Bonus: Message from a City on Fire | How to Help

Just a quick message and some ways to help from Susan and guest Richard Hatem (Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf) who live in Pasadena, CA. Links below on how to help. 

Thankfully, the 80s TV Ladies team are all safe - Sharon, Susan, Melissa, Kevin, Sailor, Sergio, Megan and Serita. Rich and I were lucky enough to be in a good spot. We housed evacuees from Altadena and La Canada this week. We know too many people who have lost homes, schools, churches, synagogues and more. Thinking of all of you and hoping we have gotten through the worst. 

Sending love and healing and recovery to Los Angeles - which is still a city on fire. The fires have decimated two entire communities within Los Angeles County, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes. The recovery will be immense. This disaster and the other recent disasters around the country and world are made worse by a changing climate, a warming earth. There’s no escape. But there are solutions. There is hope. We can help each other. Donate or Volunteer if you can. We send best wishes for you to stay safe and find the light in the dark. 

TALK TO SOMEONE
Reach out to friends and family. Take care of yourself:
Pro Bono Therapy for LA Wildfires - https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=5c10f09ac5&e=c2a6c4f49f 
More mental health resources athttps://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=66ca1a18ce&e=c2a6c4f49f.

PLACES TO VOLUNTEER
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eaSXTYlLY_spJ-_w43ac55qu6X4YtgApgRGfads3cM4/htmlview for Wednesday and ongoing.
Volunteer with the https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=ac8e5b668f&e=c2a6c4f49f.

DONATING
People we know or friends of friends gofundmes:
https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=c949386ee8&e=c2a6c4f49f
https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=417fad5f53&e=c2a6c4f49f
https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=ee45e76e82&e=c2a6c4f49f
https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-hope-for-the-rosascamacho-family

MORE GOFUNDME
Displaced Black families in Altadena https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=9973a4701e&e=c2a6c4f49f. 
Gofundme pages for https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=fe63638093&e=c2a6c4f49f

THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS
DONATE to the LAFD at https://supportlafd.kindful.com

HELP Incarcerated Firefighters. CA uses incarcerated firefighters.
Read more of their story https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/los-angeles-fires-inmates-speak-1235232001/.
Donate to those firefighters at https://antirecidivism.org/donate
Type “firefighter fund” in the payment box. 

HELP THE ALTADENA GIRLS
Teenagers who lost their school started a fund to help girls victimized by the Eaton Fire at https://www.instagram.com/altadenagirls. Donate to their cause at http://pledge.to/altadena-girlshttps://www.pledge.to/altadena-girls

PRICE GOUGING IS ILLEGAL
If you see price gouging, you can report it:
Call 311 or 213-473-3231.
Or download myLA311 app to report illegally hiked rents and prices.
Tracking Rental Price Gouging https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RXWxLqTyWvAuq8A0PgaBuWeEn_G6qTLyTZ8lzfNEaNw/edit.

THE SCALE OF IT
It is hard to get a sense of what is lost and the scope of the destruction. “LA has lost more than 20,000 homes and businesses. Its infrastructure has suffered significant damage; over 200,000 residents are without power due to the destruction of high transmission power lines. Water quality in reservoirs has been degraded from smoke particulates, meaning that hundreds of thousands of residents whose homes survived the fires will not have potable water service. Hundreds of thousands more remained locked out of their homes due to evacuation orders.” - https://open.substack.com/pub/roberthubbell/p/los-angeles-firestorms-literal-and?r=u3n9p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

If you want to understand the scale of destruction in these areas, here are satellite images that can show you a detailed zoomable visual.  

EATON - https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=0d3105d0b0&e=c2a6c4f49f.
PALISADES - https://mac.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c6955712b931709f7b46b3067&id=677c042027&e=c2a6c4f49f.

Damage Destruction maps:

- For https://recovery.lacounty.gov/eaton-fire/

• - For https://recovery.lacounty.gov/palisades-fire/
• We've heard a lot of blame and finger pointing in this disaster.

