Welcome to Handel on the Law, marginal legal advice.

Now, if you've been watching the news at all,

you know what's happened recently over the last few days.

It's been a mess with these wildfires.

And what I want to do is concentrate a little bit about the legal aspect that was going on.

There are going to be a couple of them. One, you're going to see lawsuits file the insurance companies because of replacement value.

A house, a business is going to file a suit once it's destroyed because the property was destroyed.

And they're going to go and see insurance company because there's going to be an argument between insurance company and the homeowner, the business owner. That's going to be

a disagreement because that happens all the time. The other one, which is more complicated and

more interesting, is suing the city because water pressure wasn't there in many hydrants. And the argument's going to be, if there had been

enough water pressure in the system, then my home would have been saved, and therefore, you are

responsible, the city of Los Angeles. Wow. Believe me, that's going to be litigated.

Now, are there some defenses?

I think there are big defenses because every water system,

firefighting water systems, those hydrants, was never designed.

And the whole water, the entire water firefighting system in a city never designed for anything like this, anything.

And so the argument's going to be we don't anticipate a conflagration like this, which went way beyond our wildest dreams,

what are firefighting water system, hydrants, reservoirs,

etc., are meant to fight our individual fires or a small group of fires for a limited amount of time.

The big fires went on for days over hundreds of acres, thousands of acres, tens of thousands of acres.

The system was never designed for that, ever.

And the argument is going to be, well, you should have thought of it.

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