Bill > AB1795

This bill, known as the Smoke Damage Recovery Act, establishes comprehensive new rules for handling residential insurance claims related to wildfire smoke damage and mandates several state studies following recent disasters like the 2025 southern California wildfires and the 2026 Lineage Logistics warehouse fire in Los Angeles. First, the legislation creates a legal assumption that any smoke, ash, or soot found in a surviving home within a wildfire impact zone (defined as a ZIP code within or partially within a burned area's perimeter) is directly caused by that wildfire, and it prevents insurers from cutting off additional living expense coverage—which pays for temporary housing when a home is uninhabitable—until the property is fully restored and cleared for human occupancy. Insurers are required to pay for necessary property sampling and testing, meet strict 30-day deadlines to inspect damaged properties and pay actual cash value or replacement costs for damaged structures and personal items, and provide policyholders with the estimates used to settle claims. Furthermore, the Department of Insurance must develop training and certification programs for both insurance adjusters and public insurance adjusters (professionals hired by consumers to help settle claims) regarding smoke damage evaluation by July 2029, while the Division of Occupational Safety and Health must propose worker safety regulations for residential smoke cleanup by the same date. To address regulatory gaps exposed by recent industrial accidents, the Office of Emergency Services and the Department of Insurance are tasked with conducting detailed studies and submitting reports by late 2027 and 2028 regarding emergency response coordination, shelter-in-place versus mandatory evacuation orders, and insurance coverage gaps like business interruption and living expenses when no mandatory evacuation is ordered. Finally, the bill requires coordination with other state environmental agencies and mandates that its provisions only become operative if a related bill, Assembly Bill 1642, is also enacted.