Overview

After a wildfire or other declared disaster, water damage rarely arrives in a single, tidy form, and the answer to who pays depends on what caused the water and where it went. The firefighters who saved the building may have soaked units that never burned. A roof or wall the fire opened up may have let rain pour in for weeks. Heat may have ruptured pipes, sprinkler systems may have discharged, or a denuded hillside may have sent mud and debris flowing through a ground-floor unit. Each of those is a legally distinct event, and lumping them together is how homeowners end up chasing the wrong party for payment.

Two separate questions decide the outcome, and homeowners constantly collapse them into one. The first is who is responsible to repair, which the Davis-Stirling Act answers through Civil Code 4775. The second is who pays for the loss, which insurance answers through the cause-of-loss provisions in the HOA’s master policy and your individual HO-6 policy. Civil Code 4775 can make your HOA responsible to repair a damaged common area component without your HOA’s master policy being the source that ultimately funds it, and the reverse is equally true.

Civil Code 4775 keeps your HOA responsible for repairing, replacing, and maintaining the common area, but a 2025 amendment complicated that duty in exactly the disaster setting this Fact Sheet addresses. SB 900 added a disaster exception to Civil Code 4775 that, read on its plain terms, can switch off the entire section, not merely the new utility-restoration deadline, when a declared emergency materially impairs your HOA’s ability to perform. That exception is broad in what it reaches but narrow in what triggers it. A disaster declaration alone does not excuse your HOA, the emergency has to genuinely impair the HOA’s ability to act, and the suspension lasts only as long as that impairment lasts. Even then, the exception pauses a statutory default, it does not transfer the repair bill to you or let your HOA abandon the common area once conditions stabilize.

The payment side is where most of the hard answers live, and several of them turn on facts and policy language rather than on clean rules. Water the fire department pours into your unit is generally not recoverable from the fire department because Government Code 850.4 gives fire agencies broad immunity for any injury caused in fighting fires, which pushes that loss onto insurance. That immunity is powerful, but it does not foreclose every disaster claim against a government entity because a separate theory built on a pre-fire infrastructure failure, such as inadequate water supply or failed hydrants, stands on different footing. Regardless, whether your master policy or your own HO-6 policy responds, and whether the loss is treated as fire-related water, flood, or mudflow, depends on how the policy characterizes the cause, and those characterizations are being actively litigated in the wake of the Palisades and Altadena fires.

This Fact Sheet separates the repair-responsibility question under Civil Code 4775 from the payment question under your insurance, maps the most common post-disaster water scenarios to the party who likely bears each one, and explains where governmental immunity, the master-versus-individual policy split, and California FAIR Plan gaps leave homeowners exposed.

Key Points

Water damage after a wildfire or disaster forces two questions that homeowners almost always blur together: who has to repair the damage, and who has to pay for it. The Davis-Stirling Act answers the first through Civil Code 4775. Your insurance answers the second through the cause-of-loss terms in the HOA’s master policy and your own HO-6 policy. The points below pull those two questions apart, walk through the specific ways water reaches your unit after a disaster, and show you which party most likely bears each one. Once you can tell a repair-responsibility question from a coverage question, you stop chasing the wrong party and start applying pressure where it actually counts.

