How to Verify a Wildfire Litigation Status Yourself

Every wildfire litigation status here is published with the record it was read from and the date it was last confirmed, so you can check it without asking us. This page is that check written out: the four public records that can confirm or contradict a status, and what each one cannot prove.

Start with the party, because nothing is filed under a fire's name

Court records are indexed by case number and by party name. A fire is neither. Nothing in the California court system is filed under "the Zogg Fire," so the first step is working out who the suits name.

That is easier than it sounds. Of the 20 fires in this database carrying litigation filed or settled or resolved, 18 have a recorded cause category of utility equipment or powerline, and all five of the 2020 lightning complexes read no known litigation. California's doctrine of inverse condemnation is why that skew exists. So the defendant is usually a utility: our records name Pacific Gas and Electric Company for eight of those fires, Southern California Edison for two, San Diego Gas & Electric for one. The other nine name no party, which is itself a finding: our source established that a case exists without establishing who it names.

The court index proves a case exists, then stops

County superior courts publish an online civil case index, and the useful object inside it is the register of actions: a case's filings and hearing dates, in order. That confirms a state and puts a date on it, two of the three parts every status here carries. It does not show who is inside the case, and reading the documents usually costs money per page or means a trip to the courthouse.

Expect coordination. Within one county, related wildfire cases are commonly assigned to a single judge as complex litigation. Across counties, actions sharing a common question of fact or law can be coordinated into one proceeding under Code of Civil Procedure section 404, and the Judicial Council publishes the proceedings it has assigned. A case can therefore leave the index you were watching and reappear under a coordination number. On screen that looks exactly like a dismissal, and it is close to the opposite.

The defendant's own quarterly filings are the most readable record of all

California's investor-owned utilities are publicly traded, so they are obliged to describe material litigation to shareholders. The legal proceedings section and the loss contingency notes of a 10-K or 10-Q typically give the company's own count of pending wildfire actions, where those actions have been coordinated, and what has been accrued against them. It is plain English for investors rather than docket shorthand, dated to the quarter, and full-text search across every filing is free at the SEC's EDGAR search.

Almost nobody outside the industry looks here, and it is usually the fastest way to establish that litigation over a fire exists at all. The limit is who is speaking: this is the defendant's own characterization, aggregated across a whole fire and often several. Use it to learn that a case exists, never to work out where you stand.

A CPUC proceeding is a public record of something else

The California Public Utilities Commission investigates utilities after fires and its proceedings are public. One of those documents is the source behind the Zogg Fire status here. But a regulatory penalty is paid to the state, not to a household, and an investigation opening, closing or settling does not move a civil case. We change a status on a CPUC document only when it establishes something the civil record did not.

If the defendant reorganized, the docket is the wrong place to look

Where a utility has been through bankruptcy, wildfire claims can be routed out of the state courts entirely and into a trust created by the reorganization. The live record is then the trust's own periodic reporting, and payment runs as a percentage of each approved claim, revised as the trust is funded, over years. A fire can read settled or resolved on every docket you can reach while money is still moving. Resolved and paid are different events.

Where this method fails

Name matching. Utilities appear under parents, subsidiaries and formal corporate names that differ from what everyone says out loud. A search for the name on the truck returns nothing while the case sits in the index under the name on the incorporation papers.

Absence proves very little. Not finding a case in one county's index is a result about that index on that day. It is why our fifth state is unknown rather than folding every unresolved fire into no known litigation, and why the oldest fires here, the 1991 Tunnel Fire among them, sit where they do.

None of it answers what most people are actually asking. Every source above describes a fire. Whether you can still act is a fact about you, running on deadlines tied to the type of claim and the party involved, and no public index calculates it. That goes to a licensed California attorney, and it is the one step here we cannot do for you.

This page is part of Wildfire Litigation Status: what it means and how to read it.