West Ashley community rises up to assist families impacted by Palms Apartment fire
by Jenny Peterson | Contributing Writer
It’s been about a month since an early-morning fire tore through The Palms, a West Ashely apartment complex on Feb. 7, destroying five buildings, severely damaging two other buildings and displacing 179 people.
Within hours of the fire, the West Ashley community answered the call to help their neighbors who had lost everything.
A massive donation drive was organized by non-profit community organization West Ashley Connects and Teresa Tidestrom, the organization’s founder and director, who happens to lives at The Palms in a building that was spared from the fire.
“Within 48 hours, we had way more donations than we needed,” said Kenneth Marolda, treasurer for West Ashley Connects, who volunteers at the donation intake center. “The Palms office said they’d take donations. They very quickly had way more than they could possibly handle. Two businesses, West Ashley Tool & Rental off Wappoo Road and Software Solutions & Designs behind Barnes & Noble, offered to be donation centers. They quickly found themselves overwhelmed with the amount that they had. Resident Kim Wood filled her tour bus and then a pod company donated four pods and set them up at the different locations.”
Donations poured in for all categories: clothing, toiletries, furniture, gift cards, small household electronics, dog food, diapers, blankets, bedding and more.
Tidestrom knows the owner of the Citadel Mall who offered an empty 10,000-square-foot space where donations could be organized and arranged. Volunteers from the community came out in droves to help categorize donations and sort by type and size.
“The first few days was really tough and displaced residents were understandably very upset. Generally the mood seems to be going upward as people are stabilizing their lives a little bit,” Marolda said. “There have been a couple of residents who have found houses and then came back to volunteer here because they were just so impressed with the outpouring of support. And they come for a couple hours here and there and help sort clothes or help other people go shopping for what they need.”
One displaced resident came to the donation center on a Thursday morning looking for a tablet or laptop. She feels lucky that she had renter’s insurance which is paying for a room at an extended-stay motel. She was looking for a laptop in order to type out all the items in her apartment that were destroyed for her insurance claim.
“I got out with my purse and my cat and my pajamas,” she said. “I need everything.”
She has signed a lease on a nearby townhome that will be ready to move into soon, but the experience has left her traumatized.
“The firemen banged on our doors and told us, ‘get out now—just get out.’ They saved our lives, all of our lives. Without the firemen responding in four minutes, we’d all be dead. It was horrific as it was, but it could have been much worse. Things are things. And over time you can replace them, but not people,” she said. “And the outpouring of love from a community like this, I can’t believe that half my neighbors haven’t even been here. Like, you need everything, please just go. They’re giving it to you. They’re begging you to take it. Don’t feel embarrassed and ashamed. My neighbor has a baby and she’s too proud to come in here and get diapers. So, I’m going to probably grab her some diapers and just say they’re from me.”
Marolda said displaced residents can request special items they need and West Ashley Connects will try and find it or the organization can buy items with its own donation funds.
“One gentleman needed a cane, so we got him a cane. Another person needed a toaster. Those things may not necessarily have been donated, but dryer sheets or miscellaneous things that just weren’t here, we were able to use donated funds to get those items,” Marolda said.
In addition to collecting household items, West Ashley Connects is also assisting residents with finding new places to live by helping cover move-in costs, like deposits. The Palms refunded all the displaced residents’ deposits if they had paid one when moving in and returned their February rent.
Right now, many of the residents are staying in hotels or temporarily with friends while looking for a new home.
“Finding new housing has been the biggest obstacle for them. They can’t find anything that’s within the same price range as the Palms,” Marolda said. “We can do some aid for the security deposits for new apartments, furniture, whatever they need.”
West Ashley restaurants, including Home Team BBQ, Verde, and Frothy Beard Brewing Company held fundraising nights to donate a portion of sales to support the victims of the fire.
Home Team BBQ held a percentage night, where 25 percent of sales at two locations were donated to West Ashley Connects. The restaurant presented a check for $5,317 to the organization and a second check for $1,000 from a generous customer. Home Team BBQ also gave gift certificates to displaced residents.
Jamie Perillo, service director for Home Team BBQ, happens to be a resident of The Palms. Her apartment was spared from the flames.
“It hit close to home—I’m a building away from where the fire was. It’s a blessing to work for a accompany like Home Team that does so much for our community and have the leaders of that company say, ‘These are the people wo have been supporting us for 15 or 16 years and what can we do to help them?’”
Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Ashley also had a donation drive for clothing and household items and merged with The Citadel’s donation location.
The West Ashley Connects Facebook group posts calls for donations as needed (they are no longer accepting clothing) and calls for volunteers. They will also update the hours for the Citadel Mall donation center site.
With the intake center full of clothing, toiletries and other items—and four pods filled with donations waiting to be sorted—The Citadel Mall donation location has grown to support additional disaster relief efforts.
“There was a Summerville apartment fire and the Red Cross asked those people to come here because we’d already set all of this up and we had more than we needed. That affected seven households and 12 individuals,” Marolda said. “There was another house fire in Cainhoy and the Red Cross did the same thing.”
As former residents of The Palms wait on the investigation to determine what started the fire—the Charleston Fire Department requested agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives come in and assist—they are supporting one another in group chats and text threads, new relationships created out of tragedy.
“I didn’t know Teresa Tidestrom before; even though we are neighbors, I met her because of this,” Perillo said.
Tidestrom said she owes the success of the donation drive to the community.
“I may have had the idea to do (the donation drive) based on being a first responder, having the non-profit, and being a resident of The Palms. But the community stepped up in such a big way,” she said. “It’s been incredible.”
West Ashley community rises up to assist families impacted by Palms Apartment fire
by Jenny Peterson | Contributing Writer