• Water damage after a disaster is not just one problem, it’s several. A wildfire or major disaster produces water intrusion through several different mechanisms, and each one carries its own legal answer. Firefighting water, rain pouring through a fire-opened roof (in the period immediately following a major fire), ruptured pipes, discharged sprinklers, and post-fire mudflow are not interchangeable. They differ in what caused them, who is responsible to repair the resulting damage, and which insurance policy, if any, pays for it. Treating them as a single “water damage” problem is the first mistake many homeowners (and HOAs) make, because the right answer for firefighting water is the wrong answer for mudflow.
• The first question is who must repair the damage, and Civil Code 4775 answers it. Civil Code 4775 makes your HOA responsible for repairing, replacing, and maintaining the common area, and it makes you responsible for maintaining (though not repairing or replacing) your exclusive use common area. When disaster water damages a roof, a structural wall, shared plumbing, or other common area components, the repair duty falls on your HOA by default, no matter how the damage occurred. That duty controls unless your CC&Rs expressly shift it, and an HOA cannot rewrite the allocation through a rule or a policy. [I covered this topic in depth in my Fact Sheet, “Who Pays for California HOA Common Area Repairs? Understanding Civil Code 4775,” which I recommend you read after completing this one.]
  • SB 900 also added a duty for your HOA to restore interrupted utilities fast, which matters after a disaster knocks them out. Effective January 1, 2025, SB 900 made your HOA responsible for restoring interrupted gas, heat, water, or electrical service that begins in the common area, even when the repair extends into your unit or your exclusive use common area, and it required your HOA to commence those repairs within 14 days of the interruption. After a wildfire or earthquake, those are often the first systems to fail, so this duty puts a hard clock on your HOA at exactly the moment service matters most. The same statute, however, contains a disaster exception that can relax that very clock.
  • The SB 900 disaster exception can suspend your HOA’s repair duty, but only while a declared emergency genuinely impairs its ability to act. The same 2025 amendment that created the utility-restoration duty also built in an escape valve. Civil Code 4775 now provides that the section stops applying when a qualifying emergency, whether declared by the federal government, the Governor, or a local body, actually undercuts your HOA’s capacity to carry out its obligations. Two features of that exception cut in opposite directions. On the reach side, the statute suspends the whole section rather than just the utility clock, so a board could argue that even its baseline common area repair duty pauses. On the trigger side, the bar is high, because the mere existence of a disaster declaration accomplishes nothing unless the emergency truly disables the HOA from performing, and the moment that disability lifts, the duty returns. [I part ways here with commentators who have written that the SB 900 exception only pauses the 14-day utility timeline. The statute says “this section shall not apply,” not “subdivision (b) shall not apply,” so the better reading of the plain language is that the exception can reach the HOA’s entire repair duty, not just the deadline. No California appellate court has yet interpreted the provision, so I flag this as my reading of the text rather than settled law.]
  • Even when the exception applies, it does not shift responsibility for the repair bill onto you. Suspending Civil Code 4775 removes the Davis-Stirling Act’s default allocation of repair responsibility only for the period of genuine impairment. It does not, however, transfer that responsibility to individual owners, and it does not erase your HOA’s CC&R-imposed legal obligations, contractual duties, or insurance duties, all of which survive the exception. An HOA that reads the disaster exception as “we owe our members nothing” has misread the exemption, which merely pauses a default, it does not hand the common area back to you to fix at your own expense.
• The second question is who pays for the loss, and that is an insurance question, not a Civil Code 4775 question. Being responsible to repair a component is not the same as being the source that funds the repair. After a disaster, the money usually comes from insurance, and the policy that responds depends on the cause of loss and the policy language, not on the Davis-Stirling Act. Your HOA’s master policy covers one layer, your individual HO-6 policy covers another, and a gap between them does not disappear simply because Civil Code 4775 made the HOA responsible to perform the repair. This is where post-disaster fights actually get decided, because the master policy and the HO-6 policy often point at each other while the innocent homeowner waits for the insurance companies to fight it out. [I explain how those two layers interact, and where applicable, why FAIR Plan coverage so often falls short of the rebuild cost, in my Fact Sheet “Altadena & Palisades Fires: Why California FAIR Plan Insurance Isn’t Enough to Rebuild.”]
• Water that the fire department pours into your unit is generally not recoverable from the fire department. When firefighters flood a building to extinguish a fire, units that never burned can suffer severe water damage, and homeowners understandably want to bill the agency responsible. Government Code 850.4, however, prevents that because it immunizes public entities and employees (i.e., fire departments and firefighters) from liability for any injury caused in fighting fires. That immunity is broad and courts apply it aggressively, so the practical result is that firefighting water becomes an insurance loss rather than a claim against the fire department, state, county, or city. That said, while that immunity is powerful, it does not prevent every disaster claim against a government entity.
  • A separate claim may survive where the harm came from a pre-fire infrastructure failure rather than the firefighting itself. Government Code 850.4 bars claims for injury caused in fighting the fire, but it does not necessarily bar a claim built on a different, independent theory, such as a dangerous condition of public property under Government Code 835. For example, in cases where the real failure was an empty reservoir, inadequate water supply, or dry hydrants that crippled the firefighting effort, the theory is not “the firefighters damaged my unit,” it is “the public entity maintained a dangerous condition before the fire ever started.” That distinction is exactly what fire survivors following the Altadena, Eton, and Palisades fires are pressing right now in multiple pending lawsuits. [These dangerous-condition theories are being actively litigated in the wake of the Palisades and Altadena fires and remain unproven. I flag this as a developing avenue, not a guaranteed path to recovery, because no court has yet resolved how these claims interact with firefighting immunity in the current cases.]
