Mikal C. Watts

In a 2022 funding request to the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission for $189.7 million to harden its power grid statewide, Hawaiian Electric said that the risk of its system “causing a wildfire ignition is significant.” The utility said it needed the money to make sure its facilities were not “the origin or a contributing source of ignition for a wildfire.” On August 8, 2023, fire destroyed much of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people.

That month Mikal Watts and Jan Apo, a Maui lawyer and Lahaina native, sued Hawaiian Electric. Their complaint alleged that the utility should have had plans in place to shut down its power systems before the high winds arrived, that the commission had approved the 2022 request, and that the company then failed to act: it had spent nothing on power-pole upgrades or wildfire prevention in 2021, 2022 or 2023, and nothing on removing hazard trees in 2021 or 2022. “Unfortunately, for the residents of Lahaina, these proposed grid hardening expenditures were deferred,” the complaint said. “Their own papers say they knew how to prevent it,” Watts said, “and their own papers showed their conscious and deliberate decision to delay the implementation of safety measures that would have prevented this tragedy.”

The lawyers then went looking for the utility’s own correspondence. In late August 2023 the plaintiffs in Jan K. Apo v. Hawaiian Electric Industries subpoenaed Mark Thaller of Gainesville, Virginia, a former consultant to the utility, to sit for a deposition on September 25 and to hand over his exchanges with Hawaiian Electric’s top officials about wildfire risk and the upgrades its grid needed. The subpoena asked for his documents on wildfire mitigation plans, for anything on “Decisions to Defer wildfire mitigation CAPEX,” meaning capital spending on fire prevention, and for what it called the “Thaller Letter.”

One Fire or Two

On the morning of August 8 a three-acre brush fire near Lahainaluna Road was first reported at 6:37 a.m. Shane Treu, who lived in the neighborhood, had gone outside at dawn and seen a wooden power pole snap with a flash. The line came down sparking, the dry grass caught, and the flames spread fast. Treu called 911, and from 6:40 a.m. he posted three videos to Facebook while he wet down his property with a garden hose; one shows a loose cable in blackened grass with flames around it. By 9 a.m. the fire had been announced as fully contained, and by 3:30 p.m. it had flared up again. At 3:06 p.m. another neighbor, Robert Arconado, filmed smoke and embers moving toward town.

By August 16 Watts was on Maui interviewing witnesses and “collecting contemporaneously filmed videos.” Three days earlier he had listed the videos, the witness accounts, the burn progression and the utility equipment that remained, and said all of it “points to Hawaiian Electric’s equipment being the ignition source of the fire that devastated Lahaina.” Now he told the Associated Press: “There is credible evidence, captured on video, that at least one of the power line ignition sources occurred when trees fell into a Hawaiian Electric power line.” He meant Treu’s footage. He said the company’s own documents showed that it knew its grid was degraded and that it had delayed replacing old poles, and that in that weather, with that much dry fuel, the destruction of Lahaina had been foreseeable: “an entirely preventable tragedy.”

In August 2023 Hawaiian Electric’s spokesman, Darren Pai, said the cause of the fire had not been determined and that the company would work with the state and county as they conducted their review. The company also said it had no formal power-shutoff plan and that short-notice shutoffs had to be coordinated with first responders, because electricity was needed in Lahaina to run the pumps used for firefighting. Shelee Kimura, its chief executive, said the decision also had to account for people who rely on medical equipment. “Even in places where this has been used, it is controversial, and it’s not universally accepted,” she said.

On August 27 the utility gave its own account. It said its equipment appeared to have sparked the morning fire. But that fire, it said, had been reported 100 percent contained, the fire department had left around 2 p.m. with the fire out, and at 3 p.m. its workers found a second fire in the field near Lahaina Intermediate School, about 75 yards from Lahainaluna Road, at a time when all of its lines in West Maui had been “de-energized for more than six hours.” What started that fire, the company said, had not been determined. Watts answered that Hawaiian Electric’s equipment “originally ignited the fire that eventually incinerated the historic town of Lahaina,” and he pointed to what the statement left out: “If you read it closely, they didn’t say there was a separate ignition source.” Maui County had sued the utility days earlier, and Watts read the statement as an answer to the county: in the utility’s telling, the town burned after county firefighters failed to put the fire out. “So it’s more like a contributory negligence defense,” he said.

