When disaster strikes: On the ground amid LA wildfires

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BOB SAFIAN: Hey everyone, Bob Safian here. Multiple wildfires have torn through the city of Los Angeles over the last week, destroying whole neighborhoods. Thousands of Angelenos have lost their homes and their businesses, at least 24 have died, and 100,000 have been forced to evacuate. Today we bring you a special episode, focused on the Eaton fire that’s ravaged Altadena and Pasadena, with stories both harrowing and heartening from one of the most impacted corners of LA, plus on-the-ground perspective from aid organization World Central Kitchen.

The interviews were recorded today — Monday, January 13th, so they are very fresh. With heavy winds expected in LA over the next two days, the situation, which has already been likened to Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans, could continue to evolve.

To those impacted by the fires, all of us here at Rapid Response offer our thoughts and prayers for easier days ahead. For now, let’s get to the show. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

Copy LinkA bakery owner’s nightmare becomes reality

Our first guest is Guillaume Patard, the owner of Pain Beurre — a small French bakery in Altadena. He and his wife moved to the U.S. from France less than a year ago, with a dream to create a local boulangerie. They have two small daughters, three years old and 9 months old. Here’s Guillaume.

GUILLAUME PATARD: We just moved from France to start this bakery and to offer French bread and brioche in the Altadena community. And it used to be a very nice little project.

SAFIAN: It’s hard work to start a new business, especially in a new place.

PATARD: I put all my energy. We put all our savings. Since July, honestly, I’ve been working constantly to try to do something with this business. It’s maybe one of the hardest things for me now because I was 100 percent focused on trying to develop this business and trying to make something nice for the community. I was trying to think all the time of what can we do next?

During Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve period, I guess I slept maybe an average of three hours per night because I was just baking all the time. And it’s, yeah, it’s kind of hard suddenly that everything stopped.

SAFIAN: When did you first hear about the fires? How did it unfold for you?

PATARD: When we put the girls to bed around 8 p.m., my wife told me, “Oh, there is a fire that started up in Altadena.” But everybody was saying, “Oh yeah, it can happen, but it’s pretty far away, and no worries. But get ready, just in case, prepare a bag with important paperwork, your passport, and this kind of stuff.” So we just, yeah, prepared a little bag, and we were just thinking with my wife, oh, we don’t want to wake up the girls.

If it’s not important, let them sleep. And then, the night was going on, and around three, I went outside, and I saw a police car. I went to speak with the policeman, asking him if there is an official order of evacuation because we didn’t have any good connection.

So we didn’t know if we were missing something or not. And he told me, “No, so far your area is not officially evacuated, but it’s going to happen pretty soon.” So when he told us that, we left. And we left thinking, we’re going to come back. That’s the crazy part. Honestly, we could have brought way more things than we did.

We just took a few things. We took the stuffed animal for girls and could have brought way more souvenirs and some jewelry for my wife and some things for us, but we didn’t. And when we woke up on Wednesday morning, we just realized that it was a real nightmare. The bakery in Altadena completely disappeared.

SAFIAN: Were you working out of the house or was your bakery in a different place?

PATARD: The bakery was in the house, and it burned as well. Everything burned. We were not able to go back.

The oven, my big mixer, all my fridges. I bought more than 600 or 700 pounds of flour on Tuesday, so my bakery was full of flour and stuff like that.

I might be crazy, but I brought my starter with me, so I still have my starter. I don’t know why.

It seems completely insane, but I guess it shows how important this business was for us. It was my life so far. It was just…

SAFIAN: Well, you described it before as your baby. So you were preparing that baby to evacuate too.

PATARD: Exactly. It’s completely that. So far, I don’t know what we’re gonna do with this business. We were baking for the community. That was the idea. It was a small business for a small community.

In France, you have bakeries everywhere, and you just have your bakery in the little neighborhood where you live. And that’s the bakery where you go to buy your bread. And I was always thinking of this, to be a small thing for a small neighborhood. And that’s one of the most difficult things to accept. We cannot recreate that because almost all our customers lost their houses, and we lost the neighborhood. So even if you want to restart something, it will be something new. And that’s what I cannot really accept so far because I just want to go back to Altadena, and I just want to do the same thing we were doing, and actually, it’s just not possible.