APPLY FOR FEMA AID
Online at 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Weirding Way Media. Welcome to eighties TV ladies. Wishing you
all a very safe, secure, and taken care of place.
Right now, There's been a lot going on in Los Angeles.
Sharon is out of town, so I've decided to get

(00:22):
Richard HadAM from Richard Adam's Paranormal Bookshelf to join me
in our garage, which is still standing, unlike a lot
of buildings in Los Angeles. So hello, I'm Susan.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hello Susan, I'm Richard your husband. I know I'm no
Sharon Johnson, but you guys are going to have to
put up with me for today.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
So we would be normally dropping a regular episode for you,
but today instead we are dropping this one because there
has been unprecedented fires in all of Los Angeles, the
Palisades in Altadena, and so we're safe. We housed some
people who had to evacu wait, some of whom lost

(01:01):
a home, but others were able to go home, and
we're still hoping that the fires will be fully contained soon.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
You know, we get wind all the time in LA.
But I don't know, I feel like fire was expected.
I don't know, I feel like there was a sense
of doom even before this week started. Do you get
that feeling or am I misremembering it?

Speaker 1 (01:23):
No, they were warning us there were winds coming and
with all the dryness and lines and trees that would
go down, they knew there was a chance of fire,
and so we were warned a lot, and we've been
warned a lot with all of the natural disasters that
have ramped up in the last few years because of
climate change.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
It's so strange because it happened instantly. We were getting
text messages from people friends Altadena, Pasadena, Yeah, that were
immediately like we're getting evacuation warnings. We need a place
to go. Can we go to your place? And that
was Tuesday evening, not even late, and no sooner did
one person text, then another one did, and it's like,

(02:02):
wait a second, we do have some spare room. But
it was really weird for a second. And then one
couple that we know who has a dog ended up
at a house near us in our neighborhood, in the
home of friends who were traveling. But then my sister
in law ended up bringing her family down, husband, two daughters,

(02:22):
two dogs, and they've been with us for three days.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
I know. And then our sun Spencer came down.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
He came down with his dog because they got evacuated.
So yeah, there was a point of wait a second,
how many people can we fit in here? Well, not
only that, but how many people do we know who
were being evacuated and we're their first call? Like, that's
the part I didn't get. I'm like, if we were evacuated,
what I would we be calling people? Or would I
just be like, We're going downtown to the Bonaventure. I'm

(02:49):
getting a room with a twenty four hour room service.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
You understand that we would have to evacuate with our
two dogs and a cat.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
That's fine.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Many hotels don't take that. People were unable to bring
their pets.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I know that that was the problem. And all of
these people had animals. Our son, Spencer had an animal,
a sister in law had two dogs, and the Cavins
had their dogs. So it would have been, yeah, we
have two dogs, and so we have two dogs that
are not you know, they're good, but it's like, okay,
when you're suddenly mixing a lot of dogs on one
dog's home territory, you can have some trouble.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
But it all worked out and everybody was safe. And
turns out we ended up kind of at the edge
of an evacuation warning area, and we didn't know which
way the wind was going to blow, literally, And so
there was this, you know, that sense that everybody in
LA had and some still have and many still have,
that we may have to go now, and we then

(03:44):
would have to evacuate all of us somewhere else. There
were many people who evacuated to a place and then
that whole household had to evacuate again.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, and there were evacuation centers that had to close
down and relocate everyone who had shown up there. So, yeah,
it's people have been scrambling and almost everyone because a
lot of people were texting again just checking in on
us because they hear, oh my god, Pasadena, Alta, Dina,
that's where you know, Richard and Susan live. So they
were checking in. And almost everyone who checked in with
us turned out to be hosting evacue's people they knew friends,

(04:14):
you know, I checked in. So my podcast is Richard
Haddam's paranormal Bookshelf, and one of the sister podcasts on
the Astonishing Legends Network is Scared All the Time, and
so I, you know, the hosts of that show Live
in LA I checked in with them. One of them
was hosting their co host on the show because they
had to evacuate. Almost everyone we talked to their lives

