Rodrigo Espinosa left his house with his family on Tuesday afternoon, when the flames of the fire Palisades They were beginning to devastate West Los Angeles. He arrived at a hotel in Beverly Hills. As time went by, more and more people began to arrive. They were all fleeing the fire. “People kept coming. Car after car, entire families, children and their stuffed animals…”, he remembers. The hotel bar became the place of lamentations. There she met a man who already knew then that he had lost everything. “His family was safe, but he regretted not having taken more things out of his house. “I was devastated, with a lost look,” he adds. The only thing Espinosa could do for him was buy him the margarita he was having. Neither of them have returned home since Tuesday.
The Los Angeles fires, which have already left 11 dead and devastated 14,000 hectares, also keep at least 153,000 people out of their homes. Some because they have lost it and others because they have not been able to return to the residences, located within the security perimeters outlined by the authorities. The number of evacuees has fluctuated rapidly since Tuesday. After four days, there are areas that are no longer under the forced evacuation alert and other neighborhoods that enter those areas threatened by the advance of the Palisades and the other great focus, that of Eatonin the Pasadena and Altadena region, to the east.
In the Pasadena Convention Center there is one of the shelters set up by the City Council to help the displaced. This is growing and specializing with the days. On Wednesday morning, the immense pavilion was a chaos of evacuees trying to find space, food or a stretcher to sleep on. It had become fully professional two days later, with medical tents and space to charge phones, tables with clothes of all sizes and as many with personal hygiene items, children’s areas with clowns blowing up balloons and even a small library.
Lisa Derderian, municipal spokesperson for Pasadena, explains that there are 1,200 people who have sought refuge at the shelter, and many more who come daily to request help or food, but also emergency health care, physical or mental. Across the county, Airbnb has also contributed by providing short-term accommodation to about 25,000 evacuees.
The director of community services in Pasadena, Koko Panossian, says that the population that comes to the center is the most vulnerable: people who have lost everything and cannot afford second homes or hotels. “The night from Tuesday to Wednesday was very, very hard,” says Panossian. “Many people were evacuated and volunteers and municipal workers have already begun to come. There were colleagues whose houses burned while they were here, helping,” he says excitedly.
In Westwood, a wealthy neighborhood in western Los Angeles, the Red Cross administers another of the main shelters for the Palisades, the fire that has engulfed 5,000 buildings in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. “We are a little below the maximum capacity, which is several hundred beds,” says Nicole Mall, spokesperson for the organization. The center, he says, helps the victims immediately, providing them with beds, water and food. “People arrive and here they can decide if they can go spend a few days with a family member or friend or to a hotel,” adds Mall.
The supportive community comes with pizzas, bagels and clothes to donate. Even Batman himself brings help. Actor Michael Keaton, star of the comic book hero’s film, arrives at the scene dressed in a cap and sunglasses. Before anyone recognizes him, he leaves supermarket bags with food and diapers on the ground and leaves the way he came.
The Red Cross appreciates the gesture, but indicates that it already has all the physical resources it needs. “If people want to have an impact on all of this, the two quickest ways are to make a financial donation or become a volunteer,” explains the spokesperson, something that is repeated in other areas: the same thing happens in Pasadena, and also at the point of Donation collection set up in the West Hollywood area. A coffee shop has asked for donations and they have been overwhelmed by donations. “No more clothes, please,” shouts Ethan, 21, as he packs boxes and continues to receive bottles of water and dog food.
Newly elected California Senator Adam Schiff was also in the area on Friday listening to the people at the shelter. Shell, one of those displaced by the Palisades, approached the politician. “I don’t even know what to ask for, where do I start if I have lost everything?” the 53-year-old lawyer told him. The lawyer, specialized in intellectual property, was going through a bad time when the fire came to take away the little she had.
In Los Angeles, celebrities can often be where traditional politics can’t reach. “We are the first to arrive and the last to leave,” says Spanish chef José Andrés, who jumped out of a van to help cooks and delivery people from the World Central Kitchen organization, which was deployed outside the Pasadena shelter. He had the help of actress Jennifer Garner, who delivers burritos, pasta dishes or tangerines from Enrique de England and Meghan Markle’s Montecito garden to whoever wants them.
“Unfortunately, Los Angeles is a place where, over the last 15 years, we have responded many times. We have a team and acting for us is fast,” explains José Andrés to Morning Express. The food they deliver can make a difference. “We are monitoring: sometimes people come to help who do not return tomorrow. It happens that today you need 5,000 meals but tomorrow 10,000.”
Guillermina García, 58, arrives in downtown Pasadena in search of food. More than 30 years ago he left Jalisco (Mexico) to live in California in a house that no longer exists. The woman drags a plastic cart loaded with masks, and on her arm she carries her son Carlos, 18 years old and on the autism spectrum. He can’t help but burst into tears when he remembers that the fire has taken away his decades-old home in Altadena and that of his daughter Brenda, 29, and two children, who have also lost their home. “The air and the fire took them away,” he laments. For now, together with Brenda’s husband and a third child, the seven of them sleep in a borrowed one-room apartment. “We are going to get out of this, of course,” he says through tears. “Let’s start again.”