“The evidence is overwhelming that Hawaiian Electric started the fire,” Watts said in September 2023. “And I am 100% certain of our ability to prove it.” On the law, he pointed to California: “California has a lot of wildfire case law,” he said. “We anticipate Hawaii will do the same thing.” In August 2023 Watts said hundreds of potential plaintiffs had approached his team and that the suit was aimed at keeping the islands from ever again experiencing a fire like this one. His legal team came to represent more than 3,500 Maui fire victims and survivors.

By June 2024 Watts and Apo had made public new evidence of how the fire started. Apo showed a piece of fulgurite, a substance formed when electricity strikes soil, found near Lahaina Intermediate School. “This proves that the electricity hit the ground … when the power lines broke and fell to the ground,” he said. They also pointed to a resident’s video that, in their account, captured the moment power lines that had been de-energized were re-energized while in contact with dry brush.

A November 2024 Trial Setting

By September 2023 Watts, a Texas lawyer, had applied to Hawaii’s judiciary for permission to represent Jan Apo and the Apo Family Trust. Apo, a partner in the Maui personal-injury firm Apo, Reck & Kusachi, was both his client and his co-counsel. “We lost 10 family homes,” Apo said. “Ten family homes have burned down. One of my cousins did not make it out of the fire.” He had grown up on Kuhua Street, and the house he was raised in burned. He and Watts set up an office that handled only the fire claims. By November 2023 Apo had been assigned as one of five plaintiffs’ lawyers on the liaison committee in the Maui fire litigation, and by March 2025 he was one of the three lead lawyers for the fire victims, with Jesse Creed and Jacob Lowenthal.

Defendants had removed suits to federal court under a 2002 statute that gives federal courts jurisdiction over suits arising from the deaths of at least 75 people at a “discrete location.” On March 11, 2024, U.S. District Judge Jill Otake sent 90 of them back to state court, ruling that the Lahaina fire was not a discrete location because the deaths were spread over seven square miles. In the Maui circuit court Judge Peter Cahill held a status conference on April 12, with more than 1,000 plaintiffs in the cases and the list still growing, and the lawyers discussed a first Lahaina trial as early as November 18. Depositions of employees of Hawaiian Electric, Maui County, Spectrum and the Bishop Estate filled nearly every day of July 2024, with more planned for August. The plaintiffs’ lawyers worked through tens of thousands of documents and prepared expert reports on damages and on the fire’s origin and spread.

The first cases were set for trial in November 2024: one death claim, one business, three homeowners and four renters. Among them was Apo’s claim for the loss of his two homes. In the week of June 24, 2024, the parties held settlement talks in Los Angeles with representatives of every defendant, and Watts’s firm kept preparing for the November trial while the mediation went on, meeting with clients to document each one’s damages and losses.

$4.037 Billion and 192 Insurers

On August 2, 2024, after four months of mediation, the defendants announced a global settlement. Hawaiian Electric and its parent company, Hawaiian Electric Industries, joined the State of Hawaii, Maui County, Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Co., Hawaiian Telcom and Spectrum/Charter Communications in agreeing to pay $4.037 billion. Hawaiian Electric’s share was $1.99 billion, including $75 million it had already contributed to the One ʻOhana Initiative; Kamehameha Schools committed $872.5 million, the state $807.5 million and Maui County $10 million. The defendants admitted no liability. “This settlement will accelerate the long road back for the town of Lahaina,” Watts said. “It provides billions of dollars to finance the reconstruction of this beautiful and historic town.” That month Apo spoke of the families in his own town: “If we can get them just a little more money that helps them rebuild their homes, I would be very, very happy with that.”