• Water that enters because the fire opened up the roof or walls is usually a fire-ensuing loss your HO-6 insurance policy treats as fire damage. When a fire burns off a roof or breaches an exterior wall and water from a subsequent rain fall later pours in, the resulting water damage typically traces back to the fire as the originating cause. Most policies treat that kind of ensuing water loss as part of the fire claim rather than as a separate, excluded water event, which matters because fire is a covered peril while certain standalone water causes are not. The characterization is not automatic, though, and it depends on your specific policy language and on how the carrier reads the chain of causation. Get the cause-of-loss determination in writing, because whether the carrier calls it fire damage or something else can decide whether you are covered at all.
• Post-disaster pipe bursts and sprinkler discharges follow the same repair-versus-payment split. Disasters routinely rupture plumbing, and fire-suppression sprinklers can discharge during or after an event, flooding units from within, including those that may not have received any water damage from another source. The repair responsibility for the damaged common area components still falls on your HOA under Civil Code 4775, while the payment question turns on whether the master policy or your HO-6 responds and how the policy characterizes the water. Where the pipe or sprinkler line that burst is common area, your HOA owns the repair of that component, but the water damage to the interior of your unit may land on your own coverage. Sort out which component is common area and which policy covers the resulting interior damage before you accept any party’s first answer.
• Mudflow and debris flow after a wildfire are treated very differently from fire or water by most policies. When a wildfire strips a hillside bare, the next heavy rain can send mud and debris flowing through ground-floor units, and this is the scenario where coverage most often collapses. Many homeowners policies exclude mudflow and debris flow outright, treating them as a form of earth movement or flood rather than a covered water loss, which can leave the damage uninsured under a standard policy and instead implicate separate flood coverage that many homeowners don’t carry. If a post-fire mud or debris flow hits your unit, the coverage answer is rarely intuitive, so do not assume your fire policy responds without confirming exactly how it classifies the loss.
• If your HOA’s master policy falls short, the gap can come back to you as a special assessment. When the master policy does not cover the full cost of repairing fire-damaged common areas, the shortfall does not vanish, and your HOA may push it onto the membership through a special assessment. Survivors of the Altadena, Eton, and Palisades fires have already faced exactly this, with assessments reaching tens of thousands of dollars per unit on compressed payment deadlines. [I wrote about the post-disaster assessment fight, and the questions that create real leverage, in my Fact Sheet “Can My HOA Force Me to Pay a Special Assessment After the Altadena and Palisades Fires?”]
• Here’s how to protect yourself when disaster-related water damage hits your HOA. Start by documenting the cause of the water before anyone repairs anything, because firefighting water, fire-ensuing rain, a burst pipe, and mudflow all might lead to different answers, and the cause determines who pays. Request your HOA’s master policy declarations and your own HO-6 policy, and get the carrier’s cause-of-loss determination in writing rather than over the phone. Send your HOA a written records request under Civil Code 5200 for the master policy, any insurance correspondence, and the board’s repair decisions, and keep a dated copy of everything you send. If your board claims the SB 900 disaster exception relieves it of its repair duty, make it explain in writing how the emergency materially impaired its ability to act and why that impairment continues. The homeowner who builds a clean paper trail of cause, coverage, and the board’s own statements holds far more leverage than the one who simply waits for the HOA to decide.
  • Determine whether your individual policy covers HOA special assessments before a shortfall lands. Some HO-6 policies include “loss-assessment coverage” that can pay some or all of a special assessment imposed after a covered loss. For obvious reasons, if you can afford to maintain such coverage, it’s a fantastic idea to do so. Check whether your policy carries that coverage and in what amount, because it can be the difference between absorbing a disaster assessment yourself and shifting it to your insurer.
• If your HOA is dodging its repair duty or shifting disaster costs onto you, call the HOA attorneys at MBK Chapman. After a wildfire or disaster, homeowners face a maze of repair duties, immunity rules, master and individual policies, coverage exclusions, and special assessments. Bad HOAs routinely exploit such confusion to push costs where they don’t belong. The seasoned and highly respected HOA attorneys at MBK Chapman know how Civil Code 4775 allocates repair responsibility, where the SB 900 disaster exception begins and ends, how firefighting immunity channels losses onto insurance, and how to challenge an improper post-disaster assessment. If your HOA is using the disaster to avoid its obligations or to shift the bill onto you, contact us and we’ll handle your HOA.

Civil Code 4775 decides who must repair the common area after a disaster, and even the new SB 900 exception only pauses that duty temporarily while a genuine emergency impairs the HOA, without ever transferring the bill to you. Your insurance, not the Davis-Stirling Act, decides who pays, and the answer turns on the cause of the water and the language of the master and HO-6 policies. Firefighting water lands on insurance because the fire department is immune, fire-ensuing rain usually rides the fire claim, and mudflow often falls outside coverage entirely. Pull those threads apart, document the cause, demand the policies and the records, and make your HOA justify every cost it tries to place on you because in the chaos after a disaster, a bad HOA will be counting on your confusion to take advantage of you.

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About Michael Kushner

Michael Kushner is a California attorney with over 30 years of experience representing homeowners in disputes with their HOAs. He is widely regarded as California’s leading homeowner-side HOA attorney, and has built one of the state’s most prominent law practices dedicated to holding HOAs accountable under the Davis-Stirling Act and California law.

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