Coming Together After the Unprecedented Disaster of the January Wildfires

Andrew Moseman

The devasting wildfires that tore through Los Angeles County in January left more than 300 members of the Institute community without homes, including more than 180 employees at JPL, which the Institute manages for NASA. But in the wake of the fires, people across campus and Lab came together to support their friends and colleagues in any way they could.

Caltech grad students and postdocs started a donation drive that filled up the Hameetman Center with supplies like water and clothing.

Many community members welcomed displaced colleagues into their homes—including Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, who took in then JPL director Laurie Leshin’s family when fire threatened their home. At the Institute level, Caltech’s Faculty Housing and Student Housing offices helped those displaced by the fire and mandatory evacuation orders to find short- and long-term housing. The Institute also established the Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund to support affected staff, faculty, and students who either lost their homes or needed assistance due to the disaster. As of publication, 1,500 people had applied for assistance, while over 4,000 donors had contributed nearly $5 million. Gifts have ranged from $5 to $500,000, with Caltech alumni contributing more than half a million dollars alone. Assistance came in other forms as well. Kitty Cahalan, assistant director for educational outreach in the provost’s office, left her Pasadena home during the fires to take refuge with her pets and kids at Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach (CTLO) office. After Cahalan learned that her house in Bungalow Heaven had survived the blaze, she gathered a master list of affected community members and a list of organizations accepting donations.

“I was finding people mostly through social media and text to find out who was affected among our friends,” she says. “So, I compiled a spreadsheet of people that we know who were displaced. We were just sending that out to our personal friends, saying, if you want to give, these are the organizations and these are GoFundMe pages of people who we know.” When she could return to her own home, Cahalan offered it as a resource. “We said, if anybody ever needs to just come over here, relax, print documents, they should go ahead,” she said, noting a friend of her child lived in Cahalan’s home for two months until their family could find a more permanent place that could house them all together.

When Mayte Garcia evacuated her Altadena home on the evening of January 7, she did not believe the flames would reach her street. “I live near JPL, and we never thought the fire would get that low,” says Garcia, operations manager at the Caltech Center for Inclusion and Diversity (CCID). “It wasn’t until a neighbor from our block sent us a video of our house that we realized it did not make it.” After a hotel stay and a week spent living with a family friend, Garcia moved to a new residence in Azusa.

During this traumatic period, Garcia’s CCID colleagues offered support to her and others whose homes were threatened or lost. “It felt very good that at least one part of my life was stable when everything else wasn’t,” Garcia says. “They put together a care package and asked what essential items we needed. That felt so good because when your house is gone, you realize you need everything.”

Elsewhere, Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology, organized a fundraiser among his third-floor colleagues in the Chen Neuroscience Research Building to assist custodian Sergio Lopez Meza, who lost his home in the Eaton fire.

“The community has stepped forward in amazing ways,” Rosenbaum said at the January campus gathering. “We’ve been able to open our hearts and open our homes.”