rent for housing for people that lived in mansions in the Santa Rosa hills. Some policies just have a maximum Loss of Use sum. Unfortunately, that is our situation. We have $100,000 in Loss of Use. That’s the limit. Based on the cost renting a house in a nice neighborhood in Sonoma County, we will run out of insurance coverage 18 months after the fire. We’ve used 13 months right now. Our house is only half-way finished. Our garage construction has not begun. Friends who lost their homes entirely were told two years before they’d be home. They haven’t broke ground on their rebuilds either. It could be a little longer for some. Look at monthly rent costs and do the math to determine how many months your rent will be covered if you have a ceiling on your Loss of Use coverage. If you can find a rental that include utilities, that saves you money because insurance reimbursements you for rent. We also thought our storage unit rental went under Loss of Use, but our insurance is coding it under Personal Property. That’s great for us because we were over-insured in Personal Property and underinsured everywhere else. Be sure to ask for clarification on where these types of costs will hit your policy’s coverage.

INSURANCE ON A PARTIALLY BURNED HOMEThe good news is that my house didn’t burn down. In some ways, the bad news is that my house didn’t burn down. It’s way easy to rebuild from scratch due to all the building code upgrades begin required on our property. We don’t have the option of getting an insurance payout because our house didn’t burn all the way down, and we have a mortgage, so we can’t just take the repair money and run. We have to rebuild. Fortunately, we were able to find a contractor who specializes in remodel/repair construction tied to insurance claims. We contacted him within two weeks of the fire. These types of contractors know how to deal with the insurance companies and the special software insurance adjusters use for determining the cost of your repairs. If your house has fire/water/smoke damage, it’s important that

your insurance agent’s adjuster and your contractor agree upon a scope of work ASAP. You need a contractor who understands the Xactimate software that insurance companies use, and ours did. https://www.uphelp.org/pubs/xactimate-demystified (I don’t believe that new construction builders typically work with this software.) Having our contractor and adjuster debate back and forth of Xactimate estimates took four months for us in Santa Rosa, but the insurance adjuster kept making mistakes and changing prices—low-balling us on everything from tile floors (we were very clear with him that we had limestone floors, and he still kept putting $4 per square foot for ceramic in the paperwork). He measured several of our walls wrong, which screwed up the calculations on cost. (It’s true that insurance companies will try to wear you down by switching adjusters often; I know someone who had to deal with 10 different adjusters over the course of a eight months on her Tubbs fire claim. We just had one incompetent adjuster that cost us months of wasted time.) After six months had passed since the start of the claim, when we still hadn’t been able to get an arranged upon scope of work, I finally reported the insurance company to the state. I did this 60 days after the meeting where the final scope of work was supposed to occur. Finally, things started to move. But we still never got a final, accurate scope of work on the estimated cost of the rebuild. (We will need that for the PG&E lawsuit if they are found liable for the Tubbs fire.) Our insurance finally agreed, after seven months, to just pay out all of our policy in full except for Loss of Use and Personal Property. Our damages exceed the full amount of coverage we had in Dwelling A, Other Structures, Building Code Upgrades, Landscaping, Debris Removal.

INSURANCE COVERAGE ON OTHER STRUCTURES Review the Other Structures section carefully on your policy. Other Structures are those not attached to the dwelling, and their coverage is usually just a small percentage of the entire Dwelling A coverage. This usually includes fences, retaining walls, gazebos, decks. Our garage was detached, so it was an other structure. We didn’t realize that, and we only had $50,000 in Other Structures coverage. A new metal roof for our garage will cost $15,000 alone. We expect to be about $150,000-$200,000 under-insured on Other Structures when this is all over. We had to fight our insurance on covering a flagstone terrace that was attached to the house. We did not give up and finally got it covered.

