Couples and vendors affected by the devastating California wildfires are finding an outpouring of community support.
Alexandra Riley wouldn’t have gone ahead with her Jan. 11 wedding if it hadn’t been for her mother, Bev Lowe. The Los Angeles wildfires were raging. Santa Rosa Valley, Calif., where she planned to marry Lucas Warrer Nilsson, a fellow soccer player, was out of the danger zone, but many of the couple’s 120 guests were still in it.
“My mom took all my hesitation and worry and doubt and completely brushed it aside,” said Ms. Riley, who has played in five World Cups. It was a show of fortitude that Ms. Riley, 37, of Canoga Park, Calif., had come to expect from her mother.
Those who don’t know Ms. Lowe might have been surprised by the enthusiasm she and her husband, John Riley, mustered for their daughter’s wedding: Five days before the event, their Pacific Palisades home of 41 years burned to the ground.
As Los Angeles figures out the long and uncertain recovery from the destructive fires, the fortitude of couples and the local professionals who help them put on weddings has been on display, too. Jessica Carrillo, the executive producer and creative director of Art & Soul Events, a Los Angeles wedding planning and event design company, thinks there’s a uniquely Los Angeles quality to the acts of generosity and compassion she’s seen in recent weeks.
“We’re a networking, relationship-building city here,” she said. Since the fires broke out, a Facebook group, LA Wedding Vendors & Creatives, for colleagues that she started in 2015 has been a hotbed of links, some to GoFundMe campaigns for florists who lost their homes or wedding photographers whose cameras have burned, others to venues that have agreed to host weddings displaced by the fires.
Ariel Nunez, a Malibu wedding photographer, has seen colleagues offer to fill in at shoots and open their studios to those who need a place to charge batteries. Keeping tabs on their generosity has given her something to focus on during her husband’s deployments as a firefighter with the Los Angeles Fire Department. “It’s been incredible to see how the community has risen up,” she said.
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