Evacuees fill hotels

Laguna Beach hotels are brimming with people who have had to flee their homes in the face of flames because of the weeklong firestorm.

Many local hotels are doing what they can to make the difficult process more comfortable for people who don’t know whether they will ever see their homes again.

Garrett Woo, the desk manager of Hotel Laguna, said the hotel is at full capacity. “We’ve been really almost full mostly with evacuees,” Woo said.

Like many hotels in town, the Surf & Sand Resort is waiving many policies to accommodate victims of the fire. Night manager Morgan Myers said they are allowing rescued pets to stay with their owners and more people are allowed to stay in rooms than normal.

“We’ve had a lot of people with their cats and dogs come through,” Meyers said.

The Surf & Sand was trying to find more room to accommodate people Wednesday. Myers said the mood of evacuees in the hotel, while tense, has been more hopeful than woeful.

“Most of them have been OK, they’ve been in good spirits,” she said.

The Montage Resort & Spa’s executive chef, Matt Leonard, teamed with top chefs from the St. Regis and Ritz Carlton resorts to make about 1,000 bagged meals for evacuees. Montage Business Center Manager Chris Loidolt said the bags were distributed to evacuees around Orange County.

Leonard will also assist a team that will cook breakfast for about 100 evacuees camped out at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point over the weekend.

Loidolt, a long time Laguna resident, remembers Laguna’s 1993 fires. She says Lagunans have seen the devastation of fire and have a responsibility to do what they can to help those in need.

Shane Johnson moved to Laguna from San Diego a few years ago. He was at Coast Hardware on Broadway Wednesday picking up items for friends who had lost everything to the fires. “We know what its like for a community to suffer,” Loidolt said. “There’s a sensitivity and a compassion here because we remember.”