LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The first week of July was far from calm across the Las Vegas Valley.
The impending holiday weekend guaranteed it wouldn’t be quite with plenty of fireworks and festivities.
However, beyond the fun, there was a lot of work for first responders to handle.
Fire crews took on several house fires over the weekend, many of which were also aided by the American Red Cross of Southern Nevada.
Between Friday, July 4 and Saturday, the Red Cross responded to eight house fires to aid 24 people in total.
It’s an aspect of the nonprofit’s mission that Lowell Smith feels goes unrecognized by the general public.
“We will respond to displaced families not just for house fires but to any type of incident that makes their house or living situation uninhabitable,” Smith said.
“We will send a core of our team of volunteers to meet with them and assess what types of resources we could provide.”
Smith is the Community Disaster Program Manager for the Red Cross, coordinating education programming within the valley chapter as well as organizing disaster response for the largely volunteer based staff.
“When we have, let’s say, weather conditions like the extreme heat or red flag conditions, what we’ll do is go on standby alert and reach out to our volunteers to have a higher pool of volunteers on standby,” Smith said.
This weekend’s response pales in comparison to the first week of July 2024, where the Red Cross responded to 20 house fires to assist more than 120 Nevadans.
However, this weekend capped off what was already a chaotic week for first responders after strong storms caused valley wide power outages for tens of thousands of people.
“Resulted in us opening a shelter for our community because with a loss of power that whole independent living facility had no power or air conditioning,” Smith said.
“We have to be to a point where we’re proactive, not reactive, because if we don’t have that capacity the community suffers.”
The Red Cross did confirm one of the eight fires they responded to over the weekend was connected to fireworks, leading to a reminder for people to stick to the “Safe and Sane” fireworks legally sold in Clark County and leave the rest to the professionals.
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