Disaster Response: Travelers Responds to the Palisades and Eaton Fires

In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California. Fueled by fierce Santa Ana winds and a historically dry season, the fires quickly accelerated, destroying homes and businesses in their paths. Tens of thousands of residents, including many Travelers customers, were forced to flee, leaving homes, businesses and communities behind.

Accelerating care with advanced technology

Throughout this highly dynamic and destructive event, we worked to support our customers, agents and employees across the Greater Los Angeles area. Long before damaged areas were accessible, we used high-resolution aerial imagery, geospatial analytics and AI to quickly identify insured properties that were total losses and then assigned claims to trained disaster specialists. Within three days of the initial fire events, we confirmed the status of our customers’ insured properties in the fire zones; we made outbound calls to each of those customers to help them set up claims and access funds for temporary living assistance and provided them with information on next steps. At the same time, our Southern California leadership team checked in on our employees across the area and reached out to our local agent and broker partners to keep them informed of the status of their customers’ claims, while our national Communications team provided timely updates to our customers, agents and brokers, and employees.

A human, high-touch response

As the impacted areas began to open to recovery operations, Travelers Claim professionals from our National Catastrophe team and offices across the country deployed to Southern California to meet one-on-one with impacted customers and walk them through next steps. For some, that meant waiting to return to homes in communities lacking water, power and public safety. For others, it involved planning extensive smoke damage remediation. For many, it required making tough decisions about rebuilding homes. Understanding that recovery from an event of this magnitude can take months, if not years, we worked to advance funds and help our customers find long-term housing rentals near work, schools and other essential services so they could move forward with their lives.

Commitment to our communities

For the more than 800 Travelers employees in Greater Los Angeles, these events were personal. While our local Claim and business teams were busy helping customers and distribution partners manage through this event, they also took time to support impacted communities. In partnership with the Happy Hope Foundation and the Union Rescue Mission, Travelers employees assembled more than 2,700 hygiene kits for immediate distribution to those impacted by the wildfires. Our Southern California offices also organized donations and staffed six community relief drives over the course of multiple days, where we distributed several hundred packages of water, diapers, baby wipes, toiletries and food items – enough to fill one of our Mobile Response Vehicles several times. At the relief drives, Claim leaders also advised residents – Travelers customers and noncustomers alike – how to access insurance and other state, local and nonprofit relief resources.

Together, we can

The Palisades and Eaton fires will continue to impact the people and communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena for years to come. Through our investments in advanced technology and analytics, coupled with skilled execution by our empathetic Claim organization, we were able to help our customers, agents and brokers, colleagues and communities through this life-changing event with timely information, compassionate service and needed resources.

This video shows the extraordinary humanity and resilience of our customers and Claim teams in Southern California throughout this devastating event – and how the people of Travelers play an important role in supporting the communities we are privileged to serve.