Wildfires took everything but their food trucks. So they fed their community.

Washington Post

30-01-2025

LOS ANGELES — The Tropic Truck has set up shop on the outer edges of a strip center parking lot, just steps from an insurance agency, barbershop and other businesses that have yet to reopen after wildfires jumped from Eaton Canyon to Altadena, a foothills community in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Lauren and Nelson Saravia, owners of the Tropic Truck, know this area well. They've lived in Altadena for a decade in a cozy, three-bedroom home with a big backyard and an olive tree that wild parrots love to perch on. Before the pandemic, the Saravias used to organize a charity food truck event every Friday at the Grocery Outlet, and they've occasionally served tacos, quesadillas, loaded fries and other dishes from their Cali-Caribbean menu at the Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, donating proceeds to the school's PTA. Both the discount grocery and school are plainly visible from this Altadena parking lot on Lake Avenue. Both are also closed.
On this warm morning in late January — 17 days after the Eaton Fire erupted on Jan. 7 — Lauren and Nelson are working with World Central Kitchen to provide hot meals to anyone who wanders over to the makeshift table next to their truck. A sandwich board on a nearby sidewalk reads: Comida gratuita.
One person after another approaches the truck to pick up a container of saffron rice, ropa vieja, and sautéed broccoli and carrots. Some are residents who have lost homes. Some are firefighters still trying to contain the remaining blazes. Some are emergency responders and faith-based volunteers offering personal protective equipment or counseling services in the Grocery Outlet parking lot.
Lauren and her daughter, Isabella, are assisting WCK workers as they pass out apples and bottles of water. Isabella — known as Izzy to those close to her — is a 4-year-old with a radiant smile and a boundless appetite for ube ice cream. Izzy is along for the ride on this particular school day because, like some of the folks who arrive at the Tropic Truck, she and her parents are also victims of the Eaton Fire. They lost their home and everything in it, and Izzy lost the elementary school where she had just started her first year of transitional kindergarten.
As a couple, Lauren and Nelson, both 38, have agreed not to waste time grieving their losses. They're focused on the many tasks ahead to piece their lives back together. Yet sometimes in the middle of the night, Lauren can't help but review the long list of things that have turned to dust: the wedding dress she wore when she and Nelson were married in 2018. The locks of Izzy's hair that the couple had saved, mementos of their only child, born during the pandemic. The tile mosaics that Lauren's mom had handcrafted for them, including one of the Tropic Truck.
Then there are the intangible losses, the ones harder to see until they're abruptly taken from you.
'Your home is where you feel comfortable, where you feel safe, where you return to,' Lauren says. 'And when you don't have a place to return to, you feel all out of sorts. You don't feel safe.'
The Tropic Truck's vehicles, stored near their commissary kitchen in an industrial section east of downtown, were untouched by fires, which is a relief for Lauren and Nelson. Because one thing that numbs the pain is work. The couple's first event after the fires erupted was a five-course lunch the next day for a tech conference. Lauren tried to cancel it, but the organizers wanted to press on. The family — with Izzy in tow — had to rise early in the morning from their hotel room in Long Beach, some 45 minutes from the commissary, to prep. 'I was a mess,' Lauren remembers, 'but I still did it.' She was grateful for the distraction.
Two days later, on Jan. 10, Lauren received a call from Deputy Daniel Rafael with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The deputy at the Altadena station laid out the dire situation: Firefighters were battling blazes and searching for the dead in grueling 24-hour shifts. Roads were closed. Thousands of structures were destroyed, including restaurants. Many of those still standing had no power or gas.
'It was nearly impossible for anyone to bring any supplies and food due to the devastation,' Rafael told The Washington Post in an email. The first responders, in short, were hungry.
That's all Lauren and Nelson had to hear. They had already sent trucks to the Pacific Palisades after the fires, but now their own community needed them.
'I said, 'Well, what time is your dinner shift?'' Lauren remembers telling Rafael. ''We'll be there.''
A few days earlier, before the mountains around their neighborhood went up in smoke, Lauren and Nelson had returned home from work around 6 p.m. The Palisades Fire, which had erupted that morning, was all over the news, as flames consumed virtually everything in sight, regardless of celebrity status. But the couple was only vaguely aware of the situation in the Pacific Palisades and other coastal communities. Their heads had been buried in their work and daily chores.
