Emily Glenn, 22, was a senior at Palisades High School in late October of 2019 when the Getty fire hit near her Brentwood family home, forcing her and her family to flee in the middle of the night.

“I had just gotten into a theater competition over the weekend. I was really looking forward to that and that didn’t happen,” she remembered.

She and her family fled to her grandparents’ house in Westwood at around 3 a.m.

“School was canceled for the week,” she said. “I was terrified that my house was going to be gone.”

It was that experience that set Glenn on the professional path of emergency management. Last week Glenn and her family again fled from their Brentwood home, this time due to the Pacific Palisades fire, but now she is among the professionals doing their part as a member of an emergency management team.

“The experience of fleeing in the middle of the night, seeing fires outside of your window, is something that you don’t forget and it had a massive impact on me,” she said.

Glenn is on staff at Community Organized Relief Effort, doing work related to climate resilience and disaster preparedness in and around Los Angeles. Created in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, CORE was co-founded by actor Sean Penn and activist Ann Lee.

“It’s my full-time job,” she said, and she hopes to get a master’s degree in emergency management in the next two years.

Glenn is also a part-time gymnastics instructor at the Westwood Recreation Center, which is one of the evacuation centers for people who fled the wildfires. On Wednesday, she showed up at the recreation center in Westwood facility even before CORE reached out to say she was probably going to be asked to help.

“I know what it’s like to experience an evacuation and in my heart it’s what I do,” she said. “I seek to help people. If I can do my part to make people feel just a little less pain during these times, I want to be able to do that.”

During a crisis she focuses on helping people communicate with loved ones, guide them on questions and concerns, and assist them in solving problems as they unfold.

“I’m really passionate about, ‘How do we prepare people for disasters?’ and how do we help them after?” Glenn said.

Glenn had intended to study atmospheric sciences when she began at the University of Illinois, Urbana, but the math involved wasn’t as interest to her as working with people. Instead, her bachelor’s degree is in earth, society and environmental sustainability.

“I like social sciences and I got an internship with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,”: she said. “Through this internship I got to meet a lot of amazing people,” including experts in the field of emergency management.

“It seemed like the right fit because I was passionate about wildfires and how to get people prepared, because it happened to me,” she said, alluding to the Getty fire in 2019.

“Climate change is getting worse,” Glenn said. “It’s not going to get any better in the next couple of years. I’m scared for how things are going to be, and that’s why it’s important I’m doing what I’m doing.”

In her pursuit of an emergency management master’s degree, she said the goal would be to create ways and means of avoiding catastrophes.

“I want to be able to put that into practice and find ways as a community, as a city, as a country, to repair the damage before it’s done,” she said, noting that some other countries and far more adept than the United States in being prepared for disaster situations.

“How do we mitigate disasters? How do we reduce the impact that it has on us and how do we reduce the amount of fear that we feel when a disaster happens,” Glenn said.

In her ideal society, she said, nobody would freak out when startling events occur. Instead, they would have plans and be able to calmly, collectively execute them.

“I don’t want people to have to experience (disasters) multiple times in order to learn lessons on how to prevent them from happening,” she said. “We should be able to compile all this knowledge and get this knowledge out to people and people should feel confident in knowing what to do during an emergency.”

Jarret Liotta is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and photographer.