LI volunteer helps ease the pain of disasters

At first, rescuers in Riverhead held out hope that five members of a missing family had simply escaped or were not home when a raging fire tore through a century-old Victorian house last November.

“They were still looking for them. They were hoping that maybe they climbed down, that they were somewhere else. They were hoping,” said Magnolia Chiri, 27, one of the Red Cross volunteers helping the downstairs residents who had shared the house and now had no place to live.

But sometime after midnight, the fire marshal came by with horrific news, she recalled: The five had been found dead inside the house.

“Everyone around us, the families we had helped, they started crying,” Chiri recalled of that night — her first call involving a fatality. She added: “It was sad. But we also had three other families that we had to take care of. We had to help them in the moment.”

At any hour, volunteers like Chiri, in red and white “Disaster Relief” vests, fan out across Long Island to comfort those beset by tragedy, supply donor-funded, preloaded debit cards to buy necessities and pay for temporary housing, connect them with counselors — and just listen, for as long as someone needs. This week, people like Chiri are being recognized as part of National Volunteer Week. 

Chiri is among about 800 volunteers with the American Red Cross on Long Island, which is 105 years old and also supplements the organization’s Greater New York Region operation, which includes New York City, Westchester and Rockland, according to Michael Devulpillieres, the Island spokesman. Chiri is the youngest of 25 Disaster Action Team supervisors on Long Island, he said.

Last year, the Red Cross on the Island responded to about 350 disasters in Nassau and Suffolk.

In her three years volunteering, Chiri, of Deer Park, has helped hundreds of families in the throes of disaster, she estimates — mostly at house fires but also at environmental disasters like tornadoes, and she staffed a shelter for Hurricane Henri.

In January, she and several others from the Island were sent to help in the aftermath of the apartment fire that killed 17 people in the Bronx, which was blamed on faulty fire doors that failed to close.

In the Riverhead house, there were no working smoke detectors. This week, the Suffolk County Police Department disclosed the identifies of the five — Zonia Dinora Rivera, 41; Carlos Cifredo Peñate Rivera, 24; Andrea Isamar González, 16; Douglas Edgardo Rivera Aguirre, 24; and Carlos Alberto Ramos Aguirre, 22.

Chiri, who grew up in Peru until age 12, was inspired to volunteer by the organization's work during Superstorm Sandy, as well as her dad's descriptions of how the Red Cross helped in Peru during wartime there, she said.

On Long Island, she’s worked as an EMT and a medical assistant for a doctor in Smithtown; in December she graduated from Stony Brook University and is now studying for the MCAT, hoping to attend med school in the fall. She was studying for a biochemistry midterm in November, when she got the call about the Riverhead house fire.

And after spending nearly all night at the scene, she was back at next morning at 9 a.m., doorknocking in a two-block radius urging neighbors to sign up for free smoke alarms.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.