The hardest wildfire job in California is the house that did not burn. The structure stands, the roof is intact, and the family still cannot live in it — smoke, ash, and soot through every room, and a claim that turns on a question nobody could answer with a number: when is this house clear? The Department of Insurance’s Smoke Claims and Remediation Task Force counted the scale of it in its March 9, 2026 report: of more than 40,000 claims from the January 2025 fires, more than 13,000 involved standing homes that sustained smoke damage. On September 15, 2026, the Governor signed the two bills written for exactly that file — AB 1642, the Wildfire Environmental Safety and Testing Act (Chapter 239), and AB 1795, the Smoke Damage Recovery Act (Chapter 240). What follows is what the chaptered texts actually build: a clearance file with a presumption, an interim standard, a living-expense rule, and a set of clocks. And the first fact in the file is a date.
Signed is not operative
Neither act contains an urgency clause, and each operates only if the other is enacted and takes effect on or before January 1, 2027. Under California’s regular-session rule, both take effect January 1, 2027 — which is when the duties switch on. On October 19, 2026, the presumption, the interim clearance standard, the inspection clock, and the scope rule are enacted law and not yet present duties.
The prospectivity line matters more than any other sentence in either bill. Insurance Code section 2060.2 — the testing, inspection, payment, and scope section — states that it “applies to all residential property insurance claims that occur on or after the operative date of this section.” The Governor’s signing release describes the new standards as being “for future fires.” Whether section 2060.1, which carries the presumption and the living-expense bar, reaches back to claims from the January 2025 fires is not answered in the chaptered text; it has no parallel prospectivity sentence. One more signing-season claim did not survive chaptering: the Department of Insurance described an “early action provision” in February and March 2026 that would have let Los Angeles survivors use state or local standards on their current claims immediately. It is not in the chaptered act. The Restoration Industry Association’s September 22, 2026 update gives operators the working rule for the files already open: keep records of damage, testing, scope, completion, and clearance, and confirm how the statute and the policy apply before relying on a deadline — especially on a claim involving an earlier loss. For those 2025 files, the live instrument remains the Department’s March 7, 2025 bulletin: investigate smoke claims, and do not make the insured pay for a warranted professional test.
The presumption, stated with its adjective
Section 2060.1(a): “There is a rebuttable presumption that if wildfire smoke, ash, soot, char, or combustion byproducts are present in a surviving residential property in the wildfire impact zone after a wildfire, then smoke damage in the property is the result of that wildfire.” Rebuttable is in the statute; the Department’s signing summary drops the word. The presumption runs from residues present in a surviving home to causation. It is not a presumption that any detected contaminant exceeds a health threshold.
The zone has a precise edge. A wildfire impact zone is a ZIP Code within or partially within the fire perimeter, as determined by CAL FIRE with the Office of Emergency Services. It is not the cancellation-moratorium list, which covers ZIP Codes within or adjacent to the perimeter — using the moratorium bulletin as the clearance map pulls in adjacent ZIP Codes the new definition does not name. And “smoke damage” itself is an interior definition: structural elements, building systems, contents, and the indoor environment. Exterior soil and vegetation are outside both the smoke-damage definition and the definition of “restored to preloss condition” — a scope that prices yard-soil removal as section 2060.2 restoration is pricing work the definition excludes.
The clearance: lead has a number, asbestos has a practice
Health and Safety Code section 25402.3 is the interim occupancy standard. It applies to residential properties in the impact zone, for wildfire-caused lead and asbestos remediation only, and it stays in place until three later products all exist: DTSC’s lead-and-asbestos regulations (due December 31, 2028), the Air Resources Board’s indoor-air guidance (due December 31, 2028), and DTSC’s guidance for the other contaminant list — heavy metals, dioxins, PAHs and more (due December 31, 2029).
