With food, supplies or just hugs, volunteers show fire victims they’re not alone
- Outside the Pasadena Convention center, two women from Glendora served up food they made at home.
- “What kind of nurse would I be if I didn’t come?” said one volunteer.
- Some people, just wanting to help somehow, brought their dogs to serve as comfort animals.
Her Calabasas home is wedged between two major fires that have devastated Los Angeles County, and she can see water-dropping helicopters through the windows. The slightest change in the wind could have life-altering consequences.
Yet when she awoke Friday, this registered nurse drove through the haze and smoke to Pasadena to help people who have been displaced by another fire, the deadly Eaton blaze.
“Why am I going to sit at home when I can be helping?” said the nurse, who just wanted to be called Annette; drawing attention to herself was not the point. “What kind of nurse would I be if I didn’t come?”
She stood outside the Pasadena Convention Center, now an evacuation center for more than 1,200 people displaced by the fire. And she wasn’t alone. Three other volunteer nurses in pastel scrubs joined her, ready to help people who were being evaluated by other medical staff inside the convention center.
A couple dozen steps away, in the middle of the center’s courtyard, Miguel Alcala and Francisco Arizpe handed out more than 100 burritos and tortas they spent much of the morning putting together at their East Los Angeles restaurant, Tacos El Más Cabron. Next to them Cynthia Cisneros and Rosy Antonio served up soft drinks, bottled water and food they had made in their Glendora home.
“We want to help. We want to share with the people who lost their homes,” Cisneros said in Spanish as Antonio waved a paper plate in the air and shouted, “Free lunch, everyone!” in English. “Free food!”
A few people quickly took her up on the offer, rushing the small folding table Cisneros and Antonio had sent up on a sidewalk and thanking the two women profusely.
Across the Southland, thousands of people who have seen heartbreaking images of ruined neighborhoods have responded in similar ways, donating food, money, clothing or just time to victims of the fires.
“Spontaneous volunteers are great,” said Lisa Derderian, the public information officer for the city of Pasadena. “This is an unprecedented event and people just wanted to do something to help.
“People are coming up and they’re like, ‘I don’t have anything to donate. I just want to give them a hug.’ ”
Derderian said most of the city’s 2,000-plus employees have been reassigned to work on wildfire relief around the clock.
“It’s all hands on deck,” she said. “One firefighter I just talked to lost his home. But he’s out here helping with these relief efforts when he just lost everything.”
Jada Thompson, who works in mental health services in Pasadena, brought hugs along with several dozen board games to the convention center, where fire victims have seen their world suddenly reduced to little more than a cot and bright white Red Cross blanket.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. It’s mostly shock,” Thompson said when asked how people are coping. “For a lot of the kids, they don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know what happened to their friends, what happened to the school.”
Board games can take their minds off those unanswerable questions, a least for a moment. And when that doesn’t work, she can always offer a hug or just an ear for people who have stories they need to share.
Outside the convention center, Lamar Flucas stood near the head of a line that snaked down Arroyo Parkway, holding out a cellphone playing nondescript recorded music.
“I’m online with FEMA right now,” he explained. But he also had a story he wanted to share.
Thirteen deaths have been confirmed and more than 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. Firefighters made more progress on containing the Eaton and Palisades fires overnight, but winds will continue to be a factor throughout the weekend.
Flucas, who has been living in a shelter since Wednesday morning, said he was lucky to be alive. He was asleep as the fire approached his Altadena home when an uncle managed to wake him by pounding on the door. Ten minutes later that door and the rest of the house were gone.
Flucas, like the others in line, was waiting for a $250 prepaid credit card from the California Fire Foundation to help with minor expenses such as food, gas and toiletries.
“We help out people in their worst time of need,” said Mike Lopez, a former firefighter and secretary-treasurer of the foundation. “But my whole career put together doesn’t compare to the stories I’ve heard and the families that lost everything in these major fires.”
Which is why some of the most important donations are the personal ones people have made.
“It’s not just the material and monetary,” Derderian said. “They’re like, ‘I want to give support.’ People are bringing their dogs like comfort animals.”
A half-mile away, it was the dogs who needed comforting. The Pasadena Humane Society, which had 177 animals on site when the fires broke out Monday, took in more than 400 more over the next 48 hours. Some were strays, many of them sick or injured. But the vast majority were pets of families who had been burned out of their homes and needed to surrender their animals temporarily while they figured out what to do next.
“Our staff and volunteers have just been completely heroic in dealing with this influx of animals with special needs,” Dia DuVernet, the humane society’s president and CEO, said over a chorus of barking and howling dogs. “You’ve seen this complete outpouring from the community of support.”
The havoc caused by the blazes — more than 28,000 acres have been scorched — necessitates immediate and long-term relief.
The center’s parking lot was filled with volunteers organizing donated bags of dog and cat food, crates and cages, plush toys and other pet supplies. Nearby, other volunteers struggled to direct a long line of donors who were blocking traffic on Raymond Avenue.
By mid-afternoon, the center had received so many donations, it was turning people away and asking for cash instead.
“I was walking through the parking lot and I was like, ‘Who are these people?’” Kevin McManus, the society’s communications manager, said of the dozens of people offering help. One of them was Mac McCloskey, who came with about 15 other volunteers wearing bright yellow T-shirts and jackets branded with the logo of the Church of Scientology.
“We could sit at home. But that’s not what the people need,” McCloskey said.
About a quarter-mile south on Raymond, a different mass of about 40 volunteers was buried by donations outside an adult center run by Union Station Homeless Services.
“Sorry, crazy day,” one worker shouted into his cellphone as he raced past a driver unloading pallets of donated food sent by Cremi Mex, a Latin American food and dairy services company.
“We’re always blown away by the generosity of our community. But then when we put out a need that there is an emergency, they just incredibly stepped up,” said Amanda Green, Union Station’s chief operations officer. Behind her, volunteers gathered donations of sports drinks, bottled water, blankets, hygiene items and food and sorted them into 30-gallon containers to be handed out to those who she’s sure will soon be making their way to the center.
“We have corporations who we’ve never been connected to reaching out to see how they partner. It’s just been overwhelming.”
Across the county, thousands of families have been left homeless. Green said many of those people, who never thought they’d be without shelter, will soon be turning to places like Union Station, putting pressure on a support system that was already buckling under the weight of the second-largest homeless population in the U.S.
“We just have so many people who are falling into homelessness who have never navigated the system before,” she said. “We want to make sure we’re here for them and helping them through that.”
In the last five days thousands of people throughout the Southland, from nurses who live in fire zones to firefighters who no longer have a home to return to, have apparently made the same pledge.
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