On October 2, 2024, the Maui Department of Fire and Public Safety and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made public the ATF’s findings on the cause. Broken power lines, re-energized at about 6:34 that morning, threw off sparks of molten metal, and the overgrown vegetation below caught fire; that single fire went on to destroy much of Lahaina. At 2:52 p.m. it rekindled in the gully near where it had started, and the investigators could not say for certain what set it going again. Hawaiian Electric said the findings largely affirmed the timeline it had first described. “We deeply regret that our operations contributed to the fire that ignited in the morning,” the company said.

The August settlement was conditioned on resolving the claims of the insurance companies that had paid policyholders for property losses, with no additional payments from the defendants. About 192 insurers had paid more than $2.3 billion to home and business owners and expected to pay about $1 billion more. They argued that Hawaii law allowed them to recover that money through subrogation claims against those responsible for the fire. “Subrogation is vital to a healthy and stable insurance market,” the Property Insurers for Hawaiʻi said. Paul Martin of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies warned that a loss could undermine insurers’ ability to offer competitive rates.

In the coordinated Maui Fire Cases, Judge Cahill reserved three questions about the insurers’ rights for the Hawaii Supreme Court. Jesse Creed, a liaison counsel for the plaintiffs, argued on February 6, 2025, and four days later the court ruled unanimously against the insurers. It held that the limits it had placed on health insurers’ subrogation in Yukumoto v. Tawarahara apply to property and casualty insurers as well: when an insured recovers from the party responsible for the loss through a settlement, a lien against the insured’s recovery under Hawaii Revised Statutes § 663-10 is the insurer’s exclusive remedy, and the insurer cannot bring its own suit against the settling defendant. The court reasoned that two statutes, §§ 431:13-103 and 663-10, comprehensively address and limit an insurer’s rights to reimbursement and subrogation when its insured recovers from the wrongdoer by judgment or settlement. Chief Justice Recktenwald’s 80-page opinion followed on March 17, 2025. It described the morning of August 8, 2023, in strong, dry winds from Hurricane Dora, when residents “had little warning or ability to evacuate.” The fire destroyed more than 3,000 structures. “At least 102 people lost their lives as a result of the fire,” the court wrote. The cases returned to Judge Cahill to oversee completion of the settlement and the procedures for deciding individual awards.

The Difference Above One ʻOhana

Before the money could move, it had to be divided between two groups of plaintiffs: individuals who had lost family members, homes or businesses, and a class that included tourists whose trips were canceled. The division was set for trial before Judge Cahill on January 29, 2025. The lawyers reached a deal late the night before, and the judge, after meeting privately with them, announced it that day. Under the settlement, the more than 10,000 individual plaintiffs would share 97 percent of the $4 billion, and a class action would receive the remaining 3 percent, about $135 million.

Governor Josh Green signed House Bill 1001 on July 8, 2025, committing the state’s $807.5 million over four years, about $200 million a year. Most survivors who wanted to proceed as individual plaintiffs had to sign releases by October 18, 2025, and the settlement’s organizers set a goal of making the first payments by the end of that year.

Some families had already been paid. The separate $175 million One ʻOhana Fund, set up a few months after the fire, compensated those who lost a loved one or were severely injured up to $1.5 million, and by August 2025 it had paid 22 wrongful-death claims and three injury claims. Watts credited Governor Green with the fund and said it fell short: “It got money in people’s hands, and I applaud him for that … but it wasn’t enough to pay for the full damages for those wrongful death cases.” Families paid by the fund could also join the global settlement and receive more, Watts said, depending on factors that included the age of the person who died: “So over and above what they already got in the One ʻOhana Fund, they can make a claim to this settlement and get the difference.”

