Most fire victims are still waiting to be paid by PG&E’s Fire Victim Fund, investigation finds

Unfortunately, so many of them simply have not had the resources to move on. Even now that we're approaching, three years later, we're seeing situations where a number of people that I've personally met and correspond with all the time are still living in trailers and campers, really in temporary conditions.

And when you see temperatures reach the triple digits, which they often do in that part of California, in that region we call the north state, it's really uncomfortable physically to have to endure that in a trailer and not to mention just having their lives be thrown into this limbo that is just continued on and on. I mean, we talk to people that are concerned about where their kids are going to go to school next year. T

hey don't know, because if they're one of the lucky few that have gotten any compensation from this trust, they simply have they don't have enough to rebuild because of the way I laid out sort of the way this trust was set up in the first place where you have part cash and part stock in the company, that means that those people that have had their claims process, these fire victims, they were only getting 30 percent of what the trust has determined that they are owed. They don't want to run out of money. They're kind of leaving this buffer in just in case the stock goes down to zero, which is technically possible. We're seeing it suffer right now because we're now at the beginning of fire season.

But 30 percent on let's call it a $250,000 claim is just not enough to rebuild a house that might have been worth that when they bought it in the '70s or the '80s. We're seeing labor costs skyrocketing. The cost of materials have gone through the roof. So everybody is thrown in limbo. And a lot of these folks were retirees who are now eating into their life savings, renting a house while they basically wait for that check to come in the mail.