Wildfire Survivor Network’s Joy Chen on: Recovery & Accountability

Twenty months after the Eaton Fire, a pickleball WhatsApp group from the Altadena Town & Country Club has become one of the more consequential forces in California utility and insurance policy. The Every Fire Survivor's Network (EFSN)now speaks for more than 10,000 Eaton and Palisades survivors, and its executive director, Joy Chen – a former Los Angeles deputy mayor and Fortune 500 executive recruiter – spent the summer in Sacramento arguing that California does not have a wildfire liability problem so much as a fire causation problem. Days after SB 492 died without a vote on the final day of session, TPR/VX News asked Joy Chen: what survivors believe they deserve from the State’s Insurance Companies to recover, rebuild and come home; what political principles should guild their fiscally sponsored non- profit; and lastly, what they hope the State Legislature/ Governor will do to hold accountable those legally responsible for the fires that repeatedly devastate California’s Communities. 

Joy, EFSN started as a WhatsApp group and now speaks for as many as 10,000 survivors across three Los Angeles basin fires. Share what most survivors believe they were not getting from the public institutions that were supposed to serve them?

Joy Chen: We did not originally start out as an advocacy group. We started out as the pickleball WhatsApp at the Altadena Town & Country Club, where I had been the admin for two years before the fire. What launched us was the Eaton Fire, at 6:24 on January 7th of last year. Somebody typed in that there was a fire on the mountain.

The first public breakdown was that there were no emergency evacuation alerts in Altadena, so our pickleball WhatsApp became our emergency evacuation system. There was no power that day, so we were all standing outside triangulating where the fire was based on who could see it, and calling everyone we knew in harm's way.

The second breakdown was that there were no firefighters – most of LA County's were over at the Palisades, 40 miles away – so our WhatsApp became our emergency fire brigade. People typed in when there were spot fires at their homes or their neighbors', and others came rushing with buckets of water from pools.

Those breakdowns prompted us to spring into action, born of love and care for our neighbors. By the next morning, half our homes were burned down. Nineteen of our neighbors were dead. We saved lives that night. We saved homes that night. And our WhatsApp became our source for emergency information and resources. In the absence of public infrastructure for disaster, EFSN was born. Very quickly we brought the Palisades in, and we grew and grew.

Elaborate on how EFSN grew – how you organized yourselves into a force which public officials, utilities and insurance companies had to seriously reckon. 

Joy Chen: In the chaotic first days after the fires, we invited in all the neighbors we knew, and then friends in the Palisades going through the same problems. But we quickly hit WhatsApp's 1,000-person limit. Somebody in our group – a younger guy, a gamer – said, "Joy, we should move to Discord." I said, "What? I'm a 56-year-old woman." But he showed it to me, and I could see it was a platform we could scale on.

So I set up a separate channel for every topic – soils, mental health, schools – and a different channel for every insurance company, because every insurer had different contracts and different claims processes, so families with the same company could work it out together.

Within a couple of months, by mid-February, it became obvious that whether a family was starting to recover depended largely on which insurance company they had. That was a huge shock, because we had all been paying our premiums faithfully for 10 or 20 or 30 years, but only some of us were getting the benefits we had already paid for.

That is when we started reaching out to the person who is supposed to regulate our insurance industry, Commissioner Ricardo Lara, and asked him to come speak to us and hold State Farm accountable. We started collecting evidence of State Farm misconduct and bringing it to him. That didn't work, so we brought it to the media. When many press conferences, thousands of postcards, and many entreaties did not result in resolution of our claims, we brought all this data to the County of Los Angeles, to Kathryn Barger. In November she launched an investigation, which has since unlocked over $100 million in illegally delayed insurance payouts from State Farm alone.

For context, could you share with readers your background and what experience you brought to leading this effort?

Joy Chen: My proximate relationship to all of this was as somebody who likes pickleball and picked it up during the pandemic, like many Americans. Prior to that, I served as a deputy mayor of Los Angeles. I also served for seven years as an executive recruiter, finding CEOs and board members for Fortune 500 companies, so I have been around global business and global boardrooms a lot. I am also a former bestselling author in China. I have been working at leadership levels in global business, media, and public policy for 30-plus years.

Obviously learning from new challenges most often requires learning from mistakes. What have you & your EFSN colleagues learned in the last year that makes EFSN  more effective advocates?

Joy Chen: People often ask how we grew so quickly. What I have really learned is that even when our country is so divided politically, certain things hold us all together, and I have tried to be explicit about what those principles are. We are a fiscally sponsored nonprofit operating under 501(c)(3) guidelines, which requires us to be nonpartisan. So we developed guiding policy principles – I won't call them political principles – that serve as an envelope for what we do.