The insurers came back once more, and in February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled again that “subrogating insurers do not have a protectable interest that allows them to intervene.” By mid-April 21,750 claimants had filed 94,816 claims across ten categories of loss. The property insurers agreed to take 10 percent of what their own policyholders would be paid, about $249 million, out of the second, third and fourth annual installments. By June the defendants had deposited the first installment, $1,139,453,012. The claims administrator, BrownGreer, expected to need about six months to make initial findings on every claim, and Cathy Yanni, a special master, oversaw the fund for the individual plaintiffs. When the second ruling came down, Kekoa Lansford had already waited more than a year; he meant to rebuild his family’s house on Ilikahi Street with his share. “It was a family home, it was a home for my whole family for many, many years,” he said.

Corpus Christi, 1990

Watts was born in Corpus Christi in 1967. He finished his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas in two years, graduating with high honors in 1987, and graduated with honors from the University of Texas School of Law in 1989, at twenty-one. After a year as briefing attorney to Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips of the Supreme Court of Texas, he joined David L. Perry & Associates in Corpus Christi in September 1990 and became a partner in December 1991. He formed his own firm in April 1997, founded Watts Law Firm in August 2002, and in 2009 formed Watts Guerra with Francisco Guerra IV.

His firm has said it was one of two firms that led hundreds of claims brought nationwide against Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford, and that in the settlement of one of those cases, the Bailey case, the companies agreed to disclose information about their own defect investigations and safety practices.

Before Lahaina, Watts represented fire victims in the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, work that fed into the $13.5 billion Fire Victim Trust for the 2017 North Bay and 2018 Camp Fire survivors. His firm has said it represented more than 16,000 of the claimants and that Watts spent six weeks in San Francisco negotiating the settlement.

Smoke in the Willamette Valley

During the Labor Day fires of 2020, smoke, soot and ash settled over the Willamette Valley while wine grapes hung ripe on the vine or sat freshly harvested in open-air bins. Smoke compounds bind with the sugars in grape skins and are released during fermentation, and the wine can taste of ash. Red grapes, which are fermented with their skins, are more likely to yield undesirable wine after long exposure, and the Willamette Valley is known for pinot noir. The wineries said the smoke left them unable to sell wine through various outlets and cost them shelf space and reputation in the seasons that followed.

Jim Bernau, who founded Willamette Valley Vineyards near Turner in 1983, saw it in his own fruit. “Some of the grapes took on that smoke as they were developing and so that made the fruit unusable,” he said. “We basically had to declassify that fruit.” Grapes grown for red wine went into rosé, and some growers could not harvest at all and lost a year’s work. In May 2023 Willamette Valley Vineyards, Elk Cove Vineyards, Brigadoon Wine Co. and two other wineries announced that they had hired a legal team led by Robert Julian of BakerHostetler and Watts to investigate a suit; the smoke, they said, had ruined most of the valley’s 2020 harvest. That summer Willamette Valley Vineyards sued Pacific Power and PacifiCorp for $8.1 million, claiming about $2.7 million in lost sales, revenue and repair costs. The utility answered: “Pacific Power’s ability to provide such essential utility services is being threatened by spurious lawsuits like these.” In May 2024 about 30 wineries and vineyards sued in Multnomah County Circuit Court for more than $100 million, alleging that the fires had sent out smoke particles that “landed on and infused themselves into the grapes.”

Watts was lead counsel for 93 winery and vineyard owners, among them Willamette Valley Vineyards, Sokol Blosser and King Estate Winery, working with BakerHostetler and the Eugene firm Arnold Gallagher. The owners alleged that PacifiCorp, which owns Pacific Power, ignored warnings from Oregon fire officials and refused to shut off its lines during dangerous fire conditions, failed to maintain its equipment, and failed to trim and remove trees and branches that fell onto its lines and started fires. King Estate put the smoke damage to its grapes and wine at $31.9 million. In the case set for a jury trial on November 3, 2025, in Multnomah County Circuit Court in Portland, more than 30 of the wineries sought nearly $180 million plus punitive damages. In a separate case in 2023, a jury had found that PacifiCorp caused substantial damage in wildfires in the Santiam Canyon, in Southern Oregon and on the Oregon Coast.