INSURANCE COVERAGE FOR DEBRIS REMOVAL Review your insurance policy. There is usually a debris removal section that is a portion of your Dwelling A coverage. Our insurance agent did not explain or provide advice in this area. The way our policy is written, if we maxed out our Dwelling A coverage, we'd get like $25K for debris removal. We didn’t know if we would max out our policy with a partial burn since the insurance adjuster took six months to agree upon a scope of work, so we signed up for FEMA debris removal, which was the worst mistake we ever made. I say this because I later found out that a private company would have done it for $10,000—but remember, our debris was a two-car garage with a standard slab foundation—not a house. I’ve talked to people who lived in different parts of Santa Rosa who did private debris removal, and these are

the prices they quoted: $12,000 for a 1900-square-foot house and three out buildings on a flat lot in Glen Ellen, $18,000-$25,000 for an average-sized house on a flat lot in Coffey Park, $40,000 for an average-sized home on a sloped lot in Coffey Park and $65,000 for a very large hillside home with complex foundation in Fountaingrove. A few of these folks told me that they showed the debris removal company how much coverage they had, and the companies matched the price. Some people in Santa Rosa used JM Environmental, located in the Sacramento area, for their debris removal, so they should be able to provide comparable quotes on price in the Paradise area. If you have $20k-$30k in insurance coverage for debris removal, it’s worth getting a free quote for private. Compared to using FEMA, going private could save you three months on the rebuild time line and ensure accountability for damages if the contractor screws anything up. Signing up with FEMA for debris removal cost us three more months on our timeline to rebuild, and repairing the damages the FEMA subcontractor made to our property will probably total $15,000. (They destroyed an underground electrical line and two parts of a salvageable driveway—one of which happened because they dragged a burned car up our driveway instead of lifting it and the other from them using a bulldozer when they should be using precision tools.) Damage to concrete driveways can be avoided with a detailed contractor who cut/break the end of your driveway at the joint where it connected to the house rather than just using a giant crane with a scooper to scrape everything away. FEMA, of course, has sent letters saying that they have no obligation to pay for our damages. Lawsuits may result from several of these types of horror stories from Santa Rosa. If you’ve got the money in your bank or in your policy, go private. If you’re underinsured, go with FEMA. There are positive and horribly negative stories from those who used FEMA after Tubbs. Make sure you are there the day they scrape the lot and try to keep them from damaging your property further. With private debris removal, there will be a business contract and accountability that protects you and your property, and the work should happen much faster than a government-led program. Again, line this up sooner rather than later, because in the Tubbs fire, every lot had to have special soil tests conducted after debris removal. This added about two months onto the wait. Lots with private debris removal moved through the process much faster. And if FEMA or the EPA tells you that you need to use the government system because they have the proper certification and experience do deal with the toxicity/debris, ask them why they sub-contracted a great deal of the debris removal in Santa Rosa to companies like Ghilotti Construction, who do not specialize in fire debris. They are a general engineering construction company that grades lots and builds driveways and retaining walls. I could have hired Ghilotti to do private debris removal, and then they would have been held accountable for the damages. FEMA sub-contracted all of its debris removal to third parties.

Some people have also asked about being worried that FEMA will come after them later to try to get part of their insurance policy to help cover their cost incurred for paying for your debris removal. I’d talk to someone at Uphelp.org about that, but my understanding is that any claim FEMA makes to try to get money for your debris removal is between FEMA and your insurance company. If you had debris removal

coverage, your insurance may hold that amount back in the payout to give to FEMA. FEMA contacted our insurance asking for reimbursement about nine months after the fire, six months after debris removal occurred. If you’ve got trees to remove, get that done and invoices to your insurance before FEMA comes asking for money. (We waited six months after the fire to start removing trees, and it was almost too late.) We used all of our debris removal money on removing other debris on the property like trees, so there is nothing left for FEMA.

ASSESSING YOUR PROPERTY FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER A WILDFIREIt took two weeks before Fountaingrove residents were able to access their homes after the Tubbs fire. Sadly, other fires have taken even longer. The waiting part is horrible, but you can be proactive in a few areas, like researching storage units and tentatively reserving one for your valuables that survived. When you get to your home, assess everything very carefully. You may be in shock over what you are seeing. I had to drive three miles through the burn zone to see my house. I saw six houses out of hundreds still standing along that drive. Try to focus. My first instinct was to assess damage, see if anything was stole and then start packing up valuables so they wouldn’t get looted. That was an okay plan, but documenting the extent of your possible damage is also key. It’s important to perform each of these tasks:

Be prepared to need equipment like hammer, nails, plywood, ladder, tarps, moving boxes, lots of newspaper and moving tape. Hopefully the nearest home improvement store is not far away. We’d seen enough photos to know that we had some structural burn and a broken window on the back, so we came into the neighborhood with all the tools we needed since entry was still limited and controlled by the government. I had to wrap my pottery and artwork in smoky towels because I didn’t think to bring newspaper—and I didn’t bring enough boxes.

