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Anawalt Lumber, located in Pacific Palisades, California, has persevered with resilience after facing unimaginable hardship in recent months.
The Palisades Anawalt Lumber store was in the path of the devastating wildfires that tore through multiple highly populated areas in Southern California in January.
The day the fires raged through the Palisades, general manager Rosie Maravilla had no idea if her store had survived the inferno. She lost her store’s camera view around 11:30 p.m. the night of the devastation.
“At that point, we still didn’t know if our store made it,” Maravilla says. “I was sure that our store was gone.”
Maravilla says her husband, a former LAPD officer, reached out to other officers who drove by the store after the fires to confirm it was still standing.
The Anawalt Lumber store shares a parking lot with three other businesses, including a Ralph’s grocery store, which was completely burned to the ground. The Anawalt store wasn’t destroyed, but it wasn’t left unscathed either.
“We keep pallets of soil and concrete outside our store. There were embers that flew off of the trees in the parking lot and those embers caught our soils and concrete on fire,” says Maravilla.
The Anawalt store was closed for three weeks following the disaster. A week after the fires, a few employees were allowed back into the store with Maravilla to start cleaning from the damage.
While the store was closed, the Anawalt Lumber corporate location employed the Palisades team.
“The company was nice enough to employ us at our corporate store when we were closed,” Maravilla says. “The Anawalt family kept us employed.”
Eventually, the whole team was allowed back into the store to clean up and welcome the community back, although many residents and former customers had to relocate after the disaster, Maravilla says.
“We don’t see a lot of friendly faces or customers from before, unfortunately, because whether their house is still going through the cleanup phase or not, they’re still not back in their homes,” Maravilla says. “For many of the customers, even though their home survived, their community is gone. Whether they’re coming back or not, I don’t think they’re in a hurry to move back.”
The store saw slow business in the weeks following the fires. Today, the store’s product offerings have pivoted, catering to disaster relief efforts in the area.
“We’re selling items that we weren’t used to selling, like five gallons of hydraulic fluid. We’re selling a lot of gas cans, a lot of respirators, a lot of coveralls—things that we didn’t use to sell an abundance of,” Maravilla says.
In the face of tragedy, the close-knit Anawalt team has come together.
“We are a small store and we’re all very close, and I think we’ve all rallied together,” Maravilla says. “Those of us who have stuck it out, who did not leave due to the fire, I think we’ll all be around for a while.”
Although the community is not what it used to be, Maravilla is hopeful about the future. Selling to contractors working on the rebuilding process is Anawalt’s main focus, and business in this area is growing every day.
“We are all excited about what the future will hold,” she says. “Once the contractors start the building phase, business should shoot up. I think right now the community is in the removal phase and having all these contractors that don’t know about us is difficult, but it’s getting better here and there.”
