Joe Pluta lost his Lahaina home and everything in it in the August 2023 wildfire that destroyed much of the town. Nearly three years later, Pluta is on the cusp of getting compensated for the damages he suffered.

He’s one of more than 20,000 victims who filed lawsuits against Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. and other parties for damages related to the fire. Now, after a Maui judge issued an order last week putting a lid on legal fees, victims like him can expect to start receiving their share of a $4.03 billion legal settlement.

How much Pluta and the other victims will each receive still remains a mystery. 

“It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever experienced,” Pluta said.

Regardless, the payments should start flowing “in a very short period,” said Jesse Creed, one of four liaison counsel guiding the litigation for the plaintiffs. “It could be tomorrow, it could be a week from tomorrow, it could be two weeks from tomorrow.”

The payments are expected to come out in waves, Creed said, with those in less complicated cases coming first. 

A team of four claims administrators will determine how much each victim receives based on various factors. 

The four administrators are Keith Hunter, a Honolulu-based mediator; Daniel Buckley, a retired California Superior Court judge; Louis Meisinger, also a former California Superior Court judge and former general counsel for the Walt Disney Co., and Cathy Yanni, who has served as a trustee for a California wildfire victims fund that has already paid out $13.7 billion to wildfire victims.

The money will be paid out in four tranches totaling approximately $1 billion per year over four years. For the victims, that means they’ll get their payments spread out over time. 

Much Remains Unknown

Other than that, much remains unknown. The administrators face the daunting task of determining how to fairly allocate roughly $4 billion to some 21,750 victims. That averages out to about $190,000 per victim, or about $47,000 per victim per year. 

In practice, some will receive more, presumably much more, and others much less. The administrators will award money to each victim on a pro rata basis, Creed said. That means they’ll compensate victims in proportion to their specific losses or severity of their injuries, while accounting for the finite pool of settlement money available. 

The administrators have established regulations to govern how they review claims and decide who gets how much. The regulations spell out 10 claim types for which victims can be compensated: real property losses, personal property losses, living expenses incurred because of the fire, wage losses, business losses, emotional distress damages from being displaced from homes or being trapped in the fire’s “zone of danger,” and damages for physical injury and wrongful death.

The 20-page regulations required victims and their lawyers to submit rafts of documentation showing they were eligible to make claims and how much in damages they could get. 

Claims for business losses, for instance, are governed by five pages of regulations and, in the case of damage to business property, required victims to submit a dozen documents, including things like purchase records or receipts, architectural or engineering drawings and arborist or landscaping documents.

“You’re like a little wild animal trapped in a forest fire. You don’t know where to go.”

Alan Barrios, Lahaina fire survivor

Alan Barrios had much simpler claims, including one of the most common among fire survivors: being stuck inside the fire’s perimeter, known as the “zone of danger.” 

The regulations spell out how much people are entitled to for zone of danger claims: $200,000 for “Tier I” claimants, $100,000 for Tier II and $50,000 for Tier III. But it’s far from clear how all of the people who say they were trapped in the danger zone will be able to get compensated that much, based on the enormous total number of claims.

This week, Barrios, a former cab driver in his 50s, recalled being trapped in his home for hours while fires surrounded his now-destroyed Front Street Apartments complex. 

“You’re like a little wild animal trapped in a forest fire,” he said. “You don’t know where to go.”

Barrios eventually escaped before the complex itself burned down.

His lawyers from San Diego-based Singleton Schreiber LLP filed a lawsuit including claims for personal injury, losing his residence and cab business, personal property damage — and for the emotional distress he suffered from being surrounded by fire for hours.

Barrios was one of 16,472 survivors who filed zone of danger claims, according to a report from the claims administrators submitted to the Maui State Circuit Court in April. Even if the administrators classified all danger zone claims in the lowest tier, valued at $50,000 each, that would eat up $823 million, or about 20%, of the $4 billion settlement money.  

And that’s just one category of claims.

Altogether, the 21,750 victims filed 94,816 claims supported by 215,000 documents, the report says. The claims administrators will have to decide what Barrios gets for being trapped in his home for hours, given all of the other claims victims have filed.

After the fire, Barrios’ work driving tourists around evaporated. He moved around from FEMA housing to government-subsidized housing in a hotel. He’s now unemployed. Looking back, he says the experience of being trapped was a nightmare.

“I was there the whole time,” he said. “It was like a war zone.”

Order Limits Legal Fees

Maui Circuit Court Judge Peter Cahill’s order limiting legal fees ensures the bulk of the settlement money goes to victims instead of their lawyers. 

The $4.03 billion settlement, reached in August 2024, includes about $800 million from Hawaiʻi taxpayers, $1.99 billion from HECO and its parent company and $807.5 million from Kamehameha Schools’ trust to benefit Native Hawaiian children. The rest comes from Maui County, telecommunications companies that used HECO utility poles and companies affiliated with Maui landowner Peter Martin. 

The plaintiffs’ lawyers had wanted 25% of the roughly $4 billion. Cahill cut that significantly. For lawyers who filed suits before the August 2024 settlement was reached, Cahill capped their fees at 8.3% of the settlement proceeds received for clients; those who signed up clients after the settlement could charge only 3%. 

Cahill set aside another $222 million in a common fund for lawyers who did the bulk of the work that led to the settlement. Disbursements from that fund will be administered by a three-person panel consisting of retired Hawaiʻi judges Jeff Crabtree and Dean Ochiai and retired Hawaiʻi Supreme Court Justice James Duffy.

Pluta commended Cahill for capping the legal fees.

“I thought it was brilliant,” he said. “I’m very grateful.”

Still, he said, the whole process has left him too much in the dark.

Asked what he expects to be paid, he answered: “It’s very simple. Nobody knows anything.”