My fire is not in the database. Does that mean there is no lawsuit?

No. An absent fire and a fire recorded as no known litigation are different findings. No known litigation, which 13 of the 35 records here carry, is a published result: somebody searched, on a stated date, in a named source, and found nothing. An absent fire carries no date and no source because no search was made. The absence is a fact about this database, not about the courts.

Which fires does this database include, and why those?

A fire is here for one of two reasons: it is large or destructive enough to be counted in CAL FIRE's statistics, or it is litigated enough to be visible in the public record. The shape of the data shows it. The median record is 86,509 acres, and of the 17 records below that median 14 carry litigation filed or settled, against only 6 of the 18 above it. The smallest entry is the Coastal Fire of 2022 at 200 acres and 20 structures destroyed.

How do I check litigation for a fire this site does not list?

Establish the responsible party first, since nothing is filed under a fire's name: 18 of the 20 litigated fires here have a utility equipment or powerline cause. Then run the fire's name through the SEC's full-text filing search, which works well for small fires because a utility's quarterly legal proceedings disclosure names incidents that received no news coverage. Then search the county superior court's online civil case index.

Why not simply add more fires to close the gap?

Because adding an unsourced fire would replace an honest blank with an invented status. The status vocabulary has five values and none of them means not yet examined, so every published record asserts that a search happened on a stated date. That constraint keeps the database accurate and it also guarantees the gap stays open.

When There Is No Wildfire Litigation Status for Your Fire

This database holds 35 fires. California records thousands of wildfires in a normal year. So the most common honest answer we give is no answer at all, and that answer is routinely misread. A missing record is a fact about this database. It is not a fact about the courts.

A blank and "no known litigation" are not the same finding

Thirteen of the 35 records here carry the state no known litigation. That is a published finding: somebody looked, on a stated date, in a named source, and found nothing. It comes with the date and the source attached, so you can check it and you can watch it age.

Your fire being absent is a different thing entirely. Nobody looked. There is no date because there was no search, and no source because there is no record. The two sit next to each other in a reader's head as "no lawsuit," and only one of them is a statement about the world.

This is also why the Find Your Fire tool answers a miss with "No fire in our record matches that. We never guess a match." The tempting alternative is to return the closest name and let you read a status that belongs to a different fire, in a different county, against a different defendant.

These 35 are not a sample of California fires

The median record here is 86,509 acres, which is enough on its own to tell you these are not ordinary fires. The interesting part is the small end, because it shows why the small ones were let in at all. Of the 17 records below that median, 14 carry litigation filed or settled. Of the 18 records above it, only 6 do.

The smallest entry is the Coastal Fire of 2022, at 200 acres and 20 structures destroyed. Eleven of the twelve smallest records here carry litigation, and the one exception is the 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills, which is present for being one of the deadliest in state history. Look at the five smallest that are not household names, Coastal, Saddleridge, Silverado, Mountain and Fairview, and the pattern is exact: every one is a utility equipment cause with a status sourced to Southern California Edison.

Stated plainly, a fire enters this database by being large enough to be counted, or litigated enough to be visible. A fire that is neither does not appear, no matter what it did to the people who lived in it.

The blind spot that selection creates

The gap is not random, and it runs the wrong way. This record is most complete for the fires you have already heard about, and thinnest for the ones you have not. A fire that takes 40 homes off one rural circuit will never reach a statewide top 20 list, and it can still produce a named defendant, a coordinated proceeding and a settlement. Our silence about it carries no information at all.

Reading the database as a map of California wildfire litigation therefore overstates how much of it involves the headline fires. It is a map of what is easy to verify, which is a different shape.

What to do when your fire is not listed

The method does not need us. Work out the responsible party first, because nothing is filed under a fire's name: of the 20 litigated fires here, 18 have a utility equipment or powerline cause. Then run the fire's name through the SEC's full-text filing search. This step is unusually good for small fires, because a utility's quarterly legal proceedings disclosure aggregates its wildfire exposure and will name an incident that no news outlet covered. Only then go to the county superior court's civil index. That sequence is set out in full in how to verify a status yourself, and if you find two answers, the reasons sources disagree are usually mechanical rather than mysterious.

Where this approach fails

We cannot fix the gap by widening the database. Adding a fire we have not sourced would replace an honest blank with an invented status, and the five state status vocabulary has no value meaning "not yet examined." Every record we publish asserts that a search happened. That constraint is correct and it guarantees the hole stays open.

Absence is our most common output and our least useful one. A reader who arrives, searches their fire and leaves with nothing has been told only that we have not done the work. That is honest and it is close to worthless, which is why the sequence above exists rather than a contact form.

Presence would not have answered your real question anyway. Whether a case exists is a fact about 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. A status present, absent or perfect does not calculate it, and no public index does either. That one goes to a licensed California attorney.

If your fire belongs here, send us the record. A court index entry, a docket number, a CPUC proceeding or a passage in a utility's SEC filing is enough for us to open a sourced record and date it. We will not add a fire on a recollection or a news mention we cannot trace. Method: sources and methodology. What we already hold: all 35 fire records, the fires carrying litigation, and the explainer for the record itself, wildfire litigation status.

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