That would change quickly.
The family was going through its evening routines — getting dinner on the table, giving Izzy a bath — when Lauren received a text from a friend at 7:01 p.m. She shared a screenshot with The Post.
'Are you guys close to the fire that just started on the mountain?' the friend texted. 'I saw it in the distance while driving home.'
'Oh no what fire,' Lauren responded.
'One just broke out above Pasadena/alta Dena,' the friend wrote back.
'Oh jeez it's close and with this wind,' Lauren texted.
The winds already sounded like 'thunder in the walls,' Lauren recalls. But the family saw nothing about an Eaton Canyon fire on the news. They had received no evacuation orders, and the only alert they could find was for a small area near the source of the fire. The Nextdoor app was their sole source of information. A next-door neighbor, a longtime Altadena resident who had lived through previous fires, told the Saravias they had nothing to worry about. He assured them there were protocols to keep the fire contained to the mountains.
For the next five hours, Lauren and Nelson checked for alerts and evacuation orders, unable to fall asleep as conditions worsened outside. They found nothing. Around 1 a.m., they saw fire on the mountain behind their home, perhaps a half-mile away. 'In a matter of minutes, it took over the whole top of the mountain,' Lauren says.
Then the power went out. Lauren and Nelson switched on their phone flashlights and began making snap decisions: They grabbed the laptop and a binder with important papers — marriage certificate, business licenses, birth certificates — and piled into the car. Lauren did some quick research and found a room at the Residence Inn in Long Beach, far from the smoke, heat and terror of Altadena.
'We just got in the car, and we drove as fast as we could out of there,' Lauren says. They could barely see through the smoke.
Nelson remembers that his wife had the presence of mind to grab one final thing before they left home: a branded chef's coat. She knew she would have to work the tech conference the next day.
'We ended up with two pairs of shirts, pants and a chef's coat,' Nelson recalls. That was all the clothing they had as they started life anew.
For days, as downed wires, unsound buildings and spot fires remained a threat, Lauren and Nelson were not allowed to enter their neighborhood to check on the fate of their rental house. But a neighbor sneaked onto their street and snapped some pictures, which confirmed the worst: Their home was gone, along with everything inside it, including the Christmas tree and the gifts the family had opened just two weeks earlier.
They lost everything, and the family had no renter's insurance to cover the losses. Lauren had checked into insurance multiple times, she says, and was always denied a policy. She figured it had to do with wildfires and the house's location. By her estimation, the family has suffered $150,000 in losses. 'But the sentimental value is obviously priceless,' she adds.
For days after the fire, Lauren, Nelson and Izzy had not been back to the house. Nelson wasn't ready to replace the happy memories of their house — the beautiful park across the street, the bright-green parrots singing in the trees, playtime with Izzy in the only home she has ever known — with the funereal ones that awaited on their street. But on Tuesday, Lauren decided she needed closure and asked her husband to join her. They donned masks and held something of a memorial for the ashen landscape that once was their home. They thanked the charred remains for making so many happy memories. They cried.
The ceremony made Lauren and Nelson feel better, though Nelson remains on guard to keep the negative memories at arm's length.
'I just like to focus on counting my blessings because if you focus on counting the things that you miss, you will never stop,' Nelson says. 'It's a loop that you will never be able to escape.'
'You just have to move on,' he adds. 'The show doesn't stop.'
His attitude is rooted in his childhood in El Salvador, where he was the only child of a single mother and schoolteacher. Nelson was about 14 when a magnitude-7.7 earthquake hit in January 2001, triggering a massive landslide in his hometown of Santa Tecla, just west of San Salvador. The twin disasters led to hundreds of deaths, including a few of Nelson's classmates. Everything inside the family home was ruined.
His memories remain vivid. He remembers the aftershocks and the fear they instilled. Their homes were concrete, and if a wall should collapse, it could crush anyone next to it, which is why Nelson and others in Santa Tecla slept on the streets for 10 days after the initial earthquake. He also remembers his mom volunteering to dig bodies out from the landslides.
