SCRIPPS RANCH - When the Cedar fire tore through Scripps Ranch four years ago, Karen Reimus lost everything in her home, except her family.

In the months that followed, the self-described soccer mom with a classic Type A personality fought with the family's insurance company to obtain money to rebuild and start over. What she learned from that battle has made her something of a national advocate for homeowners.

Reimus - a former Carlsbad resident, whose husband works for the Carlsbad-based TaylorMade-Adidas Golf - has helped write a book for disaster victims, lobbied California state legislators to make changes in insurance laws and organized mentor groups for disaster survivors. She also has raised money for United Policyholders, a nonprofit consumer protection agency where she is a leading volunteer.

"One thing I've learned in my life is one person can make a difference," she said Monday morning before she went to work at the Rancho Bernardo assistance center, which opened late last week to aid victims of the roughly 200,000-acre Witch Creek fire.

On the front step of her newly rebuilt home sat a half dozen copies of "The Disaster Recovery Handbook and Personal Property Inventory Guide" - the book she helped write. The books, each in a plastic bag with someone's name on them, were waiting for fire victims from the Poway and Rancho Bernardo area to come by and pick them up.

A former lawyer, Reimus has been a stay-at-home mom since her first child was born 11 years ago. She still calls herself that, but these days she is just as on top of what's happening in tornado-ravaged areas of the Midwest as she is with meal planning on the homefront.

"I feel like the luckiest person to have her on our team," said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders organization where Reimus has volunteered for several years.

Formed just before the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, United Policyholders serves as an advocate for homeowners who buy insurance - rather than the folks who sell insurance policies. The nonprofit group distributes free books and other advice to homeowners nationally in the wake of fires, hurricanes and other disasters. It tells them how to fight to get full compensation for their losses, how to handle their tax paperwork and how to assess what they lost.

"It's not the kind of charity that people immediately understand," Bach said as she described the organization's money-raising woes. "We don't feed starving children; we're not working for a cure for cancer."

Reimus has essentially become the public face of the organization, Bach said. She combines a lawyer's ability to talk comfortably with strangers with a personal understanding of what disaster victims need, Bach added.

"She gives our organization the trust factor … that's so critical to get the information" to victims, she said.

In addition to writing the insurance section of the disaster book, Reimus has helped organize fundraising drives to pay for publication of the book, which is given away to disaster victims.

She never intended to end up as a national insurance advocate, she said. She got her start several months after the Cedar fire when then-state insurance commissioner John Garamendi hosted a town hall meeting in Scripps Ranch. Reimus said she was the third furious person from the 400 people in the audience to jump up and address the commissioner about problems with homeowners insurance coverage.

"I engaged in a very colorful debate with him, for lack of a better word," Reimus recalled, laughing. "Nobody should have been better insured than us. We'd only had the house for four months."

He listened, and appointed her and 11 other folks to a insurance reform campaign. Outsiders called it "the dynamic dozen," a name Reimus hated. Over the next two years, she would make multiple lobbying trips to Sacramento.

Some of the group's efforts resulted in changes, but one thing Reimus sought most - a requirement that insurance policies list what they would pay out on a per square-foot basis rather than general dollar figures for the contents and the structure - didn't win passage.

Reimus describes herself as disillusioned by the political process, saying change comes too slowly.

"If I never get back (to Sacramento) it would be too soon," she said.

She's now spending most of her waking hours at the Rancho Bernardo assistance center working one-on-one with fire victims, and she's organizing a mentor group linking Cedar fire victims with people who lost their homes in the Witch Creek Fire.

She's done the same for Tahoe fire victims and sent copies of her books to those who survived recent floods and hurricanes in the Midwest.

As if that weren't enough, she led a campaign with the Scripps Ranch Fire Safe Council to raise money in her neighborhood to bring goats to her neighborhood to eat a fire break around their reconstructed homes.

On the Net:

To reach the United Policyholders organization, visit http://www.unitedpolicyholders.org.