Giving Back

RNRN nurse volunteers answer the call to help people devastated by the Eaton and Palisades fires

By Chuleenan Svetvilas

National Nurse magazine - Jan | Feb | March 2025 Issue

When Mary-Jane Perry, RN looked out the window as her airplane approached Los Angeles International Airport on January 19, she glimpsed some of the devastation from the Palisades Fire. “It was unreal, post-apocalyptic,” said Perry, who had flown down from Sacramento to volunteer with the Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN) in the wake of two of the most destructive fires in California history. “It was just ashes. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but then realized that’s where homes were supposed to be.”

Several wildfires began burning in southern California in January, but it was the Palisades and Eaton fires that caused the most severe damage, destroying much of Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and surrounding areas (see sidebar Fire Figures). Longstanding homes, apartment buildings, businesses, beloved restaurants, schools, and places of worship were reduced to rubble, leaving behind charred trees and remnants of walls, chimneys, and roofs. Discolored cars sat in driveways, their windshields, upholstery, and tires melted away. Some homes survived the conflagration, but residents could not return due to downed power lines, lack of drinkable water, and dangerous debris and toxic materials. 

Hundreds of people displaced by the Eaton and Palisades fires were living in Red Cross shelters at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena and the Westwood Center in West Los Angeles. RNRN, a disaster-relief project of California Nurses Foundation and National Nurses United, helped to support an effort led by International Medical Corps to provide medical and mental health care for the evacuees. International Medical Corps also provided its own volunteer doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals to care not only for people in shelters but also at community distribution centers and reentry points. International Medical Corps and RNRN also staffed a mobile medical unit in Altadena and a Red Cross shelter in north Los Angeles County for a few days, caring for people who evacuated from the Hughes Fire, which started on January 22 but was contained by January 30.

In Roseann Devlin’s Los Angeles neighborhood, located between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena, it rained heavy ash from the Eaton Fire. Her address was under warning for another fire when she got RNRN’s email alert. “I saw singed pieces of paper about the size of business cards coming down,” said Devlin, a nurse in the oncology and telemetry unit at Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance. “They were people’s bibles, dictionaries, and personal documents. That was heartbreaking.”

Devlin and Perry, an RN in ambulatory surgery at Kaiser South Sacramento, were two of the 24 RNRN volunteers deployed over four weeks to provide care for people in Red Cross shelters, which housed everyone from families and seniors to couples and people with pets. There were infants, school-age children, and college students as well as the wheelchair bound and people who had been unhoused long before the fires. Some residents still had jobs and worked during the day, only returning to the shelter to sleep, noted Cathy Kennedy, a neonatal ICU nurse at Kaiser Roseville, whose deployment as team lead began on February 1. “Others were still trying to figure out where they were going to be, what were their next steps,” said Kennedy, who is also a president of National Nurses United. 

When Perry’s first shift began on January 20, hundreds of people were at the Pasadena Convention Center, sleeping on cots in the ballrooms — large rooms with 28-foot-high ceilings — and eating meals in one of the enormous exhibit halls. A separate room housed people with pets, and another served as an isolation ward for people with flu, Covid, and norovirus. The Westwood Recreation Center was much smaller than the Pasadena shelter, housing fewer than 200 people in a gymnasium when RNRN nurses arrived. 

The RNRN deployment launched with three nurses: Perry, Denise Vincenzi, an ER nurse at Kaiser Fremont, and Jane Sandoval, a retired ER nurse and the first team’s lead. They began their first week with 12-hour shifts, but as more RNRN volunteers arrived, the shifts went down to 8 hours (7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.). The majority of RNRN nurses hailed from Northern California, but a few were from the southern part of the Golden State. Two nurses were from out of state: Jeanette Gregory, a retired nurse, traveled from Texas, and another from Louisiana. For the first three weeks, nurses staffed the shelters 24 hours a day; then, as the shelter population decreased, care shifted to 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., with nurses working either the morning or evening shift.

