One day, you’re messaging the other 50 or so people in your WhatsApp pickleball group, coordinating who’s going to play that night.
The next day, you’re messaging your WhatsApp pickleball group warning of the raging firestorm.
And six months – or 180-some days – after that? You’re messaging your old pickleball pals and a few thousand new friends on a Discord server. It’s the virtual hub for the 5,000-member Eaton Fire Survivors Network, a community bound by the devastating wildfire that tore through Altadena in January.
But before you transport back to the nightmarish night it began, a note about pickleball: The cool thing about it – the great thing, the super-duper clutch thing, it turns out – is how many cooks there are in the kitchen.
As sports go, it’s more cocktail party than tennis sit-down, the tables turning over frequently as players spend time circulating while they wait to pop back onto the court for friendly competition against opponents who range widely in backgrounds, work, ages, etc.
And what a difference that made on Jan. 7. What a win, that there was a WhatsApp group catering to a broad cross-section of Altadenans.
It was Kathy Aicher, part of the enthusiastic pickleball contingent at Altadena Town and Country Club, who sounded the alarm via the WhatsApp group.
“At 6:15 p.m., my neighbor next door said, ‘Have you heard about the fire?’” Aicher said. “I said, ‘I heard maybe a house caught fire a few blocks away – oh, wait, do you know them?’ And she said, ‘No, Kathy. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m in your driveway. You need to come to the front door.’
“So I walk across my living room and I happen to have a big window that faces the mountains – I went, ‘Oh my God, the mountain’s already on fire.’”
As Aicher and her mother hurried to collect their things, Aicher paused, taking time to think about how to spread the word: “I remember, I sat on my bed and I thought, ‘I need to tell my friends what is going on. But I don’t have the time to individually message …’
“Oh, my God, I’ll go into the WhatsApp. That’s perfect.”
She wrote: Everyone look up there’s a vegetation fire on Canyon Close. So if you’re anywhere near Eaton Canyon, I’d evacuate. We are.
‘Saved dozens if not hundreds of lives’
Joy Chen – a pickleball player who’s now one of the moderators and driving forces behind the Discord server into which the WhatsApp group evolved – said she learned about the fire first from Kathy’s message.
“I played tennis,” Chen said, “and you might have a ladies’ game that goes every week. So you have four people in that tennis group … Or if you’re a member of a softball team, you have the same 20 people year after the year, which is great. But it’s a different thing, right?
“You don’t have 50-people groups. What other sport is like that? And pickleball, you have that diversity of ages, genders, everything.”
So when Aicher rang the alarm, word traveled fast – faster than it did through official channels, or even via local media, focused as we were on the Palisades Fire and with coverage being interrupted by internet and power outages.
But Aicher’s message got through: This wasn’t a pickle, this was a full-fledged disaster, unfolding with unfathomable fury.
6:46 PM – Are they already asking you to evacuate?
6:46 PM – Kathy: No but all the neighbors are
6:46 PM – Wow! Stay safe. This is so scary.
6:47 PM – Kathy: The smoke is so thick… traffic is unbelievable
Soon, it wasn’t only Kathy communicating via the pickleball group, others began chiming in. Just like that, “the WhatsApp group completely changed,” Chen said.
6:54 PM – Hey guys – up here in Eaton Canyon … the fire is significant – if you are up here would encourage you to leave.
7:03 PM – Can anybody let us know what they’re saying on the news? We don’t have power Internet. It’s all gone down.
7:06 PM – Now saying 20 acres, evacuations on the pasadena side. Altadena and crescent is where it is burning.
7:08 PM – It’s our hillside. Just west of us. Just did the frantic 5 min evacuation it’s bad
“Kathy actually probably saved dozens if not hundreds of lives,” said Hunt Turner, another avid pickleball player who returned home the next day to fight the fire with his neighbors, saving several houses and the 1964 Porsche that’s been in the family for decades — a daring, determined feat that was covered by the Wall Street Journal.
