Mandy Moore had some words for an Amazon delivery person who dropped off a package at her family’s burned-down home in Altadena: “Do better.”
The “This Is Us” star blasted the company for delivering the parcel in the wake of the devastating Eaton fire that burned more than 14,000 acres over 36 days, killing 17 people and destroying nearly 10,000 structures. One of them, Moore said, was her in-laws’ home.
“Do better, Amazon. Can we not have better discretion than to leave a package at a residence that no longer exists? This is my mother and father in law’s home. Smh,” Moore wrote Tuesday on Instagram stories, sharing a photo of the package amid the debris at the leveled residence.
The singer-actor, who is married to Dawes musician Taylor Goldsmith, was among many who have called out the e-commerce giant for continuing service to destroyed and damaged properties in the burn zones. The company’s delivery-confirmation photos have been making the rounds on social media in recent weeks.
Steve Kelly, a spokesperson for Amazon, confirmed Wednesday in a statement to The Times that the company had reached out to Moore to apologize.
“We’ve reached out to Ms. Moore via Instagram to apologize for this and to ask for more information from her in-laws so we’re better able to investigate what happened here,” Kelly said. “Those who deliver on our behalf have been advised to use discretion in areas impacted by wildfires — especially if it involves delivering to a damaged home — that clearly didn’t happen here.”
The “A Walk to Remember” and “The Princess Diaries” star has not commented publicly on Amazon’s statement. However, she did post about the fires again on her Instagram grid.
Reflecting on the month that has passed since the wildfires, Moore said that in addition to feeling survivor’s guilt she is struggling and “reaching out and asking for help and guidance on how to process this trauma.” Her brain and heart, she said, “are so deeply broken.”
In the Tuesday post, Moore said that she, like many Altadena residents, “never got an evacuation notice” as the wind-fueled fires moved through her community. Instead, she received a call from her brother-in-law at 6:45 p.m. Jan. 7 encouraging her and her family to get “the heck out of Dodge.”
“I calmly walked downstairs and relayed this to my husband and without skipping a beat, we promptly packed up the kids (in their pjs), our dog, and scrambled to find our 3 cats as the power went out. I’ll never forget Taylor trying to figure out how to manually open our two little garage doors … in the harrowing 60 mph winds, as the sky glowed a dark red and ash started to fall all around us,” she wrote. “We raced across town amidst fallen trees on the freeway to the safety of our dear friend’s place, got the kids down, and then I raced to Target to grab a litter box and some water, impulsively refreshing the watch duty app over and over. As we did all night. Over and over. Watching the evacuation zone narrow in on our little 8-block radius. It took until 4 a.m. for it to turn red. All the while, tossing and turning with a stomach-churning anxiety I’ve never experienced before.”
Moore said that she found out this week that the structure of her Altadena home is still standing. But, due to its proximity to the fire, its contents “are a near total loss.”
“We won’t be there for a very long time as it and the neighborhood itself get sorted out and cleaned and the rebuilding starts. I say all of this because i’m struggling. Yes we are exceedingly lucky to technically still have the structure of a home. But also… do we still have a home? I think my definition is in flux,” she added.
Moore and Goldsmith weren’t looking to move to that home until they stumbled upon it amid the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020, she said