The childhood traumas left a mark. Nelson is not surprised by tragedies. He expects them over the course of one's life. What matters is how you respond to them.
'I like to say that when you have fallen from terrible heights, just falling off the bed doesn't wake you up anymore,' Nelson says. 'You have seen worse things.'
Lauren and Nelson found their way to Los Angeles via vastly different paths. He came from Central America. She arrived from Florida, where her mother works as a nurse, and her father is a small-business owner, mostly retired. Lauren and Nelson were both drawn to Los Angeles's dining scene, where they would eventually meet at the Lock & Key, a self-described 'cocktail den' in the Koreatown neighborhood. Lauren was the general manager, Nelson an assistant general manager.
They started working on their own business in 2015, before officially launching the Tropic Truck in January 2016. They had one small rental truck and about $10,000 in seed money. In less than a decade, the couple has grown the business to three vehicles, 10 employees and a calendar packed with events across the Los Angeles area. They've thought about opening a restaurant but worried about the economics and limitations.
'We go to places where restaurants cannot go, and that's what we like,' Nelson says.
When the pandemic hit, the couple discovered another benefit of food trucks: They could keep operating while restaurants were shut down. The Tropic Truck had lost its office and events gigs, but Lauren and Nelson were allowed to set up a truck outside the Grocery Outlet on Lake Avenue. They placed tables and chairs in the parking lot around the truck. Altadena residents came out and supported them. It's how the Saravias survived the pandemic, and they wouldn't forget it.
The couple has received even more support as word spread about the fire that consumed their home. Friends have bought them clothes, cups, plates, cleaning supplies and, of course, lots of toys to replace the ones that Izzy lost. The co-owner of a fellow truck launched a GoFundMe campaign for the family, generating nearly $9,000, mostly from small donations from others in L.A.'s robust food truck scene.
Once Matt Geller found out that Lauren and Nelson were covering their own costs to feed first responders in Altadena, he put a halt to it. Geller is the co-founder and chief executive of Best Food Trucks, a booking and ordering platform for mobile food vendors around the country. He secured funds to cover their costs, including contributions from a famous L.A. musician who wants to remain anonymous.
'Whatever you need,' Geller remembers telling the couple, 'we'll pay it.'
The money provided by Best Food Trucks or World Central Kitchen doesn't approach the kind of cash the Tropic Truck can make from catering events, which still account for about 30 percent of the couple's business. But at around $12 a meal, the money is enough to keep their team employed — such as Exequiel Balladares and Michelle Salazar, the staffers working inside the Tropic Truck at the strip center parking lot. The employees, Nelson says, have been put in an awkward position since the Eaton Fire: Despite their employers' tragedy, they still need the work to pay bills.
'They don't know how to express it to me,' Nelson says. 'They're sad that we lost our home, but they're also happy that they're able to work.'
The money also helps Lauren and Nelson feed those who now inhabit their community, such as the trio of firefighters who approached the Tropic Truck on a break from their shift in Altadena. They were hesitant to talk about their work until they learned the details of Lauren and Nelson's home life — and how they've been feeding first responders despite the heavy losses. The firefighters' demeanor softened like butter.
'This community has been amazing,' said Yang Xiong, a firefighter with Cal Fire/Butte County Fire Department. The men said they've seen nothing like the support they've received in Altadena.
Then there are residents such as Atul Deshpande, who was on vacation in India when the Eaton Fire broke out. He returned to his neighborhood to check the condition of his home on East Calaveras Street. It was still standing, he said, but smoke and ash had entered the structure. As he stood there, his meal from the Tropic Truck in hand, Deshpande contemplated the future.
'Altadena is strong,' he said. 'We will rebuild.'
Lauren and Nelson are not as motivated to re-create the life they had in Altadena. They want to stay in the area, but they're more interested in creating a new story, different from their old one but equally rich in community. They've already moved into an apartment in the La Crescenta-Montrose area, about 15 minutes from their former neighborhood. They've begun the process of moving on, even if Izzy isn't quite on board yet. The youngest Saravia sometimes looks out the window of her new abode.
'My daughter,' said Lauren, 'she's staring at the mountains. I'm like, 'What are you doing?' … And she said, 'I'm just looking at home.''