Talk about a baptism by fire.
The Amazon Disaster Relief California Wildfire Hub, based in an Inland Empire warehouse, opened less than six months before the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires killed 31 and destroyed thousands of homes in Southern California.
Helping Eaton and Palisades victims fell in the wheelhouse of the hub, one of two in the U.S. — the other one is in Atlanta — and 15 worldwide that have helped the mega-retailer since 2017 donate more than 26 million relief items to more than 200 disaster sites around the globe.
But the fires’ scale — and the relief gaps they revealed — gave Amazon valuable lessons in how to help when disaster strikes — something expected to happen more often as climate change sets the stage for more California wildfires.
“The Eaton and Palisades fires showed us how severe and ravaging fires can now be on the West Coast or anywhere in the world,” Bettina Stix, founder of Amazon’s disaster relief program and head of Amazon Community Impact, said during a Wednesday, May 20, visit to the Beaumont hub.
As she spoke, two wildfires burned within a 45-minute drive from the hub. The Bain fire in Jurupa Valley and Verona fire near Homeland and Hemet, both in Riverside County, forced evacuations as firefighters worked to stop the blazes from spreading.
Opened in 2024, the hub occupies a few rows of an 860,000-square-foot warehouse just off the 10 Freeway, about 25 miles from Amazon’s air hub at San Bernardino International Airport and roughly 40 miles from Ontario International Airport.
Amazon chose that location because it’s close, but not too close, to where wildfires often erupt. The same logic put Amazon’s other U.S. disaster hub in Atlanta, not far from hurricane-stricken zones.
Normally, the warehouse hums with commerce, part of a complex logistics chain connecting online-ordered goods to customers’ doorsteps. During a disaster, that same process delivers pre-packaged pallets of emergency supplies for free to afflicted areas without disrupting the business end.
At first, the hub focused on products “specifically built for wildfires,” said Sam Shockley, Amazon’s senior product manager for disaster relief. The Eaton and Palisades fires, she said, highlighted the need not just for that gear, but for everyday supplies such as diapers and hygiene kits.
“We also heard loud and clear that we missed some products that were essential after fires” like air purifiers, Shockley said. “We should have (air purifiers) in our hub so that we can respond faster and not have to pull product from shelves, put it on a pallet and send it out.”
Besides adding new supplies, Amazon also works with first responders, nonprofit groups and others to improve what it has in stock. For example, Shockley said the company now donates lip balm that can handle triple-digit temperatures without melting.
Amazon also upgraded firefighter boots and respirator masks based on feedback, Shockley added.
Another in-demand post-disaster product is mesh filters such as those used by hobbyists to prospect for gold. The filters — wire grids in wooden squares — are used by the public to sift through wildfire debris in what remains of a home to find wedding rings and other valuables, Stix and Shockley said.
Besides new and improved disaster relief products, there’s more of them.
In January, Amazon announced that it tripled the amount of supplies in the Beaumont hub, which now has more than 20,000 wildfire relief items and about 200,000 general relief items.
“Prepositioning supplies close to high-risk areas means we can respond in hours, not days,” Abe Diaz, Amazon’s head of disaster relief, said in a news release.
“After seeing the devastation in L.A., we listened and learned, scaling our California hub with more volume, more variety, and specialized equipment like masks and air filters to better support first responders and the communities they protect.”
The hub doesn’t just respond to wildfires.
It sent supplies to western Alaska last year after Typhoon Halong devastated coastal villages.
With wildfire-stricken areas often hit by flooding and mudslides, Shockley said Amazon also is focused on supplying “muck and gut” kits to help homeowners rip out damaged drywall before mold sets in.
The hub changed the way it handles donations, going from a more manual system to one that dynamically tracks and processes supplies to ship them out quicker, said Raquel Ward, site lead at the Beaumont warehouse.
Sending relief to people in need is a great morale booster, Ward added.
“It’s a wonderful feeling. Our associates love it. Our managers love it,” she said. “(It’s) a great sense of just bringing us back to our humanity … It just feels great as a human being to be able to be a part of that.”