SAFIAN: You moved from France to open this business because you had a dream, and now it sounds like you have to decide: do you keep following the same dream, or do you have to come up with a different dream?

PATARD: That’s the thing. We had this dream, we had this plan. Even if it was super hard, it was clear. We wanted to come here and develop this bakery. And now we have to rewrite everything.

We have to rethink everything. We have to rethink about the new dream.

We have to find a stable situation for our girls. We don’t want, with my wife, to just move from one Airbnb to another, trying to find a new situation. We have to find a new dream, and we don’t know what it’s going to be.

We try to be strong because we have two girls, and we cannot be completely devastated.

It’s really reassuring to be surrounded by so much love, but I guess in a couple of weeks when we’re gonna be, I guess, on our own trying to figure out what we’re gonna do, I’m afraid it’s gonna be way harder in a couple of weeks than now.

SAFIAN: I’m curious, do you have insurance for the business? Will you have resources if you decide you want to start again?

PATARD: I took an insurance when I launched the business, but it was mostly to protect myself if someone wanted to sue me. When I filled out the form, there was this question, do you want to insure your material against fire? And I said, no, I don’t need that because, you know, it was maybe 100 more, and I said, no, that’s okay. I can save 100. So far, no, I don’t have any insurance for the business. But I was working with a bread oven called Simply Bread Oven. They launched a GoFundMe for us, trying to be able for us to restart something.

Apparently, they’re gonna offer us a new oven, which is the main investment in the bakery. And they’re also gonna try to gather money for us to be able to restart.

So far, I’m just so tired that I’m not even sure I can find the strength to restart something, but we will have to do something anyway.

SAFIAN: It does sound very hard. Even if you get an oven, even if you have a place, you’re not sure where that place should be or even if that’s what you want to do now.

PATARD: Yeah, we can go to another neighborhood, but it’s not the same. Honestly, the only thing so far I would like to do is bake for my community.

I have this kind of fantasy or dream, I don’t know. If we go back to LA, if I am able to bake somewhere really, really soon, I would like just to prepare some sweet things, set up a table somewhere, and just say to my former customers and all the Altadena community, please come and grab a piece of brioche, come and grab a cinnamon nut, come and grab a baguette for free. It’s nothing, but it’s the only thing I can do. I just can bake because it’s my job.

It seems to be just a crazy idea you can have at one in the morning when you can’t sleep.

SAFIAN: I hope some of our listeners, I’m sure, will be touched by your story and want to find ways to help. I hope those feelings and those impulses come your way and help sustain you.

PATARD: Thank you, thank you, guys.

SAFIAN: It is so hard to start a business, especially when you’ve just moved to a new country. Yet Guillaume was on his way to making his dream a reality. And now, well, you can hear the despair in his voice. The practical obstacles to restarting the bakery are real enough, but it’s the emotional toll that may be hardest of all.

Copy LinkHow HomeState in Pasadena is responding to the crisis

In our next segment, I turn the mic over to Rapid Response executive producer Eve Troeh, who lives nearby to the Eaton fire devastation. Her home wasn’t damaged, fortunately, but she was on watch as the flames grew closer and closer. It drew even nearer to a dear friend’s business. HomeState is a Tex-Mex cafe with eight locations and a workforce of about 350 people. Here is Eve on the ground at the Pasadena HomeState, less than a block from where the roads close and the fire zone begins.

EVE TROEH: I am here with Andy Valdez, the Director of Marketing for HomeState.

Andy, thanks so much for talking to us for Rapid Response.

ANDY VALDEZ: My pleasure. Thank you for being here.

TROEH: I’m used to seeing this patio full of all generations of customers happily waiting in line sometimes out the door to just experience the hospitality of HomeState. As the fires were growing last week, what was the response from the company as a whole and specifically around this location?

VALDEZ: Safety was the first priority of the organization. So we were monitoring the weather, the winds, the air quality, making sure that they had time to get home to their families in a safe place.

We have just seen a lot of outpour of support, but also, I mean, it’s just been really scary. We all watched the fires come really close to this location. They came about two blocks from here, and we didn’t know if the restaurant was gonna survive or not.

So we were checking cameras, we were checking the fire maps, actively just not knowing what was gonna happen. So the fact that the restaurant is still here and standing, even though we can’t open due to the water contamination, we can open and activate as a community center.