There are three. Number one: insurance companies should honor the contracts they sell. That is not an anti-business principle. It is a principle for market integrity, it is for law and order, and it is nonpartisan. Every American, whether Republican or Democrat, hates delays and denials and underpayments.

The second principle is that companies that cause catastrophic harm should be held accountable – and there we are specifically referencing for-profit utility monopolies that repeatedly burn down communities across California.

Number three: government officials whose job it is to regulate companies should not be captured by those companies. These are the animating ideas that have guided our policy work – nonpartisan, populist, I guess you could say, and I think they frame good government.

After nearly a month of intense closed-door negotiations, California lawmakers, on the last day of session, killed a compromise bill put forward by Governor Newsom that ESGN was designed to partially insulate investor-owned utilities when they cause catastrophic wildfires. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said the “bill did not yet deliver the relief, accountability, or meaningful reform that Californians deserve”. What accountability do the people you represent want, and what specific relief was not in that bill?

Joy Chen: There was a lot of drama leading up to the final compromise bill. In July, EFSN started hearing rumors that the governor was about to launch a massive utility bailout – something Politico and others have reported. We stepped forward and said, bring this into the light. California has an eight-month legislative process for a reason.

What we heard was that he was going to do a last-minute gut-and-amend – his third multibillion-dollar utility bailout in eight years. And we said, that doesn't sound right. If you have something to introduce, at least give us the language. Let the public see what you want our legislators to vote on. So we held a press conference simply asking to see the bill text. This is the democratic process.

The governor never let his bill text out, but his staff started releasing a few bullet points. By the Thursday night before the last week of session, both houses had rejected every major part of the bailout. The governor canceled his Friday campaign trip and stayed in Sacramento for a final negotiation. At 3 a.m. Saturday they came up with a compromise, and the poor legislative lawyers had to write the bill from 3 to 7 a.m. That compromise was SB 492, and because it was far too late to introduce a new bill, they had to take an existing bill, empty it, and stuff in the new language.

The most important thing was that legislators in both houses heard survivors, and they said, we do not want a bailout. Every main part of the governor's package was gone – the attacks on victims' rights, the elimination of insurance subrogation, the capping of attorney fees. The bill dealt only with a few minor issues. We issued an official neutral letter saying the most important thing is that the bailout is gone. Of course, if you write a bill in four hours, there can be problems. Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog and I had already agreed we would come back and work on cleanup legislation in January.

At the end of the day, there was a three-house deal. But come Monday, the stock prices of two of the utilities plummeted, because they didn't get the bailout they wanted – PG&E and Edison. So their CEOs wrote a two-page letter to the legislature saying, we have lost $20 billion of stock value, you have got to scuttle this deal and come back and give us our bailout again. That was the drama of Monday morning. Then Tuesday morning, the Assembly speaker did not allow the bill to be voted on. So essentially, it died.

Governor Newsom said, following the bill's defeat: “I know we all hate utilities, so no one wants to defend a utility, but you’ve got to deal with reality. Things are not going to get better on their own”. Do you not agree with the Governor’s assessment?

Joy Chen: I disagree with many different elements of that statement.

You have to understand that there are utilities. Nobody hates their utility. Utilities are the entities that deliver power to us. And in California, we have this unusual system where three of these utilities have holding companies that are Wall Street–owned and publicly traded. This is enormously expensive for us. Over $10 billion a year of our electric rates goes purely to profit for them, and over $3 billion to dividends. We pay those three CEOs $60 million, just for those three people. That layer is what is called the IOU: the electric monopolies and, basically, those for-profit holding companies.

The issue here is not the utilities. Among these three companies – one is Edison, one is PG&E, and one is SDG&E – two have a problem: they have been repeatedly burning down communities across California. Only two of them, and that is Edison and PG&E. According to Aon, the risk management firm, of the five costliest wildfires in world history, three were caused by those two companies. Just think about that. California is now the world's most dangerous place for catastrophic wildfires because of two companies.

And the entire conversation – the whole SB 254 study – never talks about utility-caused wildfires. They talk like what Governor Newsom just said in that statement: oh, these are things that we cannot do anything about, this is a climate change problem. No, this is not a climate change problem, because publicly owned utilities and SDG&E operate under the same climate conditions, and they all have not been causing catastrophic wildfires.

The last time SDG&E caused a catastrophic wildfire was in 2007, with the Witch Fire. Right after that, they made massive safety innovations and invested massively in safety improvements, and as a result, SDG&E has not caused one since 2007. Edison and PG&E refused to make those improvements. Meantime, they continued to pay out shareholder dividends and profits and executive pay. And in fact, after the Eaton Fire, the LA Times did an investigation of Edison and found that Edison had already collected over $500 million in wildfire prevention funds from us for work that it never did – and that included the transmission line that caused the Eaton Fire.

