A Conversation with SoCal Edison: Lessons, Recovery, and What Comes Next

As a company, we've been very focused on how we help the community through this. Focused on recovery, rebuilding, and throughout it all, we've just been amazed and impressed by the resilience of this community. Every time we have a truck or we've got a backhoe or we're backfilling a trench, we're getting closer to moving forward to a place where these communities are going to be safer and stronger on the other side.

Thanks for having me, Audrey.

It's heartbreaking, and it's our community as Edison. You know, we've been in the Southern California community for 140 years this year. I've been in the Pasadena area for almost four decades now. And so seeing our friends, our neighbors impacted has been really heartbreaking. And so we've been focused on ways to help. The first has been to help rebuild by building a stronger system, including things like in Altadena rebuilding with something like 63 miles of underground power lines. We established that to help people, help businesses move forward and do so more quickly. We not only have been in the community, but we will be in this community for the long term. So our team, much of our team lives here, will volunteer here. We'll support the organizations that serve the community. And when I look back at the community, the people here, I get a lot of hope from the real progress that I see the community making, and I'm pleased that we can work side by side with them.

Yeah, I'll focus on the wildfire recovery compensation program, Audrey, because again, we see that as a way to accelerate the ability of people to rebuild their homes and rebuild their lives. And so we set up a voluntary compensation program. We have unfortunately had the experience of having had fires in the past and the litigation that's associated with that. Most of these cases have been settled, and so we designed this program to have settlement values that are similar to what we've seen in past wildfire lawsuits, but with a much more streamlined, fast approach. And so the program is offering several forms of compensation for people who are impacted, compensating for economic losses like property damage and business interruption, physical injury, compensating for non-economic losses like for personal impacts. There's in addition to that a direct claim premium for participating in the program that wouldn't be available under normal litigation. And then individuals and businesses can participate with or without the support of an attorney. For those who choose to use an attorney, there's also compensation to help support attorneys' fees. The program has been open for a few months now, will be open through the end of November of 2026. It's easy to fill out the form. Typically it's taking folks about two hours to complete a claim. They'll generally receive an offer within 90 days of having a completed claim, and once they accept, we've committed to issue payment within 30 days. So far, we're seeing folks who are participating receive their offers and compensation even sooner than all that, but that's been a main way to help provide economic compensation to help people rebuild more quickly.

Yeah, look, from the very beginning it was really important to listen to the community in designing the program, and so we continue to partner with community organizations and through engagements to do that. But we started off by seeking real experts to help provide perspectives on how to do this, and I know you'll be talking later with, as you mentioned, with Ken Feinberg and Camille Biros. The two of them together bring more than 35 years of experience resolving complex disaster cases like the 9/11 fund that they helped to set up, and they've also advocated for impacted communities. And so bringing them on helped us to make sure that the process was a fair one. We have had a guiding principle of the program having multiple options that can help cover most people. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. We engaged RAND, many of your listeners will know RAND, a respected nonprofit research organization, and they did an independent, very thorough evaluation of how our program is using a model that was developed by Compass Lexecon, another firm, to do the valuation of eligible properties, look at their value before the fire and after the fire. We had developed a protocol for what the program would look like, and in September of last year we made that public and we asked for input and feedback. We had more than a dozen community workshops before launching. We got more than a thousand different voices that have provided input. We made several dozen changes to the program. So it's another way to reflect the community input and in the end end up with a program that provides support across multiple categories. I talked big picture already, but down in the details, it provides compensation for total and partial losses for single-family residences, total and partial loss for multifamily residences, coverage for both owners and tenants, commercial property losses, smoke and ash, business interruption, and of course the tragedy of physical injuries and fatalities. So the way we structured the program and the way that we continue to monitor it has been rooted in listening to our public.

It's voluntary. You don't make a commitment until you decide whether you like it or not at the very end. It's fair and it's fast. Now, that's the headline. Digging into that a little bit more, traditional lawsuits can take years, and that creates uncertainty not only for a company, but more importantly creates uncertainty and extends the time period, and it creates added cost for people who have been impacted. And so for individuals and businesses who need the help now, the program can offer a much faster path. We've already seen a number of folks in the community who have decided that this worked for them. And just to give you some numbers, where you and I are talking in April, listeners may be listening to us a little later, but as of now we've had close to 3,000 claims that have been submitted, and many of those claims represent multiple individuals. So that's something like 8,700 individuals who are part of those 3,000 claims, as well as some trust and legal entities. We have now extended, or SCE has extended, nearly 1,300 offers to more than 3,200 claimants. Those offers have totaled more than $435 million. To date, checks have gone out for 266 claims paid to 518 claimants. That's totaled over $67 million, and it's increasing by the day. So you see that a number of folks have checked out the program. Again, it's no cost to check it out. About two hours on average for filling out the application, and they've decided that that program worked for them. I will say that maybe one more thought on the role of attorneys in this. Again, participants can engage in the program with or without an attorney. If they choose to have an attorney represent them, we pay an additional premium of 20% of net damages to help support the attorney's fees. We've had, or SCE has had, a number of plaintiffs' attorneys that have engaged directly, have brought multiple clients with them, and are checking out the program. We even had one recently, Ben Crump, who's I think a well-known, respected attorney. He's particularly known for his engagement with the Black community nationally. I think he represented the estates of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin. And he represented some clients of his who decided that the program made sense for them, and they spoke out publicly about it. It is sad, however, that we've also seen examples where we're aware of plaintiffs' attorneys discouraging their clients from participating or checking out the program. Our team even heard directly from someone who chose to participate in the program who showed us the letter that their prior attorney sent them, essentially dismissing them, declining to continue to represent them just because this individual had decided to participate. And so we encourage people to check it out. There's no cost to it. There's no obligation, and it may work for you.