TROEH: You’ve transformed this into a station where people in need can come and pick up essentials. If you had to just look around right now, help me understand what the offerings are and where these offerings have come from.

VALDEZ: Yes, as soon as we were able and the evacuation zone was lifted, that same day we activated. We partnered with our neighbors, a local skate shop.

We wanted to make sure that we showed up in a way that people need it. We have a lot of friends who have lost houses, unfortunately. So calling them and saying, what do you actually need?

How can we actually support you?

So if you look around, you’ll see things that, again, we’re hearing people really need right now. Blankets, towels, dog food, toiletries, new shoes, clothes in really good condition.

Presentation, organization is the name of our game. When people walk in, I want them to feel like it’s beautifully presented, and it’s thoughtful. It’s not just a pile of things. It’s, on a human level, I think, psychological, it really, really matters. And people, like this one woman, started crying when she saw that all of our clothing is on racks.

It’s not on the floor. It’s on racks. It’s organized. She was like, it means so much that you took the time to do that.

Val Surf, the skate shop that we’ve partnered with, they have a great relationship with New Balance.

New Balance just delivered 50 pairs of brand new shoes. You think about it, like people who left their house, the shoes they’re wearing, that’s it. So things like that really do have an impact on people’s lives and may hopefully help some start to feel a little bit normal and very much taken care of.

One of our vendors, Vital Farms, reached out and asked how they could support. So they have donated a $10,000 fund that we are able to use to provide tacos. We’re working with World Central Kitchen to provide tacos for various groups. Tomorrow we have an order for Pasadena Humane Society for people who are going to go out to the field and look for animals who are wounded and in need of help.

So we’ll be feeding those people tomorrow. There’s so many different needs, but if we can be focused on our restaurant teams, our neighbors, and the firefighters, I think that’s where our focus is right now. And we know we’re just at the very beginning of this. It’s going to be a long haul effort. So we will evolve and show up and try to find ways to provide support as the needs reveal themselves.

TROEH: Is there any particular story among the many I’m sure you’ve heard? I see you talking with people as they come and want to find out more about what’s available at the station. I see you have a hug station here set up. We’re standing right by the hug station sign. Are there any stories that have just stood out the most to you?

VALDEZ: Yeah, we met a family yesterday, a multi-generational family. They live in one house they called “the little greenhouse in Altadena.” They’ve been there for about 40 years. Grandma, parents, children.

They’re all now displaced. They were very angry. There’s a lot of anger, feeling completely abandoned by the city. They’re really strong, but the mom had to literally pull the dad out of the house. He didn’t want to leave. So she thankfully was successful in getting him to leave.

Everyone got out safe. But now they are staying in different houses, so the family is broken up and they don’t know what their future holds. They stayed here for probably an hour and a half, just sitting, sharing their story, crying, hugging. They have two younger daughters. The youngest, before she left, just gave me and my sister a hug and cried in our arms for about five minutes.

I think people are feeling very deep emotions and are in need of any type of help and support. Sometimes they’re going to find it in their family, sometimes they’re going to find it at a restaurant running a community drive. As much as we can show up and be here, we’ll do that.

A lot of our team members who work at this location are here right now volunteering. We’re also working on making sure that they continue to receive paychecks. That’s a big part of it. We’re not selling tacos, but we still need to make sure that our team members are taken care of.

TROEH: Obviously, lots of small business owners are not able to provide this kind of service. They lost their businesses. They themselves may have lost their homes and schools and be displaced. What have you learned in the past about what the role of business can be in society and community?

VALDEZ: It’s interesting to see how restaurants specifically show up in times of crisis. The idea of nourishment extends to food, but so much beyond that.

At the end of the day, we have to make payroll, and we have to figure out ways to ensure that we can do that.

A lot of people have been asking, how can we help? Is it bad to order from you right now? Is that putting your team in danger? Well, the answer is we need your orders. By you placing orders, that means we will continue to be a business and be here for the community.

TROEH: Thank you.

VALDEZ: Thank you so much.

SAFIAN: To extend their impact even further, HomeState has partnered with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen to provide food for evacuees, volunteers, and other Angelenos in need.