So what we must do is hold these two companies accountable. What we must not do is say, oh well, nothing can be done here about their catastrophic fires, and therefore we are going to shift liability away from these two companies for their future negligence, misconduct, and crimes, and make it cheaper for them to cause more fires. What we need to do instead is investigate. Why is it that these two companies keep causing fires? What is it that all these other utilities are doing right? And how can we incentivize these two companies to make California safer?

The utilities have argued that the State’s wildfire fund can't survive Eaton claims, and that without liability reform the capital needed won't exist to respond to the next fire.

Joy Chen: We have been calling on the legislature, in their hearings, to bring Edison's CEO and CFO and PG&E's CEO and CFO out to testify publicly to that. Because what we have seen is that there is now $38 billion in payment capacity from the previous two bailouts. The first one was roughly $20 billion, and the second is $18 billion. This was AB 1054, and then SB 254. These have now created $38 billion of payment capacity.

Statistical modeling shows that all Eaton Fire claims against Edison will total $10 to $15 billion. So you have $38 billion in payment capacity and $10 to $15 billion in total Eaton Fire claims against Edison. There is no financial emergency. And if there is – they keep saying there is – if there is, show us the math. All the math we have seen shows there is not. No Fortune 500 board would ever enter into a multibillion-dollar deal with no financial modeling.

So bring them out. Don't just use your lobbyists and go through this fake front group of wildfire victims that they have been funding. Come out, in person, under oath, and testify to the financial modeling that shows this need for a financial emergency and a multibillion-dollar transfer of wealth from California families to these two companies.

Earlier this year, EFSN went beyond the fight over liability. You proposed independent audits of the billions of utility dollars collected for wildfire mitigation – returning money for work that was never performed, tying wildfire fund protection to actual safety performance, and even restricting dividends and lowering a utility's authorized return after a catastrophic fire to these proposals? What is the status of these demands? 

Joy Chen: That was AB 1774, a simple audit bill. It simply says that these three companies are now getting $9 billion a year from us ratepayers for wildfire mitigation.

Consider who is paying. Californians served by these three IOUs are three-quarters of us – 30 million out of 40 million. Those 30 million pay the nation's highest electric rates other than Hawaii, post-Maui. Twenty-seven percent of that is this wildfire mitigation fund. That is a huge part of our rates. It is $9 billion a year, and there needs to be accountability for it. The few audits that have been done show that even though the utilities are allowed to collect this money from us for the purposes of wildfire prevention, they have not been spending it for this purpose. And a tragic result of that has been the Eaton Fire.

In a Los Angeles Times investigation that took place over nine months, the paper found that Edison had collected $500 million from us for wildfire mitigation. The way this works is that every year these three companies go to the CPUC and say, here is a list of super-urgent projects that we must do this year to stave off future wildfires. And the CPUC looks them over and says, okay, I can see how much they cost, you may now put this onto ratepayers' bills. So these were projects that Edison had submitted and was authorized to charge us for. Edison then did not do those projects, while it continued to pay out dividends, executive compensation, and so on. And one of those projects was the transmission line that caused the Eaton Fire.

So what we are saying is that we Californians are already paying for wildfire mitigation, and when it is not done, we pay again – through our lives, through our homes. This must not stand. This is just basic accountability. These three companies are allowed to collect this money from us, and it should be up to our government to ensure that they are spending it as they are required to.

The last time there was an independent audit of these wildfire mitigation funds was in 2021. There was $6 billion collected from us that year, and the independent audit found they could not account for $2.5 billion of it. And nevertheless, the CPUC allowed them to keep that $2.5 billion and charge more every year.

So EFSN, with Consumer Watchdog, introduced AB 1774 this year. Simple bill. It simply says that wildfire mitigation money must be independently audited, and if they cannot show that they spent it according to what it was supposed to be spent on – wildfire mitigation, instead of dividends or whatever else they are spending it on – then they cannot collect more next year. That is all it did. That bill passed the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee 11 to zero, and then it died in Assembly Appropriations. So that is the sort of accountability we are looking for. In any future bill, we are looking for accountability and safety from these two companies.

Are the bills Sasha Renée Pérez and John Harabedian have introduced, the proposed legislation you are referencing? 

Joy Chen: Those are different bills. That was a Tasha Boerner bill; she is from San Diego, and that was 1774. All of those audits are in our official sponsor letter for those bills, so anybody can go read them. That sponsor letter is a public record. Harabedian has been focused on mortgage relief, as well as the smoke damage bills. His smoke damage bill, AB 1642, has just cleared the legislature and is on the governor's desk.

We have also now collected over 2,700 firsthand accounts of the insurance challenges that Eaton and Palisades fire survivors are having – a vast trove of data.