(04:38):
are being impacted, either helping people or they are in
need of help. But thankfully, I feel like the number
of people who have died has not I don't know
it could. Let's just say this, it's terrible. It could
have been much worse.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Well, it's not done. I mean I think the latest
count is thirteen, but the amount of instruction that's very small.
I think it will go up because they you know,
there's a lot of destruction and a lot of people
that maybe couldn't get out. But at the same time,
given the amount of destruction, I think one of the
things we were talking about with our new family sitting

(05:18):
around making spaghetti, was that the priority these days, particularly
in southern California with fires, which we're used to, not
like this, but we're used to, is to protect life.
It's life first, then property. Yeah, and I think that's
what they did. I know there's been a lot of
talk about how terrible everything was, and everything is terrible,

(05:39):
but I actually think the response was incredible. I was,
you know, the firefighters were out there, the crews were
out there, people were helping each other. What I saw
on the ground and what we saw from all of
our neighbors and friends who were dealing with all of
this is a lot of people. Firefighters, police, everybody in
Los Angeles in the areas that I saw. We're trying

(05:59):
to help each other. Everybody was doing their job to
the fullest extent. How tired I was sitting in our
house just hosting people and checking in on people. There
was like a day Wednesday, maybe Thursday, where I was like,
I don't think I can keep doing this right, keep
checking for the evacuation notices, and we kept getting some
some more false alarms, some were not, but the phone

(06:22):
would go off and it's very stressful. And then I
thought of the firefighters out there on their second third night,
the pilots that were dropping and trying to drop in
very dangerous conditions and kind of holding the line literally
on a ridge that you know, saved countless of people.
And I was like, those people have to be really tired.

(06:44):
Those have to be people have to be so much
more tired than me, and they are going to keep going.
So I'm going to keep checking in, I'm going to
keep trying to share information about where you can donate.
But we live very close to Alta Dina, many of
our friends, I've worked and lived in Alta Dina and
it's very destroyed. And I know there's also the palisades

(07:04):
and all that stuff, but Altadena is literally close to
us and our hearts, and so I just want to say,
if you want to help, we'll put some stuff in
our description, some links for gofundmeis but also local charities
and organizations. And today again I went out to our
local school and the students were there with their families,
calling every family to make sure they were okay and

(07:28):
to find out where they were and what they needed.
And that was pretty amazing to me. I knew we
showed up to help, but I didn't know what we
would be doing. And immediately our son got on the
phone with his other friends and learned how to call
somebody and say, hey, this is you know, Dashel from Waverley,
and he had a little script. It was amazing. They

(07:49):
contacted every family to make sure they were okay, where
they were, and say we have whatever you need. We
can help you with and that's what businesses are doing here,
that's what people in their own homes are doing, and
that's what schools are doing. So there's been a lot
of loss, and I know there's a lot of chaos
and a lot of bad actors, but the majority of
people on the ground are helping, are looking for ways

(08:11):
to help, and are trying to make sure that everybody's okay.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
So yeah, and if you're listening and you do want
to help, and a lot of people have reached out
to us through our individual shows, and then also personally,
check the show notes for eighties TV Ladies for this
episode and there will be legitimate wayes where you can
give your money and be confident that you know it's
not one of the many scammers out there trying to
take advantage of the disaster by ripping you off. So

(08:39):
and we thank you for any help you can provide,
because now's the time, now's the time we need it.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
All right, Well, we're wishing you safe wins Low Wins,
and that we have a calmer week ahead and hoping
that you are okay and safe where you are, and
that you're taking care of yourself and others and being
amazed and ladies of the twenty first century. Eighties, my

(09:05):
hand so pretty eighties into the city, aid dream of gooding,
my god money. Many thanks for joining me Richard.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Oh yeah, okay, I thought you were dumb.