After the break, we hear from the emergency operations leader at World Central Kitchen, who has been on the ground in LA. So stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

SAFIAN: Welcome back to Rapid Response. Before the break, we heard how two businesses were impacted by the LA wildfires, including Tex-Mex cafe HomeState, which is partnering with World Central Kitchen to feed volunteers.

Copy LinkOn the ground with World Central Kitchen

Now we talk directly with World Central Kitchen’s project leader on the ground in LA, Wendy Escobedo. Let’s take a listen.

I’m here with Wendy Escobedo, emergency operations manager for World Central Kitchen. Coming to us from somewhere in Southern California, dealing with the wildfires. Where are you, Wendy?

WENDY ESCOBEDO: Currently, I’m in Burbank. This is where our sort of headquarters office is. But we’re obviously out in the field as well.

So I’m overseeing the project. What we try to do in situations like this is get our scouts out in the field as quickly as possible.

We were able to engage some of our team members that are here in LA, and they were able to head out Tuesday and actually start seeing what the situation was, right? So, me and a few of our other team members drove up Wednesday morning to kind of continue the work.

SAFIAN: Is there a consistent playbook that World Central Kitchen uses, like with every activation? Is there anything sort of distinctive to LA and to these fires that impacted how you activated?

ESCOBEDO: Yeah, I think that’s always the question, right? What does the playbook look like? And every disaster emergency is, of course, unique and different in its own way. I think our biggest playbook is adaptability. We just tend to mold in the way we need to for what needs to get done.

I think that’s what makes the team that we have really incredible. We’ve done everything from building kitchens from scratch to building community kitchens for people to cook in, to doing farmer’s markets, to produce boxes. It all depends on what the need is. Obviously, LA has a very large hospitality community. It’s been incredible, the tremendous outpour of people wanting to volunteer, of volunteering their staff, their kitchens, making meals for us.

Part of what we do, especially after COVID, when we started partnering with restaurants, was José’s idea to stimulate the economy and to stimulate the local economy. It didn’t make sense here for us to build a kitchen when we have all these amazing food trucks and restaurant partners willing to support us.

So it made the most sense, especially because the fires were pretty spread out in the beginning, to engage with local partners, food trucks, and restaurants. Food trucks, in particular, were really helpful because we were able to send them out to various locations where we needed to feed people.

In terms of this response, I think that was the unique part of it, plugging in and being able to quickly send food to an area.

The goal is to always feed people as quickly as possible.

SAFIAN: In some disasters, there isn’t food there, so you have to get it there. Here, there’s enough food around for folks. It’s just about getting it to the right places, prepared in appropriate ways.

ESCOBEDO: Yeah, I think the bigger thing here is the logistics, right? We set up a distribution site in a community or an area that we know there are recipients that need food.

On the logistical side, things change quickly. Obviously, with fires, a lot can change very quickly. We wanted to be as flexible as we could. So if I knew an area needed food, I could have a food truck there in 30 minutes and we could start serving. That’s the ultimate goal.

SAFIAN: How do you know where food is needed?

ESCOBEDO: We have a whole team, our community outreach team, and they are our scouts. They are the people who go out to these places.

We’re not doing anything over the phone. We’re all getting out in the community. In fact, Tuesday night when the fires happened, our scouts went and picked up sandwiches and burritos, and were out in the field with food.

We don’t want to go somewhere empty-handed. We try to show up with meals, engage with the community, start asking questions, getting to know them too. By establishing that relationship of, “Hey, we’re here to help,” no one knows their community better than the community itself.

They communicate, they share the information with each other, and we’ve found that often is more helpful and moves faster than social media or things like that.

SAFIAN: Are there any memorable experiences that you’ve had so far? I mean, you’ve been doing this, it’s been now almost a week, right? That you’ve been engaged with trying to deal with these fires.

ESCOBEDO: As devastating as this has been here, it’s been incredible to see how the community has shown up for each other.

I was able to go out in the Altadena area this week where there’s still obviously several places that people perhaps didn’t lose their homes, but they still don’t have power. Obviously, there’s a lot of damage in the surrounding area, and I was able to go to a community.

A gentleman set up at a gas station, right? He was friends with the guy that owned the gas station, and he said, “Hey, people want to bring donations. Can I set it up there?” We were able to get to know him a little bit. We were able to send a food truck, and then we said, “Hey, what else do you need?”