On October 19, 2025, about two weeks before trial, PacifiCorp agreed to pay the 93 businesses $125 million in a settlement mediated by retired Judge Karsten Rasmussen. “PacifiCorp has once again done the right thing, and stepped up to pay for the damage caused by its equipment more than five years ago,” Watts said. “This is what good companies do.” A PacifiCorp spokesperson, Simon Gutierrez, said the company was “glad to have this matter resolved.” By then PacifiCorp had settled with about 2,700 individuals, businesses and government entities over the Labor Day fires, and it said it would keep defending claims over the Santiam Canyon Fire.

Photogrammetry in Eaton Canyon

The Eaton Fire started at about 6:18 p.m. on January 7, 2025, on the hillside above Eaton Canyon and killed 19 people. By late January Southern California Edison had acknowledged detecting a fault on its transmission line at 6:11 p.m. that evening, while denying that its equipment caused the fire and suggesting that a nearby campfire might have started it. Steven Powell, the utility’s chief executive, said the winds had not been strong enough to warrant shutting off the transmission lines, although distribution lines had already been de-energized. In February 2025 Watts and Douglas Boxer sued Southern California Edison and its parent, Edison International, in Los Angeles Superior Court for Walt Butler and two other Altadena residents who had lost their homes. LA Fire Justice, a Pasadena-based coalition of wildfire lawyers, fire investigators, insurance specialists and community outreach workers, announced the suit; Watts is its lead trial attorney. Their team used photogrammetry, stitching surveillance footage and witnesses’ videos into an exact digital model of the canyon, to fix the point where the fire began.

Walt Butler was LA Fire Justice’s first client. He was 83 and had lived in his house for 60 years. He had owned a sporting goods store and helped coach the track and field team at Pasadena City College, which won three straight state titles from 1975 to 1977. After the fire he recorded a video. “From a guy with everything, to nothing,” he said. “But I have my health, and my life.” The video spread widely, and a GoFundMe his children started raised more than $900,000, which he said he would use to help the community.

“In my career, I’ve worked on twenty-two wildfires, representing 21,000 fire survivors in six different states,” Watts said. “This is the clearest evidence that I’ve ever seen of utilities’ equipment being the start of a fire.” Edison said it did not yet know the cause and that its investigation was continuing.

At a town hall in Pasadena in April 2025, LA Fire Justice showed thermal images that, it said, captured sparking power lines, and it identified the transmission tower at the center of the fire as more than 100 years old and decommissioned in 1971 but, the group alleged, never removed or maintained. Its lawyers had combined and enhanced footage from 14 witnesses; the result, they said, showed two flashes of light at the decommissioned tower and molten material falling onto the hillside, with dry brush under the tower burning 12 seconds into the footage. “So that leads to the obvious question,” Watts said, and he put it to the residents: how does a deactivated line become energized enough to start a fire that burns down a town? He argued that Edison could have prevented the fire with a Public Safety Power Shutoff. “This is a massive, massive expensive wildfire that Southern California Edison owes the bill for,” Watts said. Edison’s spokesman, Jeff Monford, said it would be premature to comment and that any video of the fire needed careful analysis. On April 3 Pedro Pizarro, the chief executive of Edison International, had said: “We still don’t know whether Edison equipment caused the Eaton Fire. It’s certainly possible it did.”

In September 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice sued Southern California Edison for the costs of containing the fire and restoring the land, alleging that the utility was at fault. On August 4, 2026, the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s arson investigators and Cal Fire released their findings. The fire began in the brush beneath an out-of-service Edison tower on a ridge above Eaton Wash, on the Mesa-Sylmar line, which had carried no power in more than 50 years. Two electrical arcing events on the tower, in quick succession, dropped burning material onto dry grass and brush, which caught within 12 seconds. The investigators gave the cause as “the electrical arcing events that took place on the out-of-service Southern California Edison (SCE) tower.” Edison, which had already said “it was likely our equipment was associated with the ignition of the Eaton Fire,” said it was reviewing the report. “We have taken our potential role in the start of this fire seriously from the very beginning,” said Kathleen Dunleavy, its spokeswoman.

