Christine Moore’s three children could not have seen any of it coming. Not the fire, not the sudden death, not the exhausting fight to get back home.
First, it was the Eaton fire that upended their lives in January of 2025. Maddie and Avery were living in New York after college, in their 20s and embarking on careers in art and fashion.
Little brother Colin, a high school student and baseball player, was at home in Altadena with his mother, a celebrated chef and owner of Little Flower, a Pasadena cafe and neighborhood gem that happens to have, among other delicacies, the world’s best almond croissants.
As the fire raged, mother and son used garden hoses to defend their property as nearby dwellings were torched. Colin covered the front of the house; Christine worked the back. They doused nearby homes as well, helping save a few.
The Moore house survived, but smoke damage left it uninhabitable. Maddie and Avery moved back from New York to help out as their mother tried to keep Little Flower going while dealing with dislocation and a nightmarish battle with her insurance company.
One year after the fire, Christine Moore died unexpectedlywith a heart ailment. She was 62. In their grief, Maddie, Avery and Colin inherited a business they had never run, a house they could not live in, and the insurance company stalemate that continues to this day.
One day last week, Maddie, Avery and Colin walked through their two-story Spanish-style house, which their mother had taken great pride in. The house turned 100 this year.
“She was a baller,” Avery said of her mom’s work ethic.
“This was her dream,” Maddie added, “and she was not letting it burn down.”
“Also, as a single parent, she was very aware of ‘anything can happen,’ and she wanted us to have a safety net if, God forbid, something happened,” Avery said. “And it did.”
The Moores have been living in a Highland Park apartment, but their coverage for temporary lodging has run out. Their first priority, they said, is to get Colin through college by covering tuition and other costs, and Avery drove the sophomore back to school in Oregon the day after we all met at the house.
“So we’re keeping the restaurant running,” Maddie said.
“And if we could,” Avery added, “we’ll move back into this house.”
The Moores are in the same maddening predicament as hundreds of Palisades and Eaton fire survivors. As catastrophic as the fires were for those who lost everything, people whose homes remain standing have been exasperated by insurance company refusals to cover the removal of lingering hazardous contaminants.
In the case of the Moores, Farmers Insurance insists it has paid for and completed the smoke damage remediation called for in the policy. But before her death, Christine Moore wasn’t convinced a thorough enough job had been done. She hired a lab that found loads of dangerous contaminants, and a law firm joined her fight.
In a July 24 letter to the Moores and their attorneys, Farmers said it had “issued payment for covered damages supported by the investigation…. The claim is currently closed.”
The Moores’ attorney responded: “Farmers … does not explain why it disregarded substantial post-remediation evidence demonstrating that its original scope was inadequate.”
I reached out to Farmers, too. The response wasn’t particularly enlightening: “Our goal is to pay claims quickly and fairly, taking into account the circumstances of the loss and the terms of the policy. While we cannot comment on individual claims or customers, we will continue to work with our customer to resolve their claim.”
Avery said it’s been difficult to know who to trust and what to do next.
“I’m 25, my sister is 27, and no one will take us seriously,” said Avery.
None of this was a surprise to Joy Chen of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
“This is happening across the board … and the smoke damage issue is especially pernicious,” Chen told me. “Insurance is the only product we spend thousands of dollars on per year, buying on a promise. And we hope and expect that … in a disaster, they’ll actually deliver on their promise.”
Chen said she’s launching a survey to establish something of a report card on insurance company performance.
The Moores filed a complaint with the California Department of Insurance. Michael Soller, a department spokesperson, told me roughly 1,000 of the 2,100 or so claims filed with the department involve smoke damage, and $52 million has been returned to consumers in such cases. He said every claim is investigated, but he can’t discuss the specifics of any case.
One problem is that there have been no clear scientific standards on when a contaminated dwelling is or is not habitable, although a bill by Assemblyman John Harabedian (D-Pasadena) aims to address that.
One of the bill’s supporters was Francois Tissot, a Caltech geochemistry professor who has not returned to his smoke-damaged Altadena house. Tissot put his Caltech lab to work and found elevated levels of lead in more than half the 50-plus houses they inspected, including his own.
State Farm was not impressed.
“The response was, ‘Thank you for letting us know … however, there’s no reason there should be any lead in your house,’” Tissot said.
He was told that with a wildfire, the only contaminants are soot, ash and char. He explained this was more than a wildfire. Cars and batteries and plastics and metals and other things were incinerated, and a toxic plume traveled for miles. Tissot hired a hygienist who confirmed his finding of elevated lead levels in Tissot’s own home.
“At that point, the insurance company stopped talking to me,” said Tissot, who remains in temporary housing with his wife and two children.
When Christine Moore was alive, she learned that two neighbors were battling their own insurance companies over the same issues. They had each hired a lab called MARS Environmental, which found considerable contamination in their homes. The neighbors demanded full remediation and eventually, the costs were covered by State Farm.
Moore hired the same lab, and MARS technician Jeanine Humphrey did an inspection. She wrote in her report that “heavy metals, notably lead, zinc, copper, chromium, arsenic, and antimony, were detected above laboratory reporting limits.”
Humphrey told me she was not surprised, having done numerous post-remediation inspections in which only the “bare minimum” was done initially by insurance companies. Humphrey recommended additional cleanup, including replacement of the Moores’ appliances and the heating and air conditioning system. The Moores got an estimate for the work, and it came in at nearly $240,000.
I asked Humphrey if she would feel safe returning to the Moore house without a further cleanup.
“I would not,” she said. “With those results I got, I would not move my family back in there.”
Disputes over insurance claims are nothing new. But with people’s health at risk and their normal lives on hold, cutting corners is an unconscionable tactic by the insurance companies. They’ve delayed and denied thousands of Eaton and Palisades fire claims while overloading the airwaves with warm and fuzzy ads about how much they care about customers.
They could have learned something from Christine Moore, who, while dealing with her own crisis after the fire, fed hundreds of displaced survivors and often didn’t charge them.
“She was taking care of them and feeding them and listening to their stories and crying with them,” said her best friend, Kelli Cotton.
I get the sense that mom passed her fortitude on to her daughters and son, and it seemed to me as though for them, getting back home would be at least partly about honoring her.
“We’re not even asking for anything crazy,” Avery said at the front door of the house. “Our mom died, and we just want to get back into our house safely.”
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