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On the evening of January 7, 2025, with the Palisades Fire already raging on the other side of Los Angeles County, the Eaton Fire began in Altadena, California.
Captains Nick and Becky Helms, corps officers (pastors) for The Salvation Army in Pasadena, had a direct view of the very start of the horrifying fire from the front windows of their home.
Evacuating within minutes, the Helms and their children were in the thick of the devastation, unsure if their home would survive. But it wasn’t long before they had to change gears—to service. Working with their corps members to head a robust relief effort, the Helms supported victims of the fire with food, clothing, shelter, and emotional and spiritual support.
Below is a transcript of the video edited for readability.
News Reports: We’re following a second fire burning right now in Los Angeles County. This is north of Pasadena. The Eaton Fire started around 6:30pm. It has quickly exploded into more than 200 acres. So many resources are moved over to Pacific Palisades. What if this one continues to increase rapidly? That is a major catastrophe waiting to happen.
Captain Nick Helms: About 6:20pm, we’d just finished eating dinner, I was doing the dishes, and our son came out of his room, and he said, “Mom, Dad, there’s a fire on the hill right behind our house.”
And so then Becky went out to see, and she saw it was not very big yet, but she came back in, she said, “Nick, we need to start getting ready to get out of here.”
Captain Becky Helms: And I ran back out, and by that time, it had tripled in size.
Cops were coming down yelling, like, get out. So we got our important documents and had the clothes on our backs, and we left. Our kids were crying. They were so scared.
As we drove away, I said to our kids, if everything is gone when we come back, it’s okay, because we have each other. And I thought we were gonna come back to something like this.
Captain Nick Helms: We came back the next day. At that point, we weren’t out of the woods. The fire was still going really strong.
They had 0% containment on it for days after the fire started. And we were just driving through these streets that we’re looking at now, and houses were still just engulfed in flames.
There’s downed power poles and trees that had just fallen in the middle of the street. And there wasn’t enough firefighters to get to everything.
Captain Becky Helms: We just kind of drove around, handed out masks, water bottles, prayed, hugged, cried.
We were visiting lots of our corps members and checking in on them. Some of our members lost everything.
Captain Nick Helms: We had corps members who didn’t lose their homes, but, you know, it’s… they know so many people who have lost their homes, and so that is weighing on people.
It’s the sense of community that’s there. We love people, and we don’t want to see other people hurting. But to know that they’ve lost everything is just devastating.
Captain Becky Helms: It’s not like a typical disaster response for us because we are also still in the midst of it, as our family is displaced as well. It allows us to connect, it allows us to grieve together, and it allows us to also have hope together.
Captain Nick Helms: Our family’s been incredibly blessed. We’re safe, we’re alive. Our house is fine. But we still feel really deeply with our community, because we shared that experience with them.
I think it’s really helped us to be able to empathize with the people who’ve come through our doors, and to be able to sit and talk with them and share, “Hey, yeah, that was a really scary thing that happened to all of us that night.”
It gives us an insight and a way to be able to listen to people and to share with them in a way that others won’t be able to do.
We got this all set up at the end of last week, which was about the second week after the fire. We’ve got a nice clothing shop here for the people who have been affected by the fires.
This is a simple way that we’re just trying to come through for our community and say, hey, you know, in the short term, right now, this is how we can help you. We gotta be there for each other. And I’ve seen that in the community. So many people have shown up to help and people want to help.
We have been telling everybody to come and join us for worship at our church on Sunday mornings, because that’s truly a place where we share in our faith and share in our suffering and share in all of the different things that we feel as human beings.
Captain Becky Helms: We’re in it for the long haul. I don’t quite know what that will look like a year from now, but what I do know is we will be doing something, three months down the road, six months down the road, years down the road, The Salvation Army will still be there.
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