Month: October 2025

Today was another day of inspections in the wild fire areas around Los Angeles, Palisades, and Pasadena. Started the day off in Pasadena, I was running early and ended up near the Pasadena gardens and decided to stop and walk through. The gardens are not in the best of shape but still had some neat flowers and plants. They have different areas for “desert”, “plains”, etc.

Spent the rest of the day basically sitting in traffic. The good part about today was that every inspection I did was a valid loss event. Something to write in my digital diary and in my calendar. It is hard to believe that over a year later the fire damage is still so extreme. I may stop and take some perspective photos tomorrow.

I was done around 3pm and then came back to the hotel, caught up on some paperwork, yes my desk job never really goes away, and then decided to try to get out for some exercise. Found a park nearby and went down in that direction to check it out.

Today’s GPX Track.

And that’s a wrap for today. See ya tomorrow!

What a wonderful day to be sitting in traffic in Los Angeles, CA. I really do not understand what the draw is to this area and why people want to live here. The traffic is awful! Today I started in Southeast Los Angeles then had to drive the I-5 and I-10 to Northwest of Los Angeles in the Pacific Palisades. Then back to my hotel a near LAX. I think I ran out of curse words.

I will say that the day started off nicely when I walked out of the hotel and spotted one of my favorite flowers, the Bird of Paradise.

The insurance inspections today was one commercial Theft/Vandalism claim of an 80,000 sq foot cold storage warehouse – someone took all the copper including the refrigeration piping and the wiring. The only other thing taken was the video recorder for the surveillance system. Someone knew exactly where that was, and it was not obvious.

Second inspection was a water claim in an apartment complex. Upstairs neighbors had a pipe break and drowned the kitchen of the downstairs apartment. Not good but at least most of the HVAC did not get damaged.

Third inspection was a smoke/fire claim from the Pacific Palisades wildfire last year. That area is still in very bad shape and re-building is not going well. There is ash in everything and the smoke damage is obvious. To make matters more interesting there is a lot of “questionable” claims being made. The trick is finding out what is valid vs what is questionable. Thankfully today none of the inspections I completed were in the “questionable” category.

What am I doing today? Well, how does an instant trip to Los Angeles sound to you?

Had an electrical theft vandalism claim that came across my desk yesterday morning that needed a little extra attention and after discussions between myself and my manager we decided the best thing would be for me to fly out to LA for a few days and do a complex inspection of the damaged location.

The in office part of my job includes pricing the repairs and replacements required to return the insured to “pre-loss condition” after a loss event. In many instances we use a great bunch of 1099 contractors (electricians) that do the inspections for us. Occasionally there are many unanswered questions or I look at the inspection and have a gut instinct that something is missing that is preventing me from accurately pricing the repairs and replacements. When that happens we usually send a senior tech or one of our Technical Field Managers to gather missing information. In this case I was the most available, and I can write much of the report before I leave the site. Given it is the end of the month it made the most sense for me to travel out and complete this inspection.

The downside of that is that while I am traveling and doing some field work, the office side does not stop. I have some fantastic co-workers that do try and take some of the load off of me, but the heavy pricing side of things is my evening activity.

I will be out in Los Angeles for the next few days and be flying back to Denver, CO on Sunday.

BTW: Why is it about 70 degrees warmer in LA than in Denver? As one of my colleagues said, “Welcome to Southern California”

Trying to decide what my evening workout is going to be. I guess I am going to attempt a walk on the treadmill — or not.