Guest Commentary By Brian Colón, NM Managing Partner, Singleton Schreiber — FEMA has spent years arguing that the law Congress passed to compensate Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon (HPCC) Fire victims only covers losses with a price tag, for example a home, a fence, a business, or a medical bill. Everything else, in FEMA’s reading, doesn’t count.
Brian Colón is the managing partner of Singleton Schreiber’s New Mexico offices. He served as New Mexico State Auditor from 2019 to 2022.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Somebody forced from their home for months, watching their community come apart, spending a year not knowing where they’d sleep next, walks away with nothing under FEMA’s interpretation, no matter how real the loss was. Congress wrote a law meant to cover what people lived through, not just lumber, adobe bricks, and trees. FEMA narrowed that on its own.
Our firm represents thousands of victims of the HPCC Fire, and for the past few years we have fought FEMA in federal court over exactly this issue: whether the law actually makes these families whole or only pays for what’s easy to itemize.
A federal judge has now ruled against FEMA on this question twice, ordering the agency to fully compensate victims for the emotional toll and inconveniences of the fire and the erosion damage and flooding it caused with its negligence. FEMA appealed both rulings, so people who have already waited years may wait longer for money a court has repeatedly said they are owed.
Meanwhile, the claims process itself keeps giving victims reasons not to trust it. The federal government caused the disaster, then put another federal agency in control of deciding what the government owes. There has been a recurring transparency problem. Cases sit for months without answers. The rules and practical consequences have changed while claims are pending.
FEMA has consistently missed the deadlines Congress imposed to protect victims. Earlier this year, the third director of the HPCC Fire Claims Office was placed on administrative leave amid allegations that undercut public confidence in how the office makes its decisions. FEMA has taken restrictive legal positions and then had courts tell it those positions were unlawful. Even winning against FEMA doesn’t necessarily produce finality or payment. Ultimately, the Claims Office has repeatedly generated uncertainty precisely where claimants need certainty. An agency with that record does not get the benefit of the doubt when it argues in court that the law lets it pay less than what people actually lost.
The federal government was negligent when it started this fire, two mismanaged prescribed burns lit by the U.S. Forest Service merged into the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history, and our congressional delegation led the way to have Congress respond appropriately by setting aside $5.45 billion to date specifically to make victims whole. Narrowing what counts as harm in court doesn’t protect that money for anyone. It just means a federal agency is spending less on the people its own negligence hurt.
Some of the people still waiting are elderly or living on fixed incomes; many are desperate for compensation more than four years after a fire that changed everything. They evacuated in the middle of the night, moved from one temporary home to the next, and rebuilt lives that will never quite look the way they did before the fire. FEMA is arguing in court, right now, that none of that is the kind of loss covered by the law.
Trial lawyers will continue to fight for justice regardless of powerful forces that stand in the way. Congress passed a law to make HPCC victims whole, and Congress decided what “whole” means. FEMA doesn’t get to overrule that on its own.
Brian Colón is the managing partner of Singleton Schreiber’s New Mexico offices. He served as New Mexico State Auditor from 2019 to 2022.