RNRN deployments are typically about two weeks long, depending on need and availability, giving some continuity of care for disaster survivors. Seeing a familiar face can provide some stability for people whose lives have been completely upended. RNs can get to know people after just a few days, as first-time RNRN volunteer James Cartmell can attest. Cartmell works in the ER at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, a coastal city nearly 90 miles south of Los Angeles.

“I knew everyone in the shelter by the third day,” said Cartmell, who was primarily at the Westwood Recreation Center during his deployment. “I knew my patient’s history — what’s normal for them, what’s not normal.”

Most nurses worked at both shelter locations, according to need. Assignments could change from Pasadena to Westwood. “It’s very fluid. You are troubleshooting, changing pace, changing locations,” said Patricia Guerrero Huertas, an oncology RN at Kaiser San Francisco who has volunteered twice before with RNRN. “There is no dillydallying.”

A few nurses who staffed the mobile medical unit stationed in Altadena got an up-close view of the Eaton Fire’s impact. “I looked across the street and saw the devastation. There was a car, the windshield had melted over the dashboard and steering column,” said Tammi Bachecki, an intensive care unit RN at Kaiser Vacaville, who has volunteered on several RNRN deployments, including the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. “It was eerie to know that the massive destructive force that wiped everything out was literally right where I was standing.”

RNRN nurses provided basic primary care — monitoring people with chronic diseases and checking oxygen levels, blood pressure, and glucose levels. They changed dressings on minor wounds and treated minor injuries. They also helped get prescriptions refilled. 

“Some people with mobility issues received mail order medications before the fire,” said Devlin, who was volunteering with RNRN for the second time. “But now your home is just a foundation and chimney, and you’re living in a shelter. I would call their doctor’s office and reroute everything to a local pickup at a CVS or Walgreens.”
Nurses also gave out melatonin to help people having trouble sleeping. There is no privacy; people are snoring, and others are coughing or moving around.

“Shelter life is hard,” said Guererro Huertas. “You lose your personal space; you are with all these strangers sleeping on a cot. And you are dealing with the trauma of losing everything, and you have to figure out how FEMA works.”

In Pasadena, RNRN volunteers staffed clinic areas in the hallways outside the sleeping areas where they did triage, except for the isolation room, where nurses were stationed inside. At Westwood, nurses sat at tables inside the gymnasium. Any people with conditions that could not be treated in the shelter went to the hospital. A doctor and pharmacist were available at both shelters so prescriptions could be filled and delivered to the shelter. International Medical Corps also provided vital mental health services.

“A big part of our job was listening,” said Mercedes Nunez, an RN at Kaiser Fremont who has volunteered on four other RNRN deployments. “I listened to people tell their story. Sometimes they didn’t want medical care, they just wanted to sit and talk. They didn’t know what was going to happen, where they were going to live.”
“People were in shock, coming off that initial adrenaline of escaping the fire,” said Devlin. “The ones I talked to were older. I worried about them going to meet their insurance adjuster alone. I asked if they had anyone who could go with them and encouraged them to call anyone they might know.”

For Manuel Xavier Belderol, an RN at Keck Medical Center of USC in Los Angeles, this deployment hit close to home. Two of his coworkers lost their homes to the Palisades Fire and his son’s high school burned down. Belderol wanted to volunteer because he “wanted to give back.”

Caring for people at their most vulnerable is why many people become nurses and why they volunteer with RNRN. The camaraderie and teamwork among the volunteers are special. “We really form a bond during that short time,” said Christina Schonbrun, an RN in the bone marrow transplant and hematology unit at UC San Francisco. “The feeling is: We’re all in this together. It wasn’t hard work, but it was emotional work.”

Perry agrees. “I love the volunteers I work with every time. It’s like a family,” said Perry, who has volunteered on four other disaster-relief RNRN deployments, including the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. “We all have mutual friends or worked together on past deployments.”

“Deploying brings life to my everyday practice,” said Guerrero Huertas. “It shakes me up and I come back renewed and rejuvenated.”

“There is nothing like volunteering and getting out of your comfort zone,” said Sandoval, who also volunteered with RNRN in 2013 after Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines. “It gives you an appreciation for what you have.”