A Facebook message posted Sunday offering to forward compassionate messages to the couple whose trailer started the Carr Fire took off in ways the woman who posted it never expected.
After she read news reports the Carr Fire started from a blown tire on a trailer, Rachel Pilli of Redding had been praying for the couple in the car.
“I couldn’t imagine the grief,” she said. “If I were the one responsible for the accident I couldn’t imagine the shame and the torture I’d feel.”
Officials say the Carr Fire began on the afternoon of July 23 close to Whiskeytown Lake when a flat tire caused a rim-riding trailer to scrape the road, causing sparks. The sparks ignited nearby brush and the fire grew quickly. It moved along Highway 299, destroying parts of Whiskeytown, flattening most of Keswick, and burning communities in Shasta and west Redding. As of Tuesday morning, the Carr Fire was 65 percent contained.
Officials haven't released the couple's names, but when Pilli visited The Gathering Church on Sunday, she met a firefighter who said they were his mother's neighbors. The firefighter agreed to give them a card with Pilli's sympathetic message.
Pilli thought she’d try to collect more well-wishes from friends on Facebook so she could send a few cards from other people along with hers.
On Sunday evening, she posted the following:
"Many of us have been praying for this man, 81. I learned that his wife is blaming herself for the Carr Fire because she asked him to take the trailer in the first place. She has been crying day and night on her couch. They live several miles away from Redding."
When she woke up Monday morning she read dozens of responses. It left her in tears.
It was “an ocean of compassion, of love and grace,” she said.
When Pilli, the executive director of Care Net Pregnancy Center in Redding, posted the same offer in several Facebook groups, she got similar responses. With the growing number of people wanting to send cards, she decided to accept them for the couple at her office on Athens Avenue.
“We have about a hundred cards here, and gifts, a gift basket,” Pilli said, pointing to a giant basket filled with envelopes and little gifts, with more gifts sitting next to it. “A florist in town is sending a bouquet.”
The cards keep coming.
Pilli and her friend Karen Winters are reading the letters before they send them to the couple to make sure all are encouraging. Thus far, they have been.
“I would think, no matter what race, what color, people are kind,” Pilli said. “Deep down I think that compassion and community are at the core of human beings.”
Winters saw Pilli’s post in Bethel Carr Fire Support Facebook group.
“It struck a chord in me,” Winters said. “I knew it would strike a chord with other people."
She stepped in to help Pilli go through the messages, she said, because Pilli, a working mother of three, has a lot on her plate.
Winters said she thinks writing and sending the cards is therapeutic — and not just for the recipients.
“It was an accident,” Winters said of the incident that started the Carr Fire. “It really could have been anybody.”
There’s no need for the couple to send a response, Pilli said. She hopes they “feel the love and forgive themselves.”
“I think the fire has caused us to look into each other’s eyes and discover the human kindness in us," Pilli said. "People have been so generous. It’s a beautiful story of hope and community.”