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With local legal help, fire victims build cases for federal compensation

Lawyer Antonia Roybal-Mack talks to Carol Litherland as they look over Litherland's burned family home
Alice Fordham
/
KUNM
Lawyer Antonia Roybal-Mack talks to Carol Litherland as they look over Litherland's burned family home

Up in the charred forests close to Rociada, New Mexico, a lawyer and her client are having a meeting in muddy boots.

"There's no way around it!" shouts the lawyer, Antonia Roybal-Mack, navigating streams of snowmelt pouring off burn scars that have turned a road and creek into rivers.

Her client, Carol Litherland, a slight woman nearing 60, offers a hand across the water, suggesting which rocks to step on in a landscape she once knew intimately, now irrevocably changed.

This is one of hundreds of households and other entities like municipalities that local lawyer Roybal-Mack is representing as they embark on a complicated and unclear bureaucratic process to seek compensation for the historic Calf Canyon/Hermit's Peak fire, accidentally begun as planned burns by the U.S. Forest Service.

Roybal-Mack and a colleague take pictures and notes as they look over the charred remnants of a lodge where Litherland had her wedding party, the family home where she gave birth to her children and hundreds of charred skeletons of trees.

"Lots of memories. I can still picture it very, very well," said Litherland, who lived there nearly three decades, running a small ranch with livestock as well as working as a sign language instructor. "There's times when you'll dream at night and think it's still there."

Carol Litherland stands in the remnants of her home near Rociada, New Mexico
Alice Fordham
/
KUNM
Carol Litherland stands in the remnants of her home near Rociada, New Mexico

A year after the fire, despite filling out a great deal of paperwork, attending meetings intended to let fire victims know about programs for assistance and negotiating with insurance companies, Litherland said she has had little assistance beyond some debris and tree removal.

"It's frustrating not to be any farther along than this," she said.

"It's easy to get discouraged, really discouraged," she added in an interview in Las Vegas where she currently lives.

She is far from alone. More than 600 homes burned in the fire, the state's largest ever recorded, and hundreds of other structures.

For these victims, hope came last year in the form of a law passed by Congress in which the federal government took responsibility for the fire. Congress allotted nearly $4 billion for the claims process, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, was assigned to manage it.

But Litherland, and about half a dozen others interviewed, said the FEMA claims process is confusing. Preliminary regulations for the claims were published in November, and after a public comment period, FEMA officials say they do not know when final rules will be published.

The agency is urging people to file an initial Notice of Loss to begin the process, saying that simpler claims will be settled first, but people have concerns about the preliminary regulations including a 25% cap on the value of lost trees and on fire and flood mitigation work.

Faced with all this, Litherland decided she needed help, and after hearing Roybal-Mack speak at a meeting, and asking her a lot of questions after, she decided to work with her. Roybal-Mack grew up in Mora, the county hardest hit by the fire, and her family's properties also burned.

"We have this whole community as a connection," said Litherland, "And that just felt like, okay, I will try this."

Case worker Diego Rivera helps lawyer Antonia Roybal-Mack across a waterway that used to be a road
Alice Fordham
/
KUNM
Case worker Diego Rivera helps lawyer Antonia Roybal-Mack across a waterway that used to be a road

Roybal-Mack moves around northern New Mexico in a bright blue Jeep with the logo of her Albuquerque law firm, Roybal-Mack & Cordova P.C., on the side. On the day we go up to see the Litherland property, one of the case managers she has hired to help her clients, Diego Rivera, is driving, wearing a cap that also has the company logo.

Roybal-Mack said her clients are tired of the heartache and paperwork that comes with losing a home, seeing an acequia fill up with debris or dealing with the winter's multiple floods.

"They just need somebody to sit there and ask them the question, and they check the box and go through the pieces that they need," she said. Clients are offered help finding experts like hydrologists and arborists to survey properties and estimate costs.

Her law firm has partnered with two more firms, Bauman and Dow in Albuquerque and Robins Cloud, a national firm which has represented fire victims. Extra staff are working in Las Vegas and Mora, building case files for clients.

"I hired all locals, because they will not get tired when it comes to doing what needs to be done," she said. "They're living it, too."

Roybal-Mack has been a feature of the fire zone throughout the challenging year for the community, lobbying for help like generators for people without power during the fire, and asking many questions at community meetings as officials explained new policies. She has voiced opposition to the cap on tree value and mitigation work in FEMA's draft rules.

Some of her clients said they chose to work with her law firm over the others operating in the area, because of a personal connection in the tight-knit community.

"I knew Antonia's family," said Pam Abreu, a retired teacher who lost a beloved property built by her late father, a music professor, in the fire. "Her parents were students of my dad at Highlands University, and my parents just thought so highly of her parents."

Carol Litherland, Antonia Roybal-Mack and Diego Rivera walk in forests burned by the Hermit's Peack/Calf Canyon fire of 2022
Alice Fordham
/
KUNM
Carol Litherland, Antonia Roybal-Mack and Diego Rivera walk in forests burned by the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon fire of 2022

The legislation passed by Congress placed a cap of 20% of payouts for lawyers' fees, but with billions on the table, successful cases could mean significant profits for law firms. Roybal-Mack said there is more to her work than money.

"I love this place," she said. "My father's ranch burned, if I don't get what he needs it affects my family directly."

She said she is prepared for a complex process and, if necessary, for litigation.

"The difficulty is that without a final rule, without procedures, we can't give our clients any certainty," she said. Before last year's legislation was passed, she was preparing a mass tort case, and she still does not rule out suing the federal government.

She added she is under a certain amount of social pressure, in a good way.

"If I screw this up, I can't go to church here anymore," she said. "And I really like to go to church in Mora."

Alice Fordham joined the news team in 2022 after a career as an international correspondent, reporting for NPR from the Middle East and later Latin America and Europe. She also worked as a podcast producer for The Economist among other outlets, and tries to meld a love of sound and storytelling with solid reporting on the community. She grew up in the U.K. and has a small jar of Marmite in her kitchen for emergencies.
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