He had to forfeit a series of pickleball games in a tournament that day, each defeat triggering an automated text message to his phone, letting him know he’d lost again and reminding him of what he’d rather be doing.
“Kathy is a natural leader when it comes to pickleball, inviting and welcoming people to join our WhatsApp group, ‘Hey, we play on Mondays,’ that whole thing,” Turner said. “She’s warm and welcoming – with a really mean lob. And she loves that human connection as much as anyone, so it’s natural she was one of the first to respond.”
7:11 PM – You may have saved our lives.
7:47 PM – Evac’d. Thanks for the heads up Kathy
7:49 PM – We are out too.
8:11 PM – FYI. We were told to evacuate. Fortunately, we had already left when the message came. Thank you, Kathy!!
Aicher swats away the suggestion she saved lives.
“No, I definitely didn’t do that,” she said. “What I did do was give people extra time if they wanted or needed it, to get more stuff out, because as we found out, within 40 hours, the looting got so bad, they locked the neighborhood down so you couldn’t get back in … I didn’t save anybody, but maybe some stuff.”
Harmony on Discord
The Eaton Fire, as you know, burned more than 14,000 acres and destroyed more than 9,400 structures – including the country club where these pickleball pals gathered so often.
About a quarter of the club’s clientele lost homes, Chen said, pickleball players included.
Those who didn’t have had other issues, many of them also needed to find temporary housing, or to deal with smoke damage and toxins, uncooperative insurance companies, with guilt.
And everyone was going to face so many of the same pressing questions at the same time.
“By Wednesday at noon,” Chen said, “the country club was burned down. The pickleball courts were inaccessible. Half of our houses were gone. It was clear that we were in this new phase of this WhatsApp group. And so I renamed it the Eaton Fire Info and Resources Hub.”
“The word got out really quick,” said Colleen Bates, a retired book publisher and tennis player who lost her home. “Joy and [co-organizer] Carina Walker pivoted very quickly… and just as an information resource, I know for me, it helped me cope with the trauma.”
Said Chen: “We had this motto, ‘Leave no neighbor behind.’ We wanted people to join. But then every time somebody joined, they were like, ‘Hi, I’m here. What did I miss?’ ‘Well, you missed everything.’”
Within a few months, the Eaton Fire Survivors Network moved to a Discord server because WhatsApp was overwhelmed by the influx of hundreds and then thousands of Altadenans desperate for up-to-date intel.
And as the mode and method of sharing information evolved, so did people’s needs.
At first, the most urgent issue was housing, as well as fending off potential looters; one WhatsApp suggestion at the time: Have Joy fire serves at their heads!
Six months later, Chen – formerly a deputy mayor of Los Angeles – is, in fact, very much on the offensive.
She’s harnessed the collective strength of the network to advocate for people fighting with their insurance carriers. She’s held news conferences like this week’s, attended by several hundred people, including, State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, and she’s kept the pressure on the right people, like California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara.
And the Discord is an active, information-rich hub, with more than 70 dedicated channels offering recourses on everything from cleanup and construction to remediation and renters, from taxes and attorneys, to taking care of kids. Anything anyone in this terrible predicament might need – much of it sourced by the experiences of others in the same crowded boat.
Bates said the network helped her figure out which hoops to jump through – in person, and not online, it turned out – to complete the “right of entry” form, needed to have debris removed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“We learned from each other’s mistakes and experiences,” she said. “You can glean good information from that.”
Typical pickleball behavior: Happy to have you, happy to have you learn.
“When people started joining the group, nobody cared,” Turner said. “If Peter or Sally or Samir needed info, it was like someone showing up to the pickleball community, ‘Nice to meet you, forehand or backhand?’
“I don’t know if it would have worked in a different community; the pickleball community in general is a very welcoming community.”
A community that, in Altadena, has migrated back to the original WhatsApp group — to schedule pickleball play.