SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been almost a year since wildfires devastated much of the Los Angeles area. We're going to hear about Altadena, where the Eaton Fire killed 19 people and destroyed more than 9,000 buildings last January. Freddy Sayegh is a lifelong resident of Altadena, which has been home to his family for generations. His relatives lost several properties in the Eaton Fire, and Sayegh had extensive smoke damage to his home. He and his sister created the Altadena Coalition after the fire, and what started as an immediate emergency response to handout supplies has become a larger and more prolonged effort. Freddy Sayegh joins us now from Altadena. Thanks so much for being with us.
FREDDY SAYEGH: Thank you, Scott, for having me.
SIMON: How are you? What's the past year been like for you?
SAYEGH: The longest and toughest year of my life, and I've had a few tough years in 51 years.
SIMON: Help us understand that and get a grip on what you've been going through.
SAYEGH: First, from a personal side, we lost my parents' home, and they're in their 80s. We lost my sister's home and my brother's homes, commercial properties. And so having everybody displaced from a family that was all living within a mile has really altered how our family lives and how our family sees each other. Watching the devastation across the community hitting so many people all at once, all sharing the same type of trauma, has been something to see, and it's a very slow process. Early on, the biggest problem was immediate and interim housing. That had become very, very complicated and very costly in doing so. It's dispersed, you know, about 40,000 residents across the country, believe it or not.
SIMON: They had to move there just to be able to find a place to live.
SAYEGH: Yeah. Well, to find a place to live or to have an immediate place to live. What we saw was a lot of generational families. So we had grandma living with grandchild. And then when you have these insurance policies, you have what's called a ALE, or an alternative living expense. And those expenses are really for one family. You know, the insurance company doesn't really want to take into consideration three families. I know some people have been in a hotel for a year. So you put grandma and grandpa in a hotel, what happens to the kids that was living there? What happened to the grandchildren that were living there? So they become starting to get disbursed. At around the three to four-month mark, I had identified about 1,600 residents actually sleeping in their cars because they didn't feel safe in, like, public shelters. So we created a interim housing symposium to bring in all the state, federal and local agencies to try to assist with some form of housing. Once housing kind of gotten settled, then we moved into the next phase of what their recovery looks like.
SIMON: I'm just breathless thinking about all the agencies and all the paperwork and all the initials of government agencies you've had to deal with.
SAYEGH: What I noticed immediately, like in the second week out, all these agencies start landing. And they kind of don't operate in a singular fashion. So if you wanted something, you got to go to FEMA to get this information. You got to go to SBA to get this information. I've spent, you know, 30 years also as a event festival and trade show producer. So I was the first one to bring everybody all together, you know, because I can do that, but they can't coordinate together. We would have these town halls where we'd be able to get that information all at once. What we also saw was you can tell someone, both in trauma or a senior or someone with a disability or someone with another issue, what they need to do, but people would just look dumbfounded. OK. Now, what do I actually do? So what we began doing was immediately taking seniors, opening up their computer, and putting in their SBA information and filling it out for them. Doing the same for FEMA. Doing the same for Red Cross because explaining to someone took a lot longer than actually just sitting there and doing it for them.
SIMON: Why did you and your sister decide to create the Altadena Coalition?
SAYEGH: When I woke up, the house that I was born in and got married in was gone. My brother's house was gone. My sister's house was gone. My uncle's business was gone. And we all lived together in Altadena. I mean, I had, you know, maybe 40 relatives live in the 91001 address get decimated. It was natural to run back and help our residents. We have a commercial building, which is my former law firm, so we kind of made that, like, our ground zero, helping people, allowing people to store things, letting people sleep there. Even it was Ramadan and one of the mosques had burned. They had nowhere to go, and we gave them one of the units so that they could pray. So it started as a natural reaction to help.
SIMON: What's it like for Altadenans to try and celebrate the holiday when so many families seem to be out of position and displaced and spread across the country?
SAYEGH: You see people go through different phases. Instead of phases of grief, but phases of recovery. And they seemed very strong and hard-willed all the way right around, maybe a week before Thanksgiving, is when we really saw it hit them, where the homes that they carved turkey from for 40, 50 years is gone. The pan that they baked that Grandma left them or a special knife and then realizing that they're not going to host Thanksgiving at home. And then as Christmas comes, we can just see people really decline and really feel the loss of what they had. So we threw a big Christmas party for them. We invited everybody. We bought bands and food and music and tried to give a sense of being back home in Altadena, but I think the holidays have really been difficult for them because it really shows what they lost.
SIMON: And how much hope is in your heart this season?
SAYEGH: I have to have hope. People rely on me to have hope. We got to keep the hope for them.
SIMON: Freddy Sayegh is founder of the Altadena Coalition. Thank you for being with us. And may I offer you good holidays?
SAYEGH: Thank you, Scott. We don't want to be forgotten, and we want to thank NPR for not forgetting us.
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