For lead, the statute does not print a number; it borrows one. Interior lead dust “shall not exceed the action levels for lead in dust set forth in Section 745.227(e)(8)(viii) of Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations, or any more stringent applicable standard.” Since January 12, 2026, that federal paragraph sets 5 µg/ft² for floors, 40 µg/ft² for interior window sills, and 100 µg/ft² for window troughs. Three surfaces, not one interior number — a clearance report that covers floors and sills and drops the troughs has dropped a surface the incorporated paragraph names. The statute’s own words are “shall not exceed,” and its “more stringent applicable standard” clause sits next to a separate federal hazard definition that, since the same January date, treats any reportable level of dust lead as a hazard; whether that definition is an “applicable standard” for this clearance is a question the chaptered text does not decide, and this desk will not decide it for you.
For asbestos, there is no chaptered number at all. The property “shall be evaluated for asbestos and remediated and restored in compliance with” the Cal/OSHA construction standard, Title 8 section 1529, and the federal asbestos NESHAP — a worker-protection standard and a demolition-and-renovation emissions standard. Neither is an indoor occupancy clearance expressed in structures per square centimeter. Anyone who quotes you a TEM figure as “the new California clearance” is not quoting Chapter 239.
Living expenses run until clearance — up to the policy limit
Section 2060.1(b): an insurer shall not terminate additional-living-expense coverage for a covered smoke-damage claim in the zone “until the property has been restored to preloss condition and cleared for human occupancy” under section 25402.3 or the later regulations and guidance — “subject to the applicable policy limit.” It is a bar on ending the coverage early, not an open-ended housing entitlement, and it reaches the residential policies defined in Insurance Code section 10087: one- to four-unit owner-occupied structures, condominium units, mobilehomes, and tenants’ contents policies.
The clocks, the testing bill, and the insurer’s own scope
If the insurer chooses to inspect, it shall do so as soon as practicable and no later than 30 calendar days after receiving notice of the claim — from the date access is granted, if government restrictions made the property inaccessible. The duty is conditional on the insurer electing to inspect; the unit is calendar days.
The insurer is responsible for the cost of the sampling and testing necessary to restore the property to preloss condition and clear it for occupancy. Read the citation closely, because it is the strangest joint in the act: the testing duty points at the regulations and guidance under sections 25402.4 and 25402.5 — documents not due until December 2028 and December 2029 — while the living-expense bar can be satisfied by clearance under the interim lead-and-asbestos standard that exists from day one. On January 1, 2027, the occupancy clearance has legal content and the testing specification it references does not yet. Operators will work inside that gap; the file should name it rather than paper over it.
When a claim settles on a written scope or estimate prepared by or for the insurer, the insurer must give the claimant a copy of each document the settlement rests on, and the estimate must be for an amount that restores the property to no less than preloss condition and renders it cleared for occupancy. A vendor or contractor the insurer hires or refers — to write that scope or to do the work — must hold the license, training, and certification the state mandates for this work. And the policyholder, not the insurer, selects the contractor who performs the restoration. One closing rule: once a property has been restored and cleared, the claim is not reopened for recontamination — a recontamination claim is a new claim, with a new deductible.
The file you build starting now
None of this operates until January 1, 2027, and section 2060.2 reaches only claims that occur on or after that date. What an operator does with the interval is the documentation discipline this desk keeps returning to: test before and after, report all three lead surfaces, record the zone determination and how it was made, keep the scope, the clearance write-up, and the completion record together as one file — because from the next fire forward, that file is what ends the living-expense argument and closes the claim. The standing doctrine is in Document, Hold, Respond. Washington rewrote its claims clocks this month for the same reason California rewrote its smoke file — the paperwork is the product — and that desk’s read is Five Business Days. The twin of this piece, on the same two statutes, looks at the buildings the interim standard does not name: schools, at Healthcare Facility Hub.
Sources: AB 1642 (Chapter 239, Stats. 2026) and AB 1795 (Chapter 240, Stats. 2026), chaptered texts, signed September 15, 2026; 40 CFR 745.227(e)(8)(viii); CDI Smoke Claims and Remediation Task Force Report, March 9, 2026; CDI releases 031-2026 and 023-2025; RIA Advocate update, September 22, 2026; Restoration & Remediation Magazine, October 16, 2026.