A 180-page review finds the county had no formal repopulation plan for the Eaton and Palisades fires. This outlet’s reporting all year says the harder bottleneck sits with insurers, not organizational charts.
By Jose E. Navarro | LA County Affairs | September 15, 2026 | Investigative Report
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors sat Tuesday with a verdict on its own performance: a 180-page after-action report, compiled by the McChrystal Group at the board’s own request, concluding that the county had no formal, codified plan for recovering from and repopulating after a disaster on the scale of the Eaton and Palisades fires. What the county had instead, the report says plainly, was “institutional knowledge” — staff improvising competently from memory of prior fires, without a standing playbook, defined authorities, or a rehearsed chain of command to fall back on.
That finding deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms, and this outlet does. The report examined six areas — communications, volunteer and donations management, recovery, repopulation, shelter and housing for higher-risk residents, and public health access — and credits the county with real successes: a functioning joint information center, a workable unified access-pass system for returning residents, an active recovery task force, and efficient debris removal. Its central recommendation, a codified recovery and repopulation plan with clearly assigned leadership roles, is sound governance and overdue. The county was candid enough to commission this review of itself and publish it without spin, which is more institutional honesty than most local governments manage after a catastrophe.
But an after-action report built entirely around county operations — communications protocols, task force charters, access-pass logistics — is reviewing only the parts of recovery the county actually controls. It says nothing about the single variable that has, in practice, done more to determine how fast any given household actually repopulates: whether their insurer has paid the claim.
The numbers make the gap explicit. The Eaton and Palisades fires killed 31 people combined and destroyed more than 16,200 structures in January 2025. By this past March, the California Department of Insurance counted nearly 42,000 claims filed against those losses, with more than 40,000 at least partially paid, totaling $23.7 billion. Buried inside that figure, per the department’s own estimate, are more than 13,000 claims involving smoke damage to homes that never burned — a category insurers have disputed as thoroughly as any in this disaster, precisely because no state standard existed, until this week, for what counts as unsafe smoke contamination in the first place. A family whose house is structurally intact but whose insurer won’t yet pay to test or remediate it is not “repopulating” in any sense the McChrystal report’s org-chart framework can capture. They are stuck, and the county’s access-pass system and joint information center cannot unstick them.
This is not a new observation from this outlet, and it should not be treated as one. In June, this outlet reported on the state’s own enforcement record against State Farm for wildfire-claims handling violations — 398 documented instances — met with a penalty capped by statute at a figure that amounted, against the insurer’s total assets, to a rounding error. The same commissioner who signed off on that penalty had, in the same period, approved a premium increase for the company. The point then, as now, is not that the state lacks insurance regulations. It has plenty. It lacks a consequence large enough to make an insurer’s internal cost-benefit calculation favor faster, more generous claims handling over prolonged disputes that keep families displaced and premiums flowing.
Just yesterday, this outlet detailed Governor Newsom’s newest wildfire-recovery package, signed in Altadena in front of Eaton Fire survivors: a genuine, first-in-the-nation mandate requiring insurers to cover qualifying smoke-damage testing and remediation starting now, ahead of the formal lead-and-asbestos testing standards the Department of Toxic Substances Control isn’t required to finalize until the end of 2028, with standards for other contaminants pushed to 2029. That gap is not incidental to the repopulation question the county is now studying — it is the repopulation question. A household cleared to rebuild under this summer’s accelerated permitting reforms, Assembly Bill 818’s post-disaster rebuild rules chief among them, can still spend years in a dispute with an insurer over what “qualifying” smoke damage means before a state standard exists to settle the argument. Fast permits and slow-to-arrive testing rules were never reconciled by the Legislature, and they are not reconciled by this week’s after-action report either.
The same July reporting that flagged the Zone Zero defensible-space rules as months behind Governor Newsom’s own executive-order deadline also tracked SB 254’s requirement that utility shareholders commit $9 billion to the state’s Wildfire Fund Continuation Account, capital explicitly intended to keep insurers willing to write policies in fire-prone ZIP codes rather than pull out of them. More than a year into that fund’s operation, the Department of Insurance has published no data showing whether it has actually slowed the pace of nonrenewals in Altadena, the Palisades, or comparable high-risk communities elsewhere in the county. Without that data, there is no way to know whether the insurance market survivors depend on for repopulation is getting healthier or simply less transparent about its retreat.
None of this is a case against the McChrystal report’s recommendations, which the Board of Supervisors should adopt. A codified recovery plan with defined leadership roles will make the next disaster’s logistics measurably better than this one’s improvisation. But logistics were never the whole of what “repopulation” means for a displaced family, and a review confined to the county’s own org chart will always miss the half of the problem that happens on an insurance company’s claims desk, governed by state penalties too small to change behavior and testing standards that will not exist for another two to three years.
If insurance reform is the missing chapter, its outline is not complicated, and little of it requires new legislative invention so much as the political will to finish what has already been started. The statutory cap on claims-handling penalties that turned 398 documented State Farm violations into a rounding error needs to be raised to a level that is actually painful relative to insurer assets, not simply recalculated. Insurer license renewal could be tied explicitly to claims-timeliness metrics the Department of Insurance already collects but does not publish comparatively, the same way hospital readmission rates or school test scores are published for public comparison. The department could also be required to report nonrenewal and non-issuance rates by ZIP code on a running basis, rather than leaving the public to infer, a year after a $9 billion shareholder commitment, whether the Wildfire Fund is doing anything at all. And the Legislature could simply align its own deadlines: there is no coherent reason accelerated rebuild permitting took effect in July while the toxic-testing standards meant to certify those same rebuilds safe do not arrive until 2028 and 2029. None of these fixes requires waiting for the next disaster to study what went wrong; the data on this one is sitting in Sacramento right now.
Why it matters: Los Angeles County has now produced an honest, 180-page accounting of its own operational failures after the worst disaster in its modern history. What it has not produced, and what this outlet’s reporting this year keeps circling back to by necessity, is any accounting of the insurance system survivors actually depend on to come home. A repopulation plan without insurance reform is a plan for how efficiently the county can process families who are still, months or years later, waiting on a check.
The Navarro Report — Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).