When Community Matters Most

by DOUG HENSLEY

SCAN FOR NEWS STORY!

When fire ripped through Ruidoso a few months ago, virtually everyone throughout the New Mexico mountain community felt the pain. It also became a rise-to-the-occasion moment for the local store (#682, Albertsons Market) team, showing it’s much more than just a grocery store.

“There was a need there like there’d never been,” said John Jameson, Midland-Odessa regional vice president. “Power was out for several days. Restaurants were closed. People couldn’t go home. It started as a way to help first responders, but it turned into much more than that.”

The blaze that came to be called the McBride/Ruidoso Fire started in midApril after an intense storm knocked power lines down that may have ignited the fire, which was whipped by 80-plus-mph winds across an already dry countryside. Ultimately, it burned more than 6,000 acres before being fully contained in early May.

“We’d had a bad snow season, so the ground was really dry, and the fire spread like crazy,” recalled Harley Estes, the store director and a 10-year veteran with the company. “It was a pretty traumatizing event for the community.”

Schools were evacuated, and the community center became a central staging area for people to find shelter and other resources. Power was out all across Ruidoso with the store dark for the better part of three and a half days. The continuing high winds complicated matters, making it almost impossible to contain the fire. The store was operating with limited lights and zero refrigeration.

“They were trying to limit where the fire could go,” Harley said. “It ended up taking 225 homes, and we had several team members who lost their homes in the midst of it.”

That’s when the store team really stepped up. The loss of power jeopardized the store’s perishable merchandise, so store personnel got busy giving back to the community.

“We had all of this meat sitting in trailers that was going to expire in a couple of days,” Harley said. “We had propane and grills, so we decided to give everyone a hot meal. We cooked for the community, and everyone who wanted a burger or a hot dog was welcome to come by and grab a plate of food.”

By the time it was over, more than 600 plates of food had been served.

“It was really amazing to see how the team stepped up for the community,” Craig Lunsford, market manager for the Midland-Odessa region, said. “We didn’t have power. People didn’t have groceries. We had a bunch of groceries in the back and really nothing to do with them, so we cooked them up. It was a blessing to see people working together and coming out there to support the community.”

The store also donated pallets of water and tried to provide a sense of continuity in a community experiencing tremendous heartbreak and upheaval.

“We just wanted to be that one thing of comfort for people,” Harley said. “We wanted to provide something that seemed at least a little bit like a meal at home.”

Some store team members worked up to 20 hours per day those first few days, remembering the people involved were friends, guests and neighbors.

“To be honest, there is no training for something like this,” said Dylan Odom, the assistant store director at the time who has since moved to the Hobbs location. “Nothing prepares you. It’s a matter of seeing people needing help. It was just an impactful moment seeing that the community relies on the grocery store more than we can imagine when we have no power. Hope is what everyone held on to.”

Originally, a lot of the emphasis was on helping care for first responders, but it wasn’t long before the realization set in that a lot of people needed help. The support was not only external, though. It was also internal as Albertson’s has a corporate employee assistance program that delivers aid to team members impacted by tragedy.

In this case, virtually every team member at the Ruidoso location received some type of assistance, ranging from gift cards to help replace refrigerated and frozen food items that spoiled when the power went out to more assistance for those who lost their homes.

“It goes a long way when you see the company is here helping get people up on their feet,” said Marcus Young, United’s director of asset protection and a team leader on the corporate assistance effort. “Over a couple of days, we talked to more than 100 people who worked at the store. There were two severe cases where they lost everything and more than fifty impacted by the loss of power.”

It was all in a day’s work for a caring store team, though.

“When you’re invested in the town and the people, it’s easy to make decisions like we made,” Harley said.