2 hours ago
1
Until last Tuesday, Ryan and Endea Marrone lived with their two young sons in Altadena, California, in a picturesque two-bedroom home tucked into the base of the San Gabriel mountains. Behind the house, Ryan, a music producer, had created a mini recording studio, where he adorned the walls with pictures that his kids drew for him. Their wooded neighborhood was tight-knit: it was a community that wasn’t populated by the ultra-wealthy, where many homeowners had lived for decades and still exchanged holiday presents and housewarming gifts.
Now, a week later, the Marrones’ home – and their surrounding neighborhood – are all ash. The only thing that remains of their house is the chimney, singed black from flames and smoke. The front steps lead to a huge, leveled expanse of charred debris. Everything, from their sons’ Legos, to a school art project, to a photo from Ryan and Endea’s first date, was completely incinerated.
“There’s nothing left,” Ryan said. “It’s like we were never there.”
But in the bleak days since the Eaton fire swept through their community, as they’ve wondered where to go and what to do next, something else unexpected happened. Friends and family created GoFundMe pages for the Marrones, which exploded with donations and messages from around the country. More than 700 people in total, including loved ones and strangers, donated to the cause. It was an outpouring of support so overwhelming and surprising that Ryan and Endea suggested other wildfire relief efforts for well-wishers to check out.
“I can’t believe I can even say this, but I know we will be OK,” Ryan wrote in an update on GoFundMe.
As a string of devastating wildfires has raged across Los Angeles county this month, becoming some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in California history, Angelenos have also rallied together in huge numbers to aid evacuees. So many people have showed up to help at donation sites and shelters that some volunteers have been turned away. Many non-profits and other organizations have even stopped accepting physical donations because of the huge surplus of items. Local shows and performances in the entertainment capital have been transformed into fire relief fundraisers.
Support has poured in from outside California, too. Firefighters from around the United States, and the world, have flown in to help contain the blazes. People from coast to coast, including celebrities and some of the country’s largest companies, have donated to relief funds.
Though the need for mutual aid still exists across LA, the waves of donations and general support on a personal level have altered Ryan and Endea’s outlook on everything.
“It was like the worst day in the world,” Ryan said. “And then once [the GoFundMe and messages] started, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so hopeful.’ It took away a little bit of the pain.”
From parking lot to disaster relief center
Just a few miles from the Marrones’ former home, a different large-scale relief effort for wildfire victims unfolded over the past week. Thousands of people flocked to a massive pop-up donation center staged in the parking lot of a local racetrack, both to find aid themselves and to work as volunteers.
One of the event’s organizers, Allen Gharakhani (or “Allen G” for short), wove through crowds of people at the makeshift donation site on Wednesday afternoon, pointing out each section of the miniature aid village and explaining its purpose. A section of books and toys led to a row of booths offering first aid supplies, N-95 masks to combat the smoke and canned food of all kinds. Street food vendors served up free hotdogs and protein rice bowls. In one corner of the parking lot, mountains of clothing for children and adults stretched as far as the eye could see.
Near the event’s entrance, Gharakhani stopped to embrace a woman wearing a cardboard sign that read “free hugs”.
“I’ll take a hug, ma’am,” he told her, tearing up. “Sorry, I get emotional. This event is my baby.”
Gharakhani, who was born and raised in Los Angeles roughly a dozen miles from the Eaton fire, said he’d never seen the city’s residents come together quite like this.
“I mean we live in Hollywood, so sure, I’ve seen this in a movie, on the big screen,” he said. “But to see it and to live it? I mean I knew LA could do big things, but I didn’t know we could change the lives of so many people.”
By day, Gharakhani works for a home healthcare agency. He has no formal experience in event planning or disaster relief; the biggest event he had coordinated before this was a 40-person birthday party, he said. But the donation center grew organically on social media, starting with just a handful of vendors giving away hotdogs at the Rose Bowl stadium in nearby Pasadena and livestreaming it on TikTok. So many volunteers showed up with donations that they had to change locations, eventually ending up outside the Santa Anita Park racetrack.
Gharakhani and several other volunteers helped build the momentum there – and organize what grew to five-foot piles of clothes and other supplies.
Another organizer, Sophia Baroz, who handles fundraising and event planning at St Jude children’s research hospital, said that she and a friend had been looking to help out somewhere after the fires, but the duo were politely turned away by both the Pasadena Humane animal shelter and the Pasadena convention center, which has been functioning as an emergency shelter; both already had enough volunteers.
The racetrack donation center was the perfect place to step in.
“We got here and we were like, ‘Wow, this is incredible. It’s absolutely amazing how big this thing has gotten,’” Baroz said. “But with it growing rapidly, we saw that they needed a couple extra hands, which is where we came in.”
The parking lot saw at least 1,500 volunteers in total, she said. They received so many donations this week that they had to stop accepting them. On Friday, the de facto donation site finally closed up shop.
“We’re LA here,” Gharakhani said on Wednesday, looking over the area teeming with evacuees and food truck vendors and volunteers. “When you’re here, you’re part of LA. There’s no color, there’s no religion, there’s no politics. We’re going to move forward as one.”
‘Everything completely crumbled’
Even with the widespread support, there have been unavoidably hard days for families like the Marrones. Although they had only been renting their Altadena home, their plans for a life there have suddenly been dashed.
“I just keep saying I feel lost,” Endea said. “We got married and we prayed for these kids, and we did all of these things to make sure that they would just have a stable life. And it’s just like everything, in the blink of an eye, has completely crumbled.”
For Ryan and Endea’s two sons, three-year-old Casey and five-year-old Matthew, the adjustment to life after the fire has been a particularly bumpy road. Casey’s preschool burned down, and Matthew is slowly processing the scale of what happened.
Matthew, realizing that his parents have been upset, has clearly been shelving his own tantrums, Endea said, and is constantly checking in on her.
“He’ll just be like, ‘Oh, Mom, it’s OK, it’s all right.’ Or you’ll see him being a little more protective over his brother,” she said.
“He’s just growing up really quickly in a couple days,” Ryan added.
There’s also a new, lengthy to-do list for the Marrones to tackle, including finding a permanent place to live, deciding what to spend money on and what not to, and arranging the details of where Casey will go to preschool next. With that mounting list of tasks, there’s a sense of decision paralysis.
“It’s just been really hard for me to figure out how to begin to pick up the pieces,” Endea said. “Because you have to make all of these permanent decisions, these life-altering decisions, when you’re just not there.”
In the wake of the disaster, their broader community has been a main buoying force. The Marrones have been staying at friends’ homes – they woke up one morning to fresh bagels on their doorstep – and Ryan said it’s as if almost every person he’s worked with in the music business either shared the GoFundMe or reached out. Endea, who is a speech-language pathologist, received messages from colleagues she’s never met and even old friends from middle school. The principal at Matthew’s school contacted them, too, with the reassurance that Matthew wouldn’t have to wear a uniform and that the school would cover his hot lunch.
Those messages and donations have made the idea of starting over again feel slightly more possible.
“We didn’t even realize we had built this community,” Ryan said. “And it’s really a shame that it takes something so tragic and devastating to see probably one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen in my life.”