If the Governor calls a Special Session or Legislature comes back next year with a comprehensive wildfire liability package, what are the three things EFSN members would insist be included?

Joy Chen: Number one, safety. Californians need to be more safe, and so we would like to see audits. It is not about just charging us more money. We want to see audits showing that the money we are being charged is being spent for its intended purpose. So that would be number one. We want to bring AB 1774 back.

Number two, if and when there are more catastrophic wildfires caused by these for-profit utility monopolies, we don't want the victims and California families to be asked to pay for them. If you break it, you fix it. The financial consequences should fall first on the shareholders and executives of these companies, because they are the only ones who can stop causing these fires.

So those are our two top ones. And then number three: survivors should be paid in full, and quickly.

In June, you petitioned to intervene in the state's case against State Farm. Why couldn't you trust the Department of Insurance to represent survivors; and, where does that petition stand today?

Joy Chen: We brought all these hundreds of State Farm complaints – we now have 1,600 – repeatedly to Commissioner Lara, asking him to investigate before giving State Farm any further rate hikes. He proceeded with the rate hikes. He finally opened a market conduct exam last June, and finally completed it in May of this year, so that took him 11 months.

In that market conduct exam, he only sampled 200 cases, and he found 400 violations of law. That is mass illegal activity. But he was only going to fine them for the small number of cases he sampled, when we have thousands of families suffering from misconduct by State Farm.

Under California law, the people of California have a right to intervene in government actions that impact us. We said EFSN should be a party here, because we represent the survivors whose lives are being impacted. So we filed a legal motion to intervene. Commissioner Lara had 15 days to assign a judge to hear it, and two months later he has never done that. Meantime, he has continued to negotiate with State Farm, so he may end up having a full negotiation before we have an opportunity to intervene.

If we are allowed to intervene, we will see the evidence, take witness testimony from State Farm executives, and participate in settlement negotiations. We will basically be allowed to prosecute alongside him. And we really want that.

And so, because he has not assigned a judge as he is legally required to do, we filed suit in LA Superior Court. That just happened, and we issued a press release on it yesterday. We are simply asking a judge to compel – it is a writ of mandate – a government official to act on their duties. In this case, to appoint a judge to hear our intervention complaint.

State Insurance Commissioner Lara's term ends this year. What should the next commissioner's priorities be?

Joy Chen: We are looking for somebody to be beholden to the people of California and to be working hard on insurance availability, accountability, and affordability. That is a tall mandate, and we are here to support them in doing that.

Nearly seven in 10 severely damaged Altadena homes show no rebuilding progress, according to UCLA's Latino Policy and Politics Institute, and Black homeowners are the most stalled. Is that an insurance problem, a permitting problem, or a wealth problem?

Joy Chen: It certainly is a big insurance problem. I don't know how much permitting has to do with those inequities. And it is certainly a wealth problem. That is something we have really seen in this recovery, and something we at EFSN are trying to address. We are a nonprofit. We are not here just to help rich people. We are here to help everyone.

And this recovery has been a K-shaped recovery, if you think about it. Some people are recovering and they are moving on with their lives, but then a lot of people – most people – are not. Two-thirds of us are still displaced, and, as you said, 70% of people with destroyed homes have made no progress.

That works if you have the wealth – if you have three or five million dollars in stocks and bonds lying around that you can unload, you can say, my family just wants to get home, I will fight with insurance later. But most Eaton and Palisades fire survivors don't have that kind of liquidity, where they can just move forward with their rebuilding and their remediation without insurance and their utility compensation. So I am going to give you a really important data point on this. The Los Angeles Times did a study of the five major fires before 2025 – they all happened between 2017 and 2020. There were 22,500 homes destroyed. Guess what percent of homes had been rebuilt eight years later, by 2025?

Twenty percent.

Joy Chen: You are very pessimistic. The answer is 38. Only 38% of families were able to get back home eight years later. And guess what was the number one factor in whether they could get back home?

Whether their insurance paid.

Joy Chen: Whether their insurance payouts came. And number two, utility compensation, when it was a utility-caused fire.

To conclude our too brief conversation, some trial lawyers and survivor network members have reportedly suggested that you, Joy Chen, run for LA County Supervisor. Are you interested?

Joy Chen: No. I am really focused on what I am doing now. It has truly been a privilege to focus on these issues, and to identify the core factors that will shape whether people get home. Our major funder from the very beginning, our biggest funder, was the California Community Foundation, and they just did a major feature on us. The title was "EFSN is shaping who gets home." That is an incredible mission, mandate, and privilege for me personally. It is how we got to focus on insurance and utilities. And I feel grateful that I have people's trust that way, and I hope to honor it.