An Outpouring of Kindness Fills Town as Quickly as Fast-Moving Fire Empties It

The handful of volunteers remaining at the cavernous Santa Fe Food Depot had worked themselves to exhaustion by 3 a.m. Friday. As they looked around for a place to nap for a few hours, yet another tractor-trailer truck arrived filled with donated food.

“Many of us had been up for three days,” said Christy Torricelli, executive director of the food bank. Bordering on desperation, she asked a local television station to broadcast an appeal for help, uncertain how many people would be watching at that hour.

“Within 15 minutes we had more than 20 volunteers,” Torricelli said, her voice catching with emotion. “You wouldn’t believe it. We had that truck unloaded in half an hour. . . . The community has really touched my heart.”

For all the loss, fear and drama, the flames that have destroyed more than 250 homes in Los Alamos have also forged a sense of community that has caught many people here by surprise.

While relations have never been strained, there has long been a sense of division here, akin to the “town and gown” tensions in some college towns. There are the mostly upscale people on “the hill,” as Los Alamos is called locally, and there is everyone else.

“People love to hate Los Alamos,” said Deb Carlson, who lives south of Santa Fe but works for the Los Alamos National Laboratory through an environmental engineering contractor.

In recent days, though, such local rivalries have dissipated. More than 750,000 pounds of food have been donated to the Food Depot alone. At the American Red Cross shelters, cots go largely unused as evacuees take advantage of fire-sale rates at local hotels or move into spare rooms in friends’ houses. Radio stations oversee donation drives, while churches and businesses offer help.

It is, local residents say, the measurable effects of a community coming together and of individual acts merging into an atmosphere of goodwill.

In some cases, people opened their houses to strangers. One caller to an Albuquerque radio station offered space in his eight-bedroom home to anyone who called.

Carlson opened her own doors to the families of her boss and a co-worker, a total of nine house guests before her boss and his wife decided to take their two children to Denver until the fires settled down.

John and Katie Tauxe, though, are camped out in one of Carlson’s bedrooms with their three children and could remain there for as long as a week.

‘I Just Want to Go Home’

After the adrenaline-fueled flight from Los Alamos on Wednesday to a friend’s house in White Rock and the evacuation to Santa Fe seven hours later, Katie Tauxe said Friday morning that the family was just beginning to relax and think about what to do next.

“I just want to go home,” she said.

In nearby Espanola, a working-class town in the shadow of the prestige and wealth of Los Alamos, residents also rallied to help, from sheltering animals to deploying Boy Scouts to help unload supplies trucked in for fire crews.

Troop leader Jeff Schofield took a squad of three eager Boy Scouts to Los Alamos on Thursday and Friday to help unload supplies. They waited an hour at a service station before state police would let them into town.

“They have plenty of people volunteering to pack up the trucks but no one to help when they arrive, since the place is still sealed off,” said Schofield, who owns an auto repair shop in Espanola.

His son, Ephraim, one of the three Scouts who helped, said that his arms were still aching from hauling boxes of food and jugs of water all day Thursday. But the wiry seventh-grader insisted he was ready for more.

“We’re Boy Scouts, so we’re just trying to do what we can for people,” he said, proudly wearing his Scout uniform and a chest-full of merit badges.

Communities Come Together

The elder Schofield said that many of Espanola’s residents pitched in, despite the socioeconomic distance between them and “the hill.”

It’s hard, he said, not to reach out to someone who just lost everything.

“People tend to think that everyone who works for the laboratory is rich, so certainly there is some jealousy,” said Schofield. “But they also realize the lab is kind of our lifeline. We all depend on the lab, directly or indirectly.”

On Friday night, Espanola transformed its softball fields on the western edge of town into a full scale relief center for weary firefighters. Along with bushels of food, the crews were greeted with soft bedrolls, showers and a team of massage therapists.

Kelly Koehler-Johnson, a massage therapist from Santa Fe, recruited a team of fellow professionals to rub down weary muscles.

“I was working on a client [Thursday] when it hit me. It’s something I just decided I should do,” said Koehler-Johnson, who moved to Santa Fe from Houston less than two months ago. “These people are exhausted. They’re stressed out. They need this.”

Some volunteers had more incentive than others.

Donning a bright red jail jumpsuit with Espanola Detention Center emblazoned on the back, Mike Pacheco, 35, carried boxes of food to waiting vans Friday afternoon. Pacheco, who is serving 90 days for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license, said that he is happy to help out--and escape the dreary confines of a jail cell.

“I mean, why not?” he said. “Maybe I’ll even get some good time for this and cut my time in half.”

Dozens of others in town have called City Hall to offer their homes to displaced families, pets and livestock--far more than is needed.

Theresa Johnson made the most generous offer: 10 people, 10 dogs, 10 horses.

“What I had hoped to do was take in a family and their pets--so they weren’t stressed by being forced to separate from their pets,” said Johnson, owner of a small Espanola cigarette shop, the Smoke House.

Up on the hill, Catherine Nelson returned to work Friday morning as general manager of the Holiday Inn, reopening the hotel to house fire crews. Two days earlier, her own home in the northern part of town went up in flames, destroying virtually everything she and her three children owned.

“So now I’m a single mom with three kids and no place to live,” she said. She hasn’t had time to contemplate a next step. Her ex-husband’s house in Los Alamos survived the fire, and he and the children are waiting out the evacuation at a friend’s bed-and-breakfast about 10 miles away.

For now, Nelson is staying alone at the hotel. She doesn’t know where she and her children will live.

“Housing is so limited up here as it is,” she said. “With all those families burned out, where’s everybody going to go?”

Her bigger concern, though, is disruption to the lives of her children, ages 8 to 13. All their toys and possessions are gone. So are the rhythms of youth.

“We had a soccer tournament this weekend. My daughter is supposed to be in a play. There’s supposed to be a dance tonight at the middle school. All these things have been taken away from them. They don’t know where their friends are. It really ripples through their lives.”