Tag Archives: LA Fires

Red Cross Volunteer Brought Hope and Housing Help to LA Fire Survivors and Others 

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A Red Crosser surveys damage caused by fires in LA 

What happens when you have nowhere to go after a disaster? What if your neighborhood is destroyed, or your home is no longer safe? For those affected by the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles, Calif., the American Red Cross was there to supply safe shelter, food, relief supplies, financial assistance, comfort and a specific service that only Sue Trautman and her team can provide. 

Sue, a Red Cross Northern California Coastal Region volunteer, arrived in LA about a week after the fires devastated communities across the city. She set up shop in the Red Cross offices downtown and got right to work. Sue served on the Shelter Resident Transition Team — a group of volunteers that helps evacuees in shelters create a plan to move into more stable long-term housing. 

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“A Very Different Beast”: Red Cross Volunteer Recalls the Devastation of Los Angeles Wildfires 

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It had been a children’s playground in Altadena, Calif. Now, a melted toy sat upon a melted jungle gym. Scraps of canopy were whipping in the wind. Now, it was just burned wreckage in the wake of the wildfire. Dave Crocker remembers it clearly almost a year later. “It stopped me short,” he says. 

He was in Los Angeles —the place where he was born, had grown up and gone to college. Where wildfires were a fact of life. Dave is an American Red Cross volunteer who has seen the aftermath of numerous wildfires first-hand. But this fire: it had been unusual. 

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On the Frontlines of Relief: A Volunteer’s Perspective from the Southern California Wildfires

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Kaia ready to go for her first Red Cross deployment

Kaia Newsam was out the door, ready to head to Los Angeles as soon as she got the call from the American Red Cross to respond to the Southern California wildfires. Even if this was her first volunteer mission with the Red Cross, Kaia was equipped to volunteer, having already completed the necessary training.

A recent graduate from U.C. Berkeley and now based in Merced, Kaia has been studying for the MCAT in preparation for medical school applications, which left her with free time to answer the call for volunteers.

“I was a brand new volunteer still going through my training and I just happened to be able to do all of the sheltering training in one day,” she said. “Deploying to the L.A. fires was my first experience volunteering at the Red Cross, which is a crazy thing to leave for two weeks to do.”

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