We’re setting them up with lights, power, trash removal, just making sure that they can continue to help their community. That’s been really great to be able to do and to experience. I think that’s probably pretty memorable to me in terms of this response.

SAFIAN: And for you as an activation director, when you get up in the morning in a situation like this, do you know what you’re going to do that day?

ESCOBEDO: I mean, I think overall, the first 72 hours are sort of our semi-chaotic hours, right? And it’s because we’re just going, right? We’re like, all right, let’s get food out. That’s our first priority. And then after those 72 hours, we can take a step back a little bit and look at the bigger picture, get more in line and organized.

We have a better understanding of what the need is, where the need is, and how we can fill that.

To be honest with you, I have a really incredible team, and that makes this work so much easier.

As we keep doing it, we get better at it and it feels smoother, you know?

SAFIAN: Do you know what you’re going to do tonight, tomorrow, after we get off this call?

ESCOBEDO: Yes, I do. One of the things that I would like to do is try to just get out into the field more, just check in with everyone. We have sometimes so many restaurant partners and food trucks, and I always like to go visit them, thank them, and just see how the community is doing.

Sometimes you can get stuck in the logistics part of it and kind of forget, hey, I should actually get out there and see how everyone’s doing. That’s gonna be my goal for the next few days now that I feel like we’ve set up a good structure.

We hire local people to fill the roles, so going back to community, right?

They’re familiar with the area, they know the people. Those are the people that we want right, there for the right reasons. They care, they want to give back, they want to help. That makes it better for us to transition. If, let’s say I have another project, I am confident that the people we’ve trained can run it and support their community and continue to do that while we start to move on to other projects.

SAFIAN: I’m curious, and this is a little bit of a delicate question, but World Central Kitchen does work all over the world for a lot of people who have a lot fewer resources than some of the people impacted by this fire. Not all the people impacted by this fire have resources, but some of them have a lot. Is there any part of your activity there that is as much about making sure the name of World Central Kitchen and what you do is personally relevant and resonant to people who can support what World Central Kitchen does all over the world?

ESCOBEDO: Yeah, I think we’ve been everywhere, right? We’ve been all over the world, to your point, and we’ve seen so many disasters. We go to other countries and, of course, they may never have heard of us, so it’s always kind of great to explain what we do.

Obviously, it’s a very unique thing that we do. Here in LA, there are some people that know what we do, especially in the restaurant world. That was where we had this incredible outpouring of people wanting to work with us. A lot of these partners also worked with us during the pandemic.

They were providing meals for people. So there was sort of this chef world connection of just like, hey, let’s get this done. That’s one of my favorite parts, being a chef myself, the effectiveness of how quickly we get things done. To your point, here in California and in particular to this activation, it’s almost both, right? I’m inundated with everyone that wants to volunteer, everyone that wants to give back, but also people trying to find out more about what we do, wanting to donate and give back. That’s great.

There are people here in LA, obviously, a demographic of people who have lost and are still going to be affected by this, but there are people who are okay and want to give back to their community. They’re asking, “What can I do to help? Where can I donate?” That’s been really great.

SAFIAN: Thank you for taking the time in the midst of all this to talk to us today. I really, really appreciate it.

ESCOBEDO: Yeah, thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: If the first 72 hours in an emergency are “chaotic,” as Wendy puts it, then the essential core of effective rapid response is adaptability. That doesn’t mean being careless or disorganized; it means being both efficient and malleable — to work with the resources you have at your disposal. LA is known for food trucks, so great! Let’s use food trucks! This is a great reminder for any business leader, a compelling lesson.

To be honest, though, I found these conversations today really difficult. I can’t imagine what someone like Guillaume is going through, having poured so much money, time, and energy into a home and business that’s no longer standing. With so many others struggling, in pain, in mourning, and challenges still ahead, it’s hard not to have a heavy heart.

At the same time, listening to Andy at HomeState and Wendy at World Central Kitchen is inspiring — the power of community to lift up neighbors in need. To Guillaume and all those in despair, I hope the stories we’ve highlighted today show that you’re not alone. Hard times can bring out the best in people. The beauty and resilience of the human spirit is certainly on display in LA.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.