After work on Aug. 31, Madisyn Harlan headed to the Stead Airport.
There, she and 16 colleagues loaded frozen chickens, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, nonperishable foods and hygiene kits into the vehicles of people who’d come to restock their pantries and fridges, a few days after evacuation warnings were lifted in and near Stead.
The Hawk Fire, which started on Peavine Mountain on Aug. 22, tore into North Valleys neighborhoods, destroying 47 residential structures and damaging 14.
Harlan is the community relations lead at NV Energy, which donated $25,000 to the Food Bank of Northern Nevada after the fire. She and her team were responding to a request to distribute emergency food boxes at what the Food Bank called a “mobile harvest pop-up” event.
Throughout the event, people arrived in their vehicles, filled out intake forms, drove to the food line and stopped at several stations. The volunteers took turns packing fruits and veggies into bags, running bags and boxes to the cars, and tearing down boxes.
Harlan managed the front of the line near the protein sources. This was her first time volunteering at a mobile harvest event. She noticed that some drivers didn’t put their cars in park when it was time to pop open their trunks. The Food Bank team let her know that this was likely a sign that these drivers were new there, too.
“I think when you’re having that interaction at the front of the line, people can feel a little bit nervous, right?” Harlan said. “They’re a little—I don’t want to say ‘embarrassed,’ but I think there is that moment of vulnerability.”
Jocelyn Lantrip, the Food Bank’s director of marketing and communications, said people can be reluctant to ask for help, especially if they never have before. “It’s hard to do it. And seniors—we’ve seen a lot of seniors don’t want to ask for help, because they’re too proud or they think they’re taking from somebody else.”
Said Harlan: “You should not feel any shame or guilt or any kind of negative emotion about being here. These resources are here for you for a reason. There’s a critical need, and we want to make sure that need is met.”
According to a Washoe County Emergency Management spokesperson, 45,000 people were in a “go now” evacuation zone due to the Hawk Fire, and 45,000 more were in a “get set” zone. At the peak of the fire, approximately 60,000 customers were impacted by emergency de-energization outages, according to an NV Energy spokesperson. Most had power restored within one to seven hours—but some were without power for days.
Lantrip reported that many visitors to the pop-up event said they had lost all of their refrigerated and frozen food after these outages, and that others were dealing with a loss of income after to having evacuated.
Lantrip said the Food Bank purchased 186,036 pounds of food to support victims of several fires this summer. At the Aug. 31 event in Stead, the Food Bank distributed 15,295 pounds of food. The event was scheduled to last from 4 to 6 p.m., but Harlan and her volunteers stayed an extra hour. By 7 p.m., they had served 788 people.
“We knew we would have a big turnout,” Lantrip said. “We had been promoting it for a few days.”
Lantrip mentioned that the Food Bank of Northern Nevada team learned during the pandemic to prepare for special distributions like this.
“It is tough,” she said. “We learned that, in COVID, when we were doing those special distributions, sometimes you’re not ready for how many people show up, and then you’re running back to the warehouse to get more food or sending for more. We really don’t want to turn people away.”
At the Stead event, the Food Bank brought a semi-truck loaded with food. Although a few items ran out, Lantrip said there was still plenty of food to support everyone who showed up.
Harlan said the lines moved quickly, so she didn’t have time for deep conversations, but she did hear comments like, “We appreciate you all being here,” and, “You do such great work.”
“There were several vehicles with little cute kids popping their heads out and saying hi,” she said. “You’re not only seeing Mom or Dad or Grandma, but you’re seeing these kiddos in the back, and you just know that you’re supporting a family—a group of people who need you, and I mean, that’s really special.”
Harlan said volunteering at the pop-up was a positive experience for her colleagues, too. “knowing that there was something they could do to give back in a time when we all can feel so helpless, it gave us that sense of, ‘We can help,’ and here we are doing that work.”
Funding for this story was provided by the Institute for Nonprofit News and Google News Initiative’s Disaster Response Fund.