If you are very concerned about your water safety, pick up a water treatment test kit and test your water as soon as you’re allowed back in. (SEE DAMAGES TO UTILITIES SECTION FOR LINKS.)

Walk the entire property inside and out. Survey the damage slowly and carefully. Take extensive photos, smart phone videos and notes too. Inside, check for smoke damage, water or fire damage. Document your damage. Document the number of number of trees, plants and other personal belongings and structures that were damaged or incinerated. This isn’t just for insurance purposes and accuracy of your claim; if you decide to enter a lawsuit against who started the fire, your attorney will need this documentation.

Go into your attic if you have one to see if you smell smoke up there. See my other notes about insulation under SMOKE DAMAGE TO YOUR HOME.

Consider hiring a Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) to offer a third party analysis of your property’s smoke damage. This person will look out for your best interest, unlike your insurance company who is looking out for theirs. https://www.uphelp.org/sites/default/files/Smoke%20Damage%20.pdf

Check the edges of your house if you had flower beds with mulch all the way to your siding/foundation. You may want to check inside your dry wall in

those burned exterior areas to see if the mulch had caused your wood framing to burn. We did not discover fire damage like this at our house until we started demo six months after the fire.

Make the decision on if you’ll need the storage unit. If the home has any burn damage, you may be out for many months if the damage ends up requiring a building permit. If you are unsure if you can make the decision yet, then try to see if you can find a fire damage contractor to come assess the situation. In Fountaingrove, there were people with homes still standing that only had smoke damage that were out of their homes for 1-3 months due to smoke treatment, removal of smoke damaged insulation and carpet and water contamination.

Pack up all the personal belongings that you do not want stolen or lost. Computers, other electronics, artwork, pottery, photo albums, favorite clothes. It’s worth taking these out just for piece of mind and to have something of your own around you to bring a sense of normalcy.

PERSONAL PROPERTY First, I pray that other wildfire victims had replacement value coverage for their personal property. Insurance will pay the full cost of what it would cost you to buy it new today. If you don’t have this level of coverage, they depreciate the value of your five-year-old couch, for example.

One of the biggest frustrations after a fire is being required to fill out a massive spreadsheet of all of our belongings losses in order to get a 100% pay-out on personal property. There are spreadsheet examples at Uphelp that can make this process easier for you. Uphelp was created by survivors of the Oakland Hills fire back in the 1990s. It's an incredibly useful resource in many areas: https://www.uphelp.org/. Our neighbors were offered an 80% payout on their Personal Property if they didn’t want to fill out the spreadsheet. Many people opt for this if they lost everything in the fire.

We’ve only received 80% payment from our insurance on our spreadsheet. We will only get 100% if we continue to submit receipts for everything we’ve replaced. We have two years to do that, but have decided against it. Thirteen months of paperwork has been enough already.

You may have to go back and forth with your insurance on the true value of the items you lost. My advice is this: When you create your spreadsheet, include web links to the exact item you had or the comparable replacement. Be very specific in your description of items. Don’t say “Black evening dress.” Say “Black Ellie Tahari 1974 Design Collection Dress.” Don’t just list a picture frame. List the material, manufacturer and size. Most insurance companies have a person who evaluates your spreadsheet and prices things out. Every single time we sent an updated sheet, she would always put the CHEAPEST replacement she could find. We got smart to it really fast. It’s better to tell your insurance person upfront that you know the drill, you know how they operate, and you have included the replacement value of the

exact items you owned in that spreadsheet—with proof of replacement cost. And if you get a spreadsheet back that has marked all of your values down, you know your rights, and you will file a claim with the State Insurance Commissioner’s office.

