The owner
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A relative had an extra rider on her wedding jewelry and the insurance company happily accepted the extra payments year after year. It was only after the ring was stolen that the insurance company decided the ring was worth less than the appraised and insured value, while at the same time keeping her years of “over payment”. :-/
If you are an insurance company rescission is your friend.
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Well, schist.
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Really? Of all the Lanterns in the Universe, you went with Gardner?
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Imagine the PREMIUMS they pay in the Emerald City. “Yes, you’re covered for tornadoes. Do you require witch protection?”
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“Do you want flying monkeys? Cause that’s how you get flying monkeys!”
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Emeralds are very soft and react chemically quite readily. A controlled environment would be expected for what amounts to a wonder.
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“Uh, where’s the documentation that you owned this emerald?”
“I kept it in the same safe where you keep the documentation that shows you routinely inspected and upgraded your equipment so that it wouldn’t be basically guaranteed to start a series of brushfires every dry season.”
“Oh, yeah… now that you mention it, that safe was destroyed in the fire.”
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Photos of your belongings for insurance purposes are exactly the sort of thing that you should maintain off-site (ideally cloud) backups of. After all, forget wildfires, what if somebody breaks into your house and steals your computer?
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Been there, doing that . . .
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As a geek, I do have a multi-tier backup strategy for my photos involving several computers, thumb drives which are held in a fire proof safe in my house, and cloud storage backups in a geographically diverse location.
But, honestly… guess why I do that now. 
The problem with this is that we don’t have any idea what happened, and while PG&E is assuming fraud… with my experience buying rocks; I can easily see non-fraudulent ways that this could happen.
Rocks don’t always come with receipts. After all, every (natural) rock was at some point just sitting in the ground waiting for someone to pick it up. Emerald is what we call green Beryl; and while it always has a particular crystal form the value of it and the physical properties of it depend on what kinds of contaminants it has in it. Some of it is gemmy; this is what most people think of when they hear “emerald”; it lets light through and is very dark green and is quite lovely. Some of it isn’t gemmy; this is a rock that varies from a green-white hue rock to a deep green rock.
And the thing is that there are a ton of Beryl outcroppings; while the really nice stuff comes from Brazil, there are a lot of Emerald Mines in North Carolina too. And there are a lot of places in North Carolina (and probably in Brazil, too) where you can pay some dude to let you go mine; and you get to keep what you take.
Finding a 500 lb boulder which is mostly an Emerald crystal cluster that is not gemmy but is Emerald and matrix? I can believe it. Seen it before. Dragging it to your car and taking it home? Not something that I would say is impossible. Putting it in your house and not really thinking about it again? In the garden or possibly even as an end table or something? Yep. As a rock hound, this is as you do.
Heck, they may have even sold the house with the rock in it because they didn’t feel like moving it again; and mentioned to the new owners “Hey, btw: that rock is solid emerald.”
So then the house burns down and they are filling out the paperwork and someone says “Hey, do you remember that 500-lb emerald that I kept stubbing my toe on in the garden?” “Oh, yeah, that should probably go on the list; I wonder how much it is worth?”
So they try to find a good value for how much a 500-lb emerald is worth and all the values they see are huge (because they are looking at Emerald sales, not random non-gemmy beryl) and they come up with a per-pound price and score!
Now, was the rock worth $280MM? Nope. I mean, probably not. But figuring out how much a gem stone boulder is worth after it is destroyed is nearly impossible; but that is what PG&E and the owners are going to have to do.
And the funny thing is that emeralds become greener and more gemmy after they are heated and the contaminants are removed. If they can find where the rock was it is entirely possible that they would find slivers of gemmy, dark green emerald…
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Most safes/vaults aren’t going to hold up to something as hot and prolonged as a wildfire. Granted, for something that valuable you should probably have paperwork for the vault you keep it in in addition to everything else.
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Probably because at least one element of this sounds hinky; either the owners have no proof that they ever owned such a rock, or the insurance company is trying to weasel out of a monster payout.
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Previous owners:
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He’s the one I figured was most likely to be dumb enough to lose his ring or commit insurance fraud.
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You better give some numbers before making that sort of assertion.
Beryl is harder than quartz…
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