Rotary members jump into action to help Los Angeles wildfire victims

Massive wildfires in California, USA, have destroyed at least 12,000 buildings, razed neighborhoods, and displaced tens of thousands of people. Rotary members have raced to help.

By Clara Germani

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Bill “Chilly” Chillingworth walked out the door of his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on 7 January — a normal, bright California, USA, Tuesday morning — for a business appointment 60 miles south.

He would never see the house again.

In the early afternoon his adult daughter called to describe wildfire smoke blooming over canyons that descend sharply to the Pacific near where Chillingworth and his fiancé live.

He didn’t initially worry, because his neighborhood isn’t typical wildfire fuel: It’s a flat neighborhood with green lawns and no dry wildland around it, he says. But he can vividly chart the crescendo of panic triggered when his phone alarm erupted with an evacuation order. As he raced northward to meet his fiancé, they talked on the phone and feverishly checked off the so-called “p’s” she should grab as she fled: people, pets, pictures, paperwork.

When they met at a California Pizza Kitchen in a community a short distance south of their home, their cellphone alarms were going off. Each new ping eroded hope, he explains: “There was smoke detected in our master bedroom. … Five minutes later we got an alarm that was detecting excessive heat in the kitchen. … Five minutes later we got another alarm detecting excessive heat in the fan in the laundry room, and then we got a notification our front door had been breached … then we got a notification in two 15-minute increments that the front door was still open. … After a half an hour those messages stopped altogether, and we knew that we likely had been facing a total loss of our house and all of our belongings.”

Chillingworth is the kind of guy who relates this dark chapter with self-awareness and some humor. The fire, he chuckles, drove the couple to break their 30-year streak of going without alcohol after the holidays during “dry January.” Even while hitting an outlet mall to buy shoes, socks, and underwear, he says he’s hyperaware he’s only one of thousands who have been displaced — and a privileged one, at that, financially able to start again.

But still, in a phone interview, his voice quavers twice: over the “profound distress” of seeing his neighborhood burning on TV news and in describing his heartwarming awe of being both giver and receiver in community service.

Rotary network brings aid to fire victims

Rotary is the platform for that reciprocity, he says. A member for more than 35 years and president-elect of the Rotary Club of Santa Monica, California, USA, he has an extensive global network of fellow members calling, texting, and emailing to offer help.

Those connections buoy him as he helps plan and participate in two major fundraising events. On 1 March, the club’s annual $150,000 black-tie benefit will direct the bulk of this year’s proceeds to fire relief. And Chillingworth is scheduled as a featured speaker discussing his fire experience remotely for a Seattle-area fundraiser in late January. That fundraiser in Washington, USA, was organized in a matter of days by Larry Snyder, who goes to California to serve as the auctioneer every year at Santa Monica’s black-tie event. Snyder isn’t a Rotary member himself, but on the sheer basis of his years of work with and respect for Santa Monica , he believes they are a conduit for philanthropy that “people can trust.”

“Rotary is all about jumping into action as quick as we can,” says Chillingworth, whose club of 100-plus members has kicked into service overdrive, even with close to a quarter of those members now without homes. (As a point of fire reference, all members of the much smaller Pacific Palisades Rotary club have lost their homes, as well as the business where the club met.)

That quick action is important, especially if it’s the right action, says Brady Connell, governor-nominee or Rotary District 5280 (California).

A lesson driven home in the outpouring of desire to help is that random collection of physical donations may not be as efficient as a more purposeful needs assessment, says Connell, a member of the Rotary Club of Playa Venice Sunrise. “That’s where Rotarians can really come in because [they] are very connected in the community.”

Members have been helping displaced people in their communities with paperwork for insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, lending spare bedrooms and providing money, clothes, food, and listening ears. But there’s a bigger, longer-term picture, says Connell. His club is working with the Santa Monica club, which includes leaders from crucial frontline assistance organizations like the YMCA, Salvation Army, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Meals on Wheels, to focus on fire relief and “what families are going to actually need when they are given access to their properties.”

The two clubs have partnered on a “safe search” project to provide ash sifters and protective wear to families returning to their homes to go through the ruins. Home Depot has donated 150 sifters to the two clubs, and they have applied for a grant from the District 5280 Wildfire Disaster Relief Fund to buy protective kits of goggles, body suits, gloves, and booties.

Steering Rotary momentum across a large chunk of the Los Angeles basin is Albert Hernandez, governor of District 5280. By profession, he operates a homeless services nonprofit in Burbank, a city situated between the two big fires that were still burning in late January in the area of the Palisades to the west and the Altadena community to the east. With his work and service missions aligned, he’s accustomed to meeting human needs which, he says, fall into two categories: the monetary and “sense of touch, as I call it.”

“Monetary contributions allow us to get what we need when we need it,” he says, convinced it should be a service priority after witnessing evacuation centers across L.A. turning donations of food and clothing away because there was no storage space.

His district’s fire relief fund has collected $250,000 as of 20 January. The money will be used to help organizations serve the community, to help Rotary members directly who’ve lost homes and businesses, and to be part of matching grants for projects dreamed up by clubs to meet needs in their own areas.

Hernandez sees the powerful community bonding in disaster as “sense of touch.” He recounts how a Burbank club’s recent lunch meeting program consisted of members expressing their feelings, one by one around the room. The intimacy of that crisis response, he says, echoes across state and international borders with the hundreds of offers of help he has received. It’s particularly poignant, he says, after years of service trips abroad, to now be on the receiving end of Rotary members’ service offers — one of which came from a club official in Ukraine where war continues.

Hernandez is looking beyond the moment, as well as to a future where changes in patterns of precipitation, temperature, and wind is driving hotter, fiercer fire seasons here. He offers this perspective: “A lot of people are worried about the homes that we’ve lost; but I think we’re forgetting about how many businesses people lost. And … how many children’s schools have burned down? How many children are out of school [now]? When are they going to have that sense of normalcy again?”

— January 2025

Photo courtesy of Alamy