This paperwork is going to take a lot of time. We had 1,200 line items on our biggest spreadsheet of property losses. We had to print and number every single receipt or proof of replacement cost and mail a giant packet to our insurance. We submitted our first big spreadsheet in January, and we didn’t get our 80% payout until May. If I would have included legal wording about the 60-day window in our first submission, maybe the time could have been sped up. Still, all the back and forth with them low-balling all of our replacement costs took an extra two months.

SMOKE DAMAGE TO CLOTHING/PERSONAL PROPERTYThis is for those who will be dealing with smoke damage or partial fire damage on a home. Our first instinct was that we needed to get a company to do smoke damage treatment on the house, our clothing and belongings ASAP. We were very concerned about being looted and also getting our clothes back. Make sure to talk to an attorney (plenty of free advice out there) or do online research about which items beyond clothing should be written off even though they look fine (like computers and appliances). It all depends on how much smoke/fire/water damage your home has. Since ours had all three of those, we were able to write off computers, televisions, and large and small appliances.

Know what you’re getting yourself into if you hire the big franchise companies for clothing and personal belongings smoke damage treatment. This is my personal experience with using ServoPro in Santa Rosa. ServPro handles hard goods and uses a third party for soft goods, i.e. clothing and blankets—Brightleaf Textile Restoration. ServoPro has a local office, but their main processing and storage facility is in Lodi. ServPro was extremely helpful and very responsive. They told us they could be at the house within 48 hours to start boxing things up. We were still waiting for a call back from a local smoke repair company. What ServPro didn’t tell us is that even though they boxed up our house and took all of our clothes in late October, we wouldn’t be getting any of that back until the end of January. Yes, the wine country firestorm was an unprecedented event, so they were dealing with unprecedented volume of smoke damage repairs. But what they don’t tell you is the likelihood of whether not your things will actually be able to be repaired. They are in the business of making money, and they have accounts set up with the insurance companies to make direct payments easier. The bills to have items smoke treated are big, and this goes against your personal property coverage. If you have a lot of coverage, then don’t worry about it. If you don’t have a lot of personal property coverage, it’s in your best interest to only send things to ServPro/Brightleaf that you don’t mind writing off if they don’t come back clean or don’t come back at all because they get lost at a giant cleaning facility. Most importantly, talk to a local drycleaner about your favorite types of clothes first. Do not waste your time with the following items. We paid Servpro/Brightleaf to take all of these things, and they either didn’t come back at all or were still smoke damaged:

all leather goods (shoes, belts, purses) all hats anything with a cushion (couches, chairs, mattresses) * pillows were the only

exception, and that was hit and miss really thick fabric or woven items (croquet blankets, thick robes)

We also received items back that belonged to other people, and had several items missing, like glassware, which was probably broken in transit, and sometimes the company returned our calls and picked up items or tried to find missing items. Once all of our “hard goods” were returned in June, they stopped returning our emails. I called again in September when I realized that my wedding dress and all of my formal evening gowns never came back either. I talked to the manager. She said she would look for them. It’s been two months and no response. So, your home might have survived the fire, and you got to hold your special belongings again—and then you trusted them to a smoke damage cleaner—and you lost them anyway. Again, this is my experience after the Tubbs fire. Yours could be totally different.

Brightleaf completed all smoke damage treatments for our clothes and bedding. I think it took about three months to get our clothes back—right around February 1, 2018—and lots of things smelled funny and had stains from treatment. But our dress shorts and ties never looked better. I recommend the following based on my experience:

Take your favorite and most expensive clothes out and don’t give them to a big facility that is handling thousands of disaster claims at a time. Find a local smoke damage repair company with great reviews who can smoke treat those items with care and ensure they don’t get damaged or lost. We had situations where we got a dress or shirt back, but they lost the belt and the ties for those garments, so we had to throw them away. And, many favorite pieces that had stains, had shrunk or just smelled too weird to ever wear. 

Take any cotton items like underwear, socks, T-shirts, towels and workout clothes and clean those yourself. If you Google how to get smoke damage out of clothes, you’ll see a trick that involves baking soda and vinegar. I used this one for some gym clothes, underwear, socks and towels: https://rainbowintl.com/blog/how-to-get-smoke-damage-out-of-clothes. Didn’t have the chemical smell that the treated items did. And we were able to wear the clothes within a day. 

