Alum Take Thomas Fire Coverage into Own Hands [Tyler Bradford]
Tyler Bradford, Staff Writer
After the Thomas Fire first began in Santa Paula on December 4th and had created a massive push of mandatory evacuations across Ventura and Carpinteria, Westmont alumnus Matt Organista (’12) took coverage of the Thomas Fire into his hands. Unsatisfied with the news coverage the fire was receiving at the time, Organista began recording live Facebook videos with his phone. “I actually went out looking for the fire because there was such poor news coverage. Then I realized it was 2 miles from carp and no one was talking about it. So I did some live videos,” Organista told the Horizon
Thanks to his knowledge of the Carpinteria landscape and layout, as well as the sheer number of videos he uploaded (a number that stretches well beyond 60, with each video ranging from one to several minutes long), Organista’s facebook page quickly became a go-to source for coverage on the fire for thousands of people: “The next day [the fire] was threatening my uncle’s house and still no fire crews or news. So I put out some more videos. Then the neighbors started asking me to check and give them coverage of their house then soon the whole town. Then friends and family from all over the world started messaging me and friending me.”
When the Horizon asked Organista what exactly motivated him to take up his camera and commit so much time to documenting the Thomas Fire, he recounted this difficult story from the early days of the Thomas Fire: “[When] the fire was threatening my uncle’s house, the fire crews got there in the afternoon and we asked several times if they would come on our property to help us defend our home and they refused because the fire chief felt it was unsafe. After that my cousin, my uncle, and a couple friends picked up garden tools and began cutting fire breaks with in the brush. After about 4 hours the winds changed and the fire jumped our breaks and road and burned his house down. After that I took it upon myself to document all things pertaining to fire and fire crews.”
Organista’s tremendous efforts did not go unnoticed. Last month he was featured in a brief piece in The Santa Barbara Independent, which recognized his video work and his role as a go-to news source for in the midst of the Thomas Fire. Having made videography something of a hobby for himself over the last few years, Organista even uploaded several videos on the damage from the mudslide that devastated Montecito earlier this month. In closing, he remarked, “No one should be denied [coverage] like that and with technology these days no one should be left in the dark especially with such a crazy fire like this one.”
Photo: This is the best photo I could find. Westmont has no labeled photo of him since they switched athletic sites (I’ve looked through both, though, and just couldn’t find a picture that I knew for sure was him). It’s form his facebook page and the photographer’s name is Gerardo Soria (also an alum and a former xc runner) Organista is the second form the right.
