National Nurses United

Center in Torrance. "They were people's bibles, dictionaries, and personal documents. That was heartbreaking." Devlin and Perry, an RN in ambulatory surgery at Kaiser South Sacramento, were two of the 24 RNRN volunteers deployed over four weeks to provide care for people in Red Cross shelters, which housed everyone from families and seniors to couples and people with pets. There were infants, school-age children, and college stu- dents as well as the wheelchair bound and people who had been unhoused long before the fires. Some residents still had jobs and worked during the day, only returning to the shelter to sleep, noted Cathy Kennedy, a neonatal ICU nurse at Kaiser Roseville, whose deployment as team lead began on Feb. 1. "Others were still trying to figure out where they were going to be, what were their next steps," said Kennedy, who is also a president of National Nurses United. When Perry's first shift began on Jan. 20, hundreds of people were at the Pasadena Convention Center, sleeping on cots in the ballrooms—large rooms with 28-foot-high ceilings—and eating meals in one of the enormous exhibit halls. A separate room housed people with pets, and another served as an isolation ward for people with flu, Covid, and norovirus. The Westwood Recreation Center was much smaller than the Pasadena shelter, housing fewer than 200 people in a gymnasium when RNRN nurses arrived. The RNRN deployment launched with three nurses: Perry, Denise Vincenzi, an ER nurse at Kaiser Fremont, and Jane Sandoval, a retired ER nurse and the first team's lead. They began their first week with 12-hour shifts, but as more RNRN volunteers arrived, the shifts went down to 8 hours (7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.). The majority of RNRN nurses hailed from Northern California, but a few were from the southern part of the Golden State. Two nurses were from out of state: Jeanette Gregory, a retired nurse, traveled from Texas, and another from Louisiana. For the first three weeks, nurses staffed the shelters 24 hours a day; then, as the shelter population decreased, care shifted to 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., with nurses working either the morning or evening shift. RNRN deployments are typically about two weeks long, depend- ing on need and availability, giving some continuity of care for disaster survivors. Seeing a familiar face can provide some stability for people whose lives have been completely upended. RNs can get to know people after just a few days, as first-time RNRN volunteer James Cartmell can attest. Cartmell works in the ER at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, a coastal city nearly 90 miles south of Los Angeles. "I knew everyone in the shelter by the third day," said Cartmell, who was primarily at the Westwood Recreation Center during his J A N U A R Y | F E B R U A R Y | M A R C H 2 0 2 5 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 19 TAMMI BACHECKI OPPOSITE: RNRN nurse volunteers Vida Cheng, Pamela Knowlton, International Medical Corps physician Michelle Mouria, and RNRN nurses Denise Vincenzi, Mary-Jane Perry, and Patricia Guerrero Huertas. LEFT: Burned out car near mobile medical unit in Altadena

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