You can still write off clothes with insurance after they come back from a repair company if they’re not to your standard. Don’t get too excited when you put on your favorite hat again. Not sure what’s happening chemically with those treatments, but we found that sweat reactivated the smoke smell in some clothes, especially hats and shoes. So, we had to start a second spreadsheet of losses for items that came back “clean” from Brightleaf. Having insurance pay for smoke damage treatment of clothes and then having insurance pay to replace those items later can work for people that have plenty of personal property damage insurance and for those that have replacement value coverage. You just have to weigh the odds because it might be cheaper to just buy new things, and then you don’t have to worry about the

chemicals the clothes were treated with. Ask them to give you a quote in writing for the average price they charge per piece to clean a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, a dress.

SMOKE DAMAGE TO YOUR HOMERead all about your rights and coverage surrounding smoke damage: https://www.uphelp.org/sites/default/files/Smoke%20Damage%20.pdf. We consulted with a few attorneys immediately after the fire about our partially burned situation. They told us that dealing with smoke damage only is very difficult with insurance agents and that you should spend the money and hire a licensed hygienist to survey your damages and the livability of your home. (Because we had a combination of fire, water and smoke damage, we never had an issue with our insurance being not willing to pay for new flooring, dry wall, carpet, insulation, etc.—the issue was how much they were willing to pay to replace those things.) Companies like Servpro and ServiceMaster also handle the smoke damage repair to the actual dwelling, versus personal property. I have heard good things about this from others who have done so. We still aren’t to the point in the building repairs to need their services. You want to make sure to fight with your insurance about getting your insulation replaced as part of this process. Thirteen months after the fire, our contractor was finally able to open up the ceiling in unburned areas of the home to prepare for the sprinkler lines (see building code upgrades). THE HOUSE SMELLS LIKE SMOKE ALL OVER AGAIN. The smoke got into our insulation in unburned areas of the home even though we do not have an attic or central AC/heat vents. But, it would probably cost $100,000 to remove and replace the rest of our dry wall and insulation, and our repair costs have already exceeded our insurance coverage on the dwelling. We have to roll the dice. Some homes still standing in Fountaingrove—houses that did not have any fire damage to the structure—had issues with smelly insulation and had to have the repair done twice. Same with ozone treatments to try to get the smoke out of their drapes and carpets. Review your policy. Ask Uphelp for advice. You are probably entitled to replacement if the damage is there. Drapes, walls, unfinished wood—these all need to be treated for smoke. Our walls also have to be sealed with smoke blocker. All of our wood cabinets in the house that survived the fire had to be resealed and/or painted. I haven’t heard of anyone yet that was able to save their carpets. Better to replace those.

DAMAGE TO UTILITIESThere were a handful of houses in my neighborhood that survived the Santa Rosa fires. Ours was the one with the worst damage. If you’re among the lucky ones with only smoke damage, be prepared for delays in moving back home that result from the damages to your infrastructure—telephone, electricity, water, gas, sewer.

Telephone/internet: call your service provider immediately and make sure they have suspended your service and you don’t get charged.

Gas: call your service provider immediately and make sure they have suspended your service and you don’t get charged.

Electricity: talk to your city to see when power will be destroyed. Inspect your electrical box for damages and/or hire a contractor to do so. Our electrical box and gas meter were attached to the destroyed garage. We had to pay $6,000 to have a temporary power pole put it at our house since the electrical box for our house was destroyed.

Water: Be sure to have a lab run tests on your water. FGL in Chico is a good place to start: http://www.fglinc.com. Water lines and pump systems burned underground throughout Fountaingrove. If your water pipes burned, chemicals could be in your water system. Some neighbors with homes in the burn zone had benzene water filtration systems installed before the moved back home for piece of mind. Cost was $8,000. Our SUP pump was incinerated, and we had to jump through a lot of hoops to even get our water turned back on. City of Santa Rosa wanted a back-flow test done to show it worked before turning on the water, but we needed water to test the back flow. This took months to sort out.

Documentation on water safety and damages to utilities may be needed in order to get your insurance to pay for extended loss of use coverage. Just be prepared that even though your home might have survived, infrastructure damages could take a while to be fixed in order for you to be able to move home.