Edison’s Payout Program

In July 2025 Edison announced a Wildfire Recovery Compensation Program offering voluntary, expedited payments to people and businesses harmed by the fire in exchange for limiting or waiving their right to sue. When Edison announced workshops for the program that September, Watts said LA Fire Justice looked forward to working with Kenneth R. Feinberg and Camille S. Biros “to resolve our clients’ cases as quickly and fairly as possible.” He said he had known Feinberg for decades and called him “one of the best at resolving complex litigation involving tens of thousands of claimants.” Then he set a condition: “If Ken and Camille are in charge of resolving these Edison cases, then I trust it. If Edison is in charge of the process, then I don’t trust it.”

Edison finalized the program on October 29, 2025. LA Fire Justice warned survivors that accepting a payment required signing a release of claims against Edison for damages known or unknown at the time of signing. Two weeks earlier the coalition had cut its own fee to 25 percent for all current and future Eaton Fire clients; its chief executive, Chris Holden, said the change meant that “more of the recovery goes directly back to you.”

In November 2025 lawyers for Eaton Fire survivors told the court in a joint case-management statement that Edison was intentionally delaying the litigation and any faster mediation to raise participation in its payment program, and they pointed to repeated public statements by Pedro Pizarro, Edison International’s chief executive, that Edison equipment likely sparked the fire. Edison’s lawyers answered that the utility had never entered a mediation protocol so early in a wildfire case: “The Parties are still at the very early stages of developing the factual record.” In March 2026 LA Fire Justice scheduled Watts to lay out its settlement strategy against Edison for survivors at the Pasadena Civic Center, drawing on the Bobcat, North Bay, Camp and Maui fire cases and covering individual mediation, group settlement templates, court-appointed special masters and the California statute AB 1054. By late March, Judge Laura Seigle of the Los Angeles Superior Court had set the first bellwether trials in the Eaton Fire cases to begin on January 25, 2027, and had turned down Edison’s request to wait until August 2027.

West of Lake Avenue

On November 17, 2025, Watts and his LA Fire Justice colleagues sued Southern California Edison, Edison International and Genasys Inc. on behalf of Geraldine “Gerry” Darden over the death of her sister, Stacey Darden, in the Eaton Fire. Genasys, a San Diego company, had a contract with Los Angeles County to provide emergency alerts, notifications and evacuation communications. Gerry Darden accuses Edison of igniting the fire and Genasys of failing to issue evacuation warnings in her sister’s neighborhood; in Watts’s words, Genasys “left Stacey and her neighbors west of Lake Avenue omitted from the designated alert zone.” Gerry Darden said her family “thought long and hard about the decision to file a lawsuit.” “The truth is that if these companies had done what they were supposed to do, Stacey would be alive today,” she said.

Eighteen of the Eaton Fire’s 19 dead lived west of Lake Avenue, in the predominantly Black part of Altadena. Gerry Darden’s lawyers say residents east of the avenue received four evacuation warnings that night, while residents to the west received no alert until nearly 6 a.m. “People close to the fire, with the least amount of time to get out, almost all survived with one exception,” Watts said. “And the folks farthest away from the fire, with the most time to get out, got no warning telling them to do so.” He called it “a case of digital redlining.” Genasys denied wrongdoing and said it would defend itself; Edison said it was reviewing the suit and would respond through the legal process.

Stacey Darden was 54 and lived on Marengo Avenue, about five blocks west of Lake Avenue. Her body was found a week after the fire and identified in April. “Stacey did everything our community asks of a responsible neighbor in a wildfire,” Watts said. “She stayed informed, followed the rules and trusted that if she was in danger, she would be told to get out.” Her family’s lawyers believe her phone’s last activity came at about 3:30 a.m. on January 8, and they say the only evacuation order she received arrived at 5:43 a.m.