Yeah, every situation is different. That's why the program has different kinds of compensation. It just really depends on a person's own experience, their losses. I'll give you examples. It can include help with things like property damage or business interruption or personal impacts. And of course there's a premium for participating through the program. The offers can vary widely. So for example, we've seen lower-end offers for tenants, for renters with fairly limited damage, and there's been smaller offers. We've seen significantly larger offers for households or businesses that had more serious losses. So a tenant household with smoke and ash damage might receive compensation in the six-figure range. A family who lost their home, those offers could go into the hundreds of thousands or even several million dollars depending on the circumstances. So the key point here though is that this is based on individual situations. So that's why we're encouraging people to file a claim and check it out.

Staying connected with the community has been a priority from the very beginning, Audrey, and that means actively meeting people where they are. It's been really helpful to engage with community organizations in doing that. So examples: conversations that our team has had with the Altadena Town Council, with the Black Clergy and other faith-based organizations, the local chapters of the NAACP, the Altadena Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, they're known as ACONA, along with the Altadena Chamber of Commerce. SCE also has a dedicated website that's updated regularly with the latest recovery and rebuilding information. You can reach SCE online through the disaster recovery webpage, or folks can call a dedicated phone line. I'll give you the phone number here. It's 800-250-7339, and our team can help with recovery questions and any electric restoration needs. You also mentioned the opening of the Altadena Rebuild Community Hub, ARCH. We love our acronyms, and that's ARCH. And that's a place where people can connect in person with SCE representatives. It's a one-stop shop, and it's a one-stop shop for both recovery and rebuilding. So in the building there's advisors and planners who can help customers restore or plan for future electric service. They can answer account questions. They can provide guidance on things like meter locations or electric panel upgrades. There's also support for people who are in the middle of planning their home retrofits or how they're going to rebuild their home, guidance on making homes more wildfire resilient and how you integrate clean energy options like solar and batteries and electric vehicle chargers, electric appliances. So, you know, nothing beats being able to sit down with a human being face to face, and that's what ARCH is all about.

You know, I mentioned gathering input from over a thousand voices before launch. Since then, we've continued to make some adjustments based on what people are experiencing and asking. And so, for example, earlier this year in February, SCE expanded the support for displaced renters and increased housing assistance, strengthened help with legal expenses as well. Initially we were providing 10% of net damages, that's now 20%. Those updates took effect in February. We made those retroactive so that people who had already settled through the program also got the benefit of that change. And that just helped to remove barriers for people participating and made it easier for people to access the support. Look, at the core of this is that we're going to continue listening and we're adapting. We want to help people as recovery continues. We had a number of community panels that we've hosted. I participated myself in some of them, and we plan to have more of those over the course of the year.

California has always had fires. My wife grew up in California. She remembers fire when she was a young girl living in Tujunga, but back then they were called forest fires because it was a forest and not that many people lived there. Now, we talk about the wildland-urban interface, and we recognize that it's not only the impact of more and more people living at that interface or deep into high wildfire risk areas, but it's also climate change that's going to make the potential impacts more severe as we see more extreme weather. And so for us, that's really underscored the importance of SCE's wildfire mitigation plan and the need to continuously improve that as we learn more, as we see new tools that pop up to become available to help make our infrastructure more resilient. For utilities like Southern California Edison, what does that mean? Well, it's hardening the grid. Since the 2017 fires, SCE has really revamped how it thinks about wildfire mitigation and done a number of changes to its infrastructure. We've been kind of redesigning the airplane as it's been flying, designing systems that can withstand more extreme heat and storms and the fires that result from that. We know that the risk of wildfire can never go to zero. We'll never be able to eliminate it, but we want to get it as close to zero as possible. So SCE files wildfire mitigation plans, and they get updated annually. The 2026 to 2028 WMP, wildfire mitigation plan, focuses on reducing wildfire risks, increasing and improving emergency preparedness and response, safeguarding our communities, and this includes things like changing out bare wire in high fire risk areas with insulated wire, covered conductor. SCE has changed over more than 7,000 miles of wire in its high fire risk areas in the last six or seven years. Added up more equipment, monitoring equipment, high-definition cameras, weather stations, the careful use of public safety power shutoffs. So all of these are ways baked into the wildfire mitigation plan that continue to improve with new technology, but that are focused on continuing to learn, continuing to redesign, and continuing to help mitigate risk.

Thank you.