After the devastating fires going on in LA, a few graduates from Redwood High School share their experiences with evacuating from their colleges.
By: Greer Olson
On January 7th, multiple fires began to spread across the Los Angeles metropolitan area of California. The fires contaminated popular places like Malibu and the Hollywood Hills. It has displaced roughly 10 thousand people from their homes.
This includes many college students from community colleges and larger universities like UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). A couple of Redwood graduates in recent years have been affected by these fires after having to be evacuated from UCLA.
One of these students includes the class of 2024’s valedictorian and former Gigantea editor-in-chief, Donya Hassanshahi, ’24.
After being back in school for less than a week she says, “I know a lot of people are feeling disoriented.” Since the fires had started becoming a risk to UCLA students around Wednesday of that week, classes were set to be remote until the following Monday. They were later changed to be online for the next week after the evacuation order was set in place.
Hassanshahi expresses her initial concern about being remote for such a short amount of time. She remembers thinking, “Oh this is kind of weird because the fires hadn’t been contained.” Clearly, some other students were feeling the same way and began a petition to make classes remote. Over 4,000 people signed this petition, including Hassanshahi.
Besides the destruction these fires have caused in LA, so little information was being released at the time of it happening. This caused many people to be misinformed. Hassanshahi says, “I was really naive about it, thinking ‘Oh it’s okay, they’ll get it under control,’ and I found out the fires had doubled.”
Besides just Hassanshahi, Dani Palma, ’23, who is also attending UCLA, says that it was an almost apocalyptic feeling watching people evacuate.
After evacuating, classes were announced to be held remotely. Even being away from the fires, they continued to weigh down on students as they work from home. Palma expresses that being online isn’t any easier and that, “it significantly affects my learning.”
Along with Palma, another UCLA student, Lillie Wassem, ’23, says that being online feels like COVID again and explains how it tends to put her in a rut. Wassem says, “It was hard to get work done at home” resorting to going to a coffee shop to focus. Not to mention the inevitable stress students face from everything.
Wassem talks about how her family and friends made it easier to manage her feelings. She says that when school was a stressor she would make sure to break up her time and, “go grab a coffee or go to the gym to recenter myself.”
UCLA resumed classes on January 21st as the LA Fire Department had put out a statement saying they have the Sepulveda fire under control and will keep it from further damaging. The rest of the fires continue to be monitored.
Greer Olson
Greer Olson '27 is in her first year of journalism and isn't quite sure what she exactly wants to write about, but is interested in learning about the people of Redwood and what makes everyone individuals.
Tags: clubs & lifestyles, la fires, rangers, Redwood, redwood fires, redwood gigantea, redwood high school, redwood journalism, redwood rangers, rhs, rhs fires, visalia ca
