This club of catastrophe welcomes people who have lost everything
SONOMA, Calif. – Amy Bernstein and Grace Park weren’t sure what to expect when they walked into the beige-paneled auditorium in California wine country. Other attendees wore lanyards that bore the names of places now seared into history: Santa Rosa, Paradise, Lahaina. A message on the big screen read, “Welcome Los Angeles to the Worst Club of the Best People.”
The pair, faith leaders from the L.A. enclave of Pacific Palisades, realized this wasn’t a normal conference. The room was full of fire survivors like them, and they were attending what felt more like an initiation. They were among the newest members of this club of catastrophe.
The summit, an annual affair organized by the nonprofit group After the Fire, brings together survivors, emergency responders and other disaster experts to trade ideas about recovery and to symbolically swear in the latest class of devastated communities. This year, the first-timers were from the Palisades and Altadena, two Los Angeles neighborhoods where January’s firestorm destroyed more than 16,000 buildings and killed at least 31 people.
Bernstein and Park were hesitant. Emotions were still raw. But when they arrived, they felt the sort of comfort that only comes from being surrounded by people who get it.
“I felt less lonely instantly,” said Bernstein, the senior rabbi at Kehillat Israel, who lost her Palisades home. “It’s just really normalizing at a time when you feel like a freak.”
After the fire, founded in the ashes of the 2017 blazes that tore through this region, has deployed to the sites of the nation’s worst wildfires. The organization, survivors say, fills a key gap at a time when increasingly destructive fires have strained the capacity of governments to respond.
The group’s leaders encourage survivors from different disasters to mentor one another through the long rebuilding process. They become each other’s pen pals, sounding boards, cheerleaders. And the annual summit is equal parts resource fair and support group – akin to a gathering for those affected by a rare malady.
“When you’re plunged knee-deep into it, you are very grateful for someone in the room who deeply understands what you’re feeling and what you are going through,” said Park, the associate pastor of Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, which was lost in the fire.
The conference center, an open-air venue near the hills that burned eight years ago, was decorated in signs bearing inspirational mantras and maxims. One read: “Recover. Rebuild. Reimagine.” Another: “It wasn’t just stuff. It was my stuff.” Bernstein clocked them, and felt at home.
“That’s the scripture of fire survivors,” she said. “They are quotes from our sacred text, the text of our lives.”
‘We become the experts’
When Jennifer Gray Thompson’s hometown in California’s North Bay caught fire in October 2017, she assumed there would be protocol for a disaster of this scale.
“What I always thought was, ‘Oh, it’s a disaster, there’s a system. The cavalry will come and they’ll tell me where to go,’ ” said Gray Thompson, a former teacher then working in the office of a Sonoma County supervisor. “Then I waited.”
For survivors of other types of calamities such as hurricanes and floods, it is a familiar experience. Local, state and federal authorities are often overwhelmed initially and ill-equipped for the arduous recovery process. This was especially true in 2017, still early in the modern age of American megafires.
The organization that would become After the Fire began as a local effort to coordinate the response to the North Bay blazes. But in Gray Thompson’s first year as CEO, the massive Camp and Woolsey fires erupted on the same day at opposite ends of California, and she realized there would be many more places in need of guidance.
Since then, After the Fire – still a small organization that doesn’t charge for its services and relies on philanthropy – has traveled to burn scars across the West, from Hawaii to Colorado, and has lobbied Congress on behalf of survivors.
“My intensity today is the same as it was almost eight years ago,” Gray Thompson said.
At this year’s summit, Jeff Okrepkie, who lost his home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Northern California, noticed the room seemed unusually crowded. He was glad at first to see such strong attendance. Then he realized with a pang: “Oh wait, they’re here because there was another fire.”
Okrepkie, now a Santa Rosa city council member, has bonded with fellow survivors over dark humor and F-bombs.
“There’s a shared trauma,” Okrepkie said. “We all ran in the middle of the night at the drop of a hat to save our lives. … We know the terror. It brings you closer.”
Zaire Calvin, born and raised in Altadena, was one of the new faces this year. His sister, Evelyn McClendon, was among the Eaton Fire’s 19 victims. He lost his own house, and several of his family members lost theirs. But like others, he has channeled his grief into activism, and he’s working to help his neighbors rebuild.
“We become the experts,” he said.
Meeting other experts, he added, was both comforting and inspiring. “It brought that peace to the soul,” Calvin said.
Many of those Calvin spoke with recounted a similar experience during their first years of recovery. Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen, who Calvin has consulted multiple times, said it was important to reciprocate after the outpouring of support following the island’s 2023 fires.
“We’re here to return the favor,” Bissen said. “To give back to the folks who gave so much to us.”
It’s not just first-timers who benefit. Between panels, Jennifer Singer-Rupp, who lived through the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, tracked down Casey Taylor from Paradise. Singer-Rupp and many of her neighbors have rebuilt their homes in Boulder County, but they struggle to find affordable insurance.
Taylor had surprising information to share: Paradise’s strict fire safety rebuilding requirements persuaded at least one insurer to write more policies there. Singer-Rupp now hopes her community can eventually adopt similar standards.
“We’re all in these little silos,” she said. “And when you come to a place like this, you can exchange information and get new ideas.”
In these conversations, Taylor thinks of herself as sending a message from the future: “I see the light at the end of my tunnel. I see the light at the end of your tunnel also.”
‘It’s who I am’
For Paul Lowenthal, recovery began as a job. As both a Santa Rosa firefighter and fire survivor, he became a go-to adviser for his neighbors and his city government. When other communities asked for guidance, he was happy to help. But it was always more of a professional pursuit.
Then Gray Thompson invited him to Maui. Fires had leveled Lahaina, and the island’s leaders were wary of outsiders. But Lowenthal met with John Smith, head of the Maui recovery office, and won him over.
Smith called Lowenthal his “crystal ball,” because he always seemed to know what was coming next, from infrastructure issues to emotional burnout. Since that first trip, Lowenthal has traveled to Maui nine times, planning family vacations there so he can visit Smith and work with him on the latest recovery problem.
“It was more of a job for me originally, but it has truly shifted,” Lowenthal said. “Now, it’s who I am. It’s a passion.”
Disaster has already inspired survivors of the Los Angeles fires to make the same shift. Patty Ratermann and iO Wright did not know where to turn after their Altadena home burned. They were dazed, mourning, exhausted and trying to sort through a torrent of information.
Wright filled legal pads with everything he learned about debris removal and public adjusters. Then he began sharing it on Instagram, and the posts went viral. Survivors from other fires commented, offering more help and support.
“It was absolutely incredible and lifesaving,” he said.
Gray Thompson got in touch and introduced him and Ratermann to more survivors and experts, who helped fact-check Wright’s PSAs.
Before long, Ratermann, who worked in tech start-ups, and Wright, a writer and documentarian, decided on a career change. They founded PostFire, a nonprofit clearinghouse for recovery resources that translates the jargon of forms, claims and appeals.
It was inspired in part by the help they received from other survivors. “They’re almost like sentinels – I can feel them watching over me,” Wright said. “I will do that for the next fires.”