REBUILDING If you are simply updating your existing house plans and are short on insurance coverage, consider hiring a draftsman, not an architect. Updating your house plans to Title 24 standards also takes time and money; you'll also have to pay a Title 24 consultant too. And structural engineers and maybe a geo-technical engineer. We changed two doors and a window on our house and used a prominent architect who had build our home originally in 2003, and the four months of work that took totaled about $30K. Hiring the structural engineer to verify that our changes to the doors would not harm the integrity to the home cost us another $15K, and $3K for the geotechnical engineer to take a core sample of our foundation to prove it was fine. (This caused $5K in damages to our patio, by the way.) We then did more homework and changed our strategy because the costs were not sustainable. We found a draftsman to create plans for rebuilding our garage with a granny unit. Draftsman fee was about $20K; estimate from our architect was about $50K. You can hire a draftsman for an entire home rebuild design. They have the same skills, but don’t have the architectural accreditation that can cost you lots more $$$. Keep in mind my experience is with Santa Rosa and Bay Area engineers and designers in an area where thousands of homes were lost. Butte, Redding and Mendocino costs could be very different, but with all of the fires we’ve had throughout the state, there just aren’t enough workers to fill the need at every level of the home building process.After losing so much, we had the deep desire to make some lemonade out of the situation. We decided to rebuild the destroyed two-car garage as the four-car garage of our dreams with a 1,000-square-foot granny unit attached. We got some ballpark prices per square foot before hiring the draftsman to design the garage—about

$150 for the downstairs garage and probably $300 for the apartment. What we didn’t realize is that we would end up paying $30K out of pocket in design and engineer fees in order to get completed plans that could be given to contractors so we could get accurate quote to build. After we spent all the money and submitted the garage plans to the city for permitting, we started getting the build quotes in, and the average price was around $800,000!!! Who in their right mind would spend that much money on a garage? So, we’ve most likely blown $30,000 and lost a year of our rebuild time chasing a dream. We still have a giant hole in front of our house where the garage once stood and are just wrecked with disappointment. The lesson here: get a legitimate contractor bid on how much it costs to replace exactly what you had before you go trying to make lemonade our of your fire lemon, or you might be left with even greater disappointments a year from now.

ENGINEERSYour rebuild probably needs many engineers; I lost count at five. First, a land surveyor needs to survey the property. This took at least eight weeks due to supply/demand. Ask your contractor about best timing, but there should be no reason why you can’t at least get a land surveyor booked early. Get into the queue. It’s a long one. You’ll need a geotechnical engineer to run soil tests and tell you if the ground is viable for building the type of structure you want. Even if you are rebuilding the same house, you’ll probably have to pay to have this done again. Structural engineer makes sure the building your designer created will be structurally sound. Civil engineer is needed for plot plan evaluation, making sure the drainage, driveways, retaining walls and slopes are good. You’ll also need a sprinkler engineer (see building code upgrades). Our draftsman waited until he was done with the first round of the design to begin the search for all of these engineers. The process of hiring them and getting their reports and incorporating into the plans took almost four months. If I would have known sooner, I would have started getting quotes from all of these engineers right at the beginning of the design process, so there were signed contracts and we were in the queue. The sooner you get them lined up, the better. By using the original land surveyor and geotechnical engineers who worked on our property in 2003 when it was built, we saved some money.

If you are having trouble finding available vendors, some people in Santa Rosa used structural engineers from southern California and just flew them up. It was faster and cheaper. Kathy Hamilton from Fountaingrove is chronicling their rebuild on a blog, which can also be helpful: http://tubbsfire-our-rebuild.com. I think she brought engineers from the south central coast to keep her rebuild moving quickly. We ended up hiring a structural engineer out of Utah for our garage after the sticker shock of minor updates to the house plans. This decision saved time and lots of money. We are considering a contractor out of Fresno to rebuild the garage, and providing their crew with housing. That’s how high the costs are for local builders—and how short Sonoma County is on available construction labor.

