LA universities see long road to recovery after wildfires

Fred Farina, California Institute of Technology’s chief innovation officer, lost his home in the fires that tore through Los Angeles this month.

“Things turned on a dime. One evening we were sitting in our living room and within 10 minutes we had to evacuate,” said Farina, who lived in Altadena, one of the neighbourhoods hardest hit by the Eaton fire. “The loss of everything you have is hard to deal with.”

Farina was one of hundreds of faculty, staff and students from colleges and universities across Los Angeles displaced by the wildfires.

While most institutions were spared burn damage to their physical sites, many became entrenched in immediate recovery efforts. Numerous colleges raised money to help students and staff secure housing and other basic needs.

Others opened shelters and food pantries. Pepperdine University’s law school hosted free remote legal clinics to educate homeowners and lawyers about federal emergency assistance and related issues such as insurance, leases and mortgages. And the University of California, Los Angeles, opened space at its research park for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use as a disaster recovery centre for fire victims living on the city’s Westside.

Flexibility and compassion

But beyond efforts to meet their communities’ most pressing needs, colleges in Los Angeles were figuring out how to move forward and get through a semester scarred by one of the most destructive fires in Californian history. The priority emerging for most college leaders was moving forward with flexibility and compassion.

“Words seem inadequate to capture the scale of the devastation,” said Thomas F. Rosenbaum, president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, near where the Eaton fire destroyed 1,400 homes. “The Caltech community has responded with compassion and generosity, seeking to help each other and working heroically to permit Caltech and [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] to resume their fundamental missions of learning and discovery. We are in this for the long term, and the closeness of our community gives us hope for the future.”

The blaze didn’t reach the Caltech campus itself, but the institute estimates that more than 1,000 students and employees live in an evacuation zone. Of those, more than 90 employees have lost their homes, along with at least 200 employees of the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Lab, many of whom live in the decimated nearby enclave of Altadena.

Caltech was one of the many colleges in Southern California that closed down as strong winds accelerated the Palisades and Eaton fires and displaced scores of people affiliated with those campuses.

Caltech resumed in-person classes last week, and most other local colleges have done the same or are planning to in the coming days as the air quality continues to improve. But hundreds of students, staff and faculty are far from resuming life as it was before the blaze.

“It’s pretty overwhelming, the things that have to be done to get back to a good situation,” said Farina, who was in the throes of dealing with insurance and disaster relief logistics after losing his home. “There’s so many decisions that have to be made so quickly.”

Campus collection: How to chart a course through crisis

Although Farina is uncertain about when he will find permanent new housing for his family – apartments are scarce and rents have skyrocketed in the past week – Caltech helped him and many other employees secure a temporary place to live. So far, the Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund has raised about $2 million (£1.6 million) to help displaced people meet their basic needs in the aftermath of the fires.

Numerous other LA-area colleges are also helping their students and employees access cash and safe housing, which have emerged as two of the most needed resources more than a week after the fires started.

At least 60 faculty, staff and students at California State University, Los Angeles have lost their homes, and college officials expected that number to grow. The university was raising money and offering basic needs support for those most affected, which includes grants for housing and food as well as adjustments to teaching and learning, as needed. Cal State LA president Berenecea Johnson Eanes said in a memo that the institution “will continue to harness the healing power of our university for the long road to recovery”.

The Foundation for the Los Angeles Community Colleges has launched the LA Strong: Disaster Response Fund, which is raising money to assist people with housing, transport, clothing, food and other basic needs.

“What’s most important right now is financial support,” said Alberto J. Román, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, who expected the first round of assistance to be distributed by the end of the week. “We consider these really unprecedented times with an impact, and that’s why we are compassionate and empathetic of individual situations.”

None of LACCD’s nine campuses sustained fire damage, nor were any of the district’s more than 200,000 students and 9,000 employees injured as a result of the disaster, Román said.

“The impact that we’ve had has been on folks who’ve been evacuated or lost their homes, road closures preventing people from coming to work or power outages and being without internet,” he said, noting that the colleges had transitioned to remote work as the fires spread.

Although LACCD resumed in-person operations last week, Román said the district wants to be flexible with students and staff whose lives have been upended by the fires.

“It is important for us to continue instruction,” he said. “It’s a balance between health and safety and ensuring that students can finish their courses.”

Glendale Community College also reopened for in-person classes last week, although at least a dozen employees and 20 students lost their homes and dozens more had to evacuate. While officials continued trying to make contact with the 600 students who live in evacuation ZIP codes, the college was also offering extra paid leave for some employees, raising money, supplying students with laptops and helping people connect with other resources.

Tzoler Oukayan, dean of student affairs at Glendale CC, said the college was allowing students to withdraw from their classes without facing a penalty.

“The challenge is that a lot of our students in these areas didn’t – and some still don’t – have power. Access to the internet and their classes has been very challenging,” she said. “It was important for us to open up campus and give people a place to just be.”

Empathy and compassion will also be a priority for Mount St Mary’s University president Ann McElaney-Johnson when her campus reopens. The university’s Chalon campus – which is about three miles from the burn path of the Palisades fire – was still under evacuation orders and four faculty members so far had lost their homes.

“The impact of the fire – once we’ve ascertained what it is – is going to be tremendous. So, we really want to make sure we’re caring for our community as we move forward,” McElaney-Johnson said, adding that the university was using money from its operations budget to provide staff and students with financial assistance. “We’ll pick up where we need to, but there will be special attention. Some of the plans for different projects can get put on hold. Right now, the only thing that really matters is the safety and well-being of this community.”

‘Healing more than academics’

That’s the approach California State University, Chico took in 2018, when it reopened two weeks after the Camp fire destroyed the homes of more than 300 faculty, staff and students.

“We made sure that we had all of the exceptions and support systems in place to prioritise the people who were part of our community, to make sure our eye was on their long-term success,” said Ashley Gebb, executive director of communications at Chico State. “We were focused on healing more than academics. It was about how we could get students to the end of semester with their well-being as a priority.”

While Gebb said Chico State was “one of the first to have a community levelled by a fire like this”, this month’s fires in Southern California have proven that catastrophes of this scale are becoming more common.

Meredith Leigh, climate programmes manager for Second Nature, a non-profit focused on higher education’s role in climate action, said it was a signal that universities across the country should be prepared to navigate increasingly drastic events.

“While campuses across our network have taken steps to increase climate resilience and adaptation, the scale and impact of the current fires (as well as recent floods in the East) is novel in its intensity,” she said. “In this way, the biggest lesson for campuses across the nation is to shift the mental model for resiliency and emergency management – away from planning and implementation based on what has happened in the past, toward what are certain to be more frequent and intense events that previously seemed unimaginable.”

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.