BUILDING CODE UPGRADES

I believe this varies per city, but if you are remodeling/repairing more than a certain percentage of your house, it will have to be brought up to new building code standards. Title 24, CALGreen and HERS are all new sustainable building standards that are required in new homes or remodels. Our partial burn of 10% of the home, coupled with the water and smoke damage, required us to pull a permit for the repairs and bring the house up to code. Title 24 updates to our house plans took about four weeks. (All windows had to be replaced to meet Title 24 energy efficiency code, for example.) CALGreen and HERS are much longer processes that take place throughout the build, but in Santa Rosa, we were required to have certified CALGreen and HERS documentation that our plans adhered to the guidelines BEFORE we could submit our plans to the city to rebuild our garage. (CALGreen and HERS consultant quoted us $2,400 for CALGreen and $2,200 for HERS review/certification of the plans and build for a four-car garage with a 1000-square-foot apartment. I assume the price goes up with more square footage.) We learned all of this two days before we planned to submit, which slowed us down another two weeks scrambling to find an energy consultant to help with the consultation. (A week later, we found another energy consultant offering the same service for $1000—less than half the price—so make sure you start getting quotes early.) Even though our house did not burn down, we are being required to bring it up to CALGreen and HERS standards. This progress has just begun, and it’s going to be a nightmare. We are hoping they don’t make us replace our toilets, lights and other items that were not damaged in the fire. The cost for CALGreen certification on our 2400-square-foot home is estimated at $1,800 plus $120 per hour for site visits. For a 2600-square-foot garage and ADU, the estimate is $2,400 for CALGreen and $2,300 for HERS.

These types of building code upgrades are considered soft costs. When a builder cost you a price per square footage to rebuild, that price is for hard costs of construction. It doesn’t include architects, engineers and all these green building certifications. Our soft costs on a partially damaged house are estimated around $50K—we did make minor change to the original plans of replacing two burned doors and an adjoining window to retractable NanaWalls. Regardless, that price is ridiculous.

Sprinkler systems are also now required in California: http://osfm.fire.ca.gov/codedevelopment/residentialsprinklerandcacodes. If you have to pull a permit to fix your house, you’ll likely have to install sprinklers. Hire your sprinkler system engineer ASAP. The process from getting quotes to having the system installed took about five months for us! We started looking in May, and it took forever to get quotes. Not enough sub-contractors in this field for the demand from new construction before the fires and then all the fire rebuilds. We finally got two bids in September, and one was from a sprinkler engineering firm in Bakersfield. Their quote was $5,000 less, so we went with them. But, two months later, our contractor still had not seen the plans. The fire department recently declined the first sprinkler system design plan for our house, so now we go back to the end of the queue. Install date is set for the first week of December. I am holding

my breath. I’ve heard of many fire victims frustrated with the delays in their rebuilds because of sprinkler system approvals and installation. Most sprinklers submitted are declined because the designs don’t have tank systems, and the house water lines are too small to carry the water. Your water system needs to have enough power to even pump a sprinkler system, and this is also causing issue for many of us, so that’s something to potentially be prepared for as well. The water lines in our neighborhood are one-inch in diameter, and the fire department says that’s not big enough to carry the water for sprinklers.

In my experience, the average price quote for a sprinkler system design and install for a 2,400-square-foot house in Santa Rosa was around $12,000. This would fall under Building Code Upgrades in your insurance policy, not Dwelling A. We also have to buy a sprinkler tank system. This can cost around $2,000 to $3,000. We also have to pay our contractor to demo several parts of our ceiling for the lines to be installed, and then we’ll have to pay for the repairs to replace all the drywall.

INSURANCE REIMBURSEMENTS DURING CONSTRUCTIONWe have a mortgage on our house, which means that our insurance company would not release funds directly to us. We could just take the money and run, right? So, the money to repair the house goes to the bank that holds our mortgage. They will only release funds as checks payable to both my husband and the general contractor. The general contractor is supposed to pay all the bills and then show proof of payment and then the reimbursement comes. You can read all about this on Uphelp: https://www.uphelp.org/pubs/getting-your-mortgage-company-release-insurance-proceeds. That means that when my husband paid for materials, it created paper trail issues with us getting reimbursed. We will have to just settle up the bills with our contractor at the end of construction when the final insurance check goes to him. We also had to front our contractor money when he didn’t have enough funds in his own account to pay for materials or subcontractor fees. Our bank also uses a third party to handle insurance claim payments, and we found them to be incompetent and slow to pay. They forgot to send the first check they agreed to release. They also sent one check to the wrong address. This whole process has been very frustrating and complicated. It would be even worse if we didn’t have enough money in our savings account to pitch in and pay upfront for some of the repairs.

REBUILD TIME LINE One of the biggest pieces of advice I have is this: plan ahead. You have to be proactive. Always be thinking of what’s next in the rebuild—what will your job site need eight weeks from now. It’s the only way to manage all of the massive delays during disasters and a major labor shortage.

You have to be the best project manager you can be. Stay on top of your contractor. Have a monthly meeting where you talk about what he or she is going to be needing two months from now—tile choices, paint colors, a sub-contractor for a new septic system.

Designing a two-story garage with an upstairs apartment and getting it submitted for approval to the city will end up taking six months. START NOW! Don’t wait. We waited eight months before we started working on our garage rebuild and focused on the house repairs first. Big mistake. Thirteen months after the fire, and we just submitted the build plans to the city. We’ll be lucky if the garage is built by next summer—if at all. The most frustrating thing is that you truly don’t know the cost to build until you have spent the time and money designing a plan. Our first bid on building the garage with apartment was astronomical. Laughable. It’s entirely possible that we can’t afford to build what we want, and we spent $30,000 to get to the point where we knew potential building costs. I’m starting to see lots go on the market in Santa Rosa that come with rebuild plans approved by the city. It’s very sad because it means that they probably spent a year on the rebuild process only to realize that they cannot afford to build the house—or it just doesn’t make financial sense to take out a mortgage for more than a million dollars on new construction, even if you can afford it. The cost to build is 30-40% more than it was two years ago—supply vs. demand, tariffs, etc.

Updating an existing house plan to meet new building code standards with minor edits to the plan took five months. This was my experience working with an architect who had lots of other projects. It took eight months of dealing with insurance and repair quotes before we could start demo on the house. Demo went fast, and took only about 4-6 weeks. We didn’t have any sub-contractors at first, so construction moved quickly for three months, and then it came to a halt when we needed the sprinkler system to be designed and approved by the fire department. So far, the delay has set us back eight weeks. (Santa Rosa turned over the approval and inspection of all sprinkler systems to the fire department in 2018.) In the end, repairing a home that had 15% fire damage, 20% water damage and 100% smoke damage will take about 16-18 months from the date of the fire.

In hindsight, as fire victims with a partially damaged home, I wish we had approached the recovery in this order:

Find housing—not just short-term but mid-term and possibly long-term File claims; document everything Review policy carefully; understand rights and coverage Evaluate damages to home; secure home from possible looters Take photos to document everything—your personal items, your damages

inside and out Determine best method for dealing with smoke damage to personal

belongings and house; don’t send your prized possessions to a giant facility Find a storage unit for belongings if not giving them to a smoke damage

repair company to clean and store Locate copy of original house plan; convert to digital if it’s print Hire a building contractor who specializes in fire damage Find a draftsman to update house plans Secure all engineers and green building consultants

Fill out personal property spreadsheet Work on repairs to utilities

OTHER ADVICE IN HINDSIGHTIf I could go back in time, here’s what I’d do differently:

I’d never put mulch on my yard I’d never keep plastics around the exterior of my house—garden house

boxes, flower pots, lawn chairs I’d carry a minimum of $1.4 million in insurance on Dwelling A to rebuild a

2400-square-foot high-end home in Sonoma County I’d increase my Loss of Use insurance to unlimited, include Fair Rental Value

and add a rider for possible overages I’d increase my Other Structures and debris removal coverage I’d accept donations and ask for funds raised for victims I’d hire a draftsman over an architect to update my existing house plans to

meet new building code standards I’d start finding rebuild services immediately, from contractors to engineers

—labor and services are in too short of supply I’d find out the cost to rebuild the garage I had before designing a bigger

dream garage

If this information has been helpful, please consider purchasing a copy of my memoir. All book sale proceeds benefit Sonoma Family Meal, which is feeding 80 families still struggling to recover from the 2017 fires in Santa Rosa, as well as six Camp Fire families who have relocated to Santa Rosa. http://lisamattsonwine.com/books/the-exes-in-my-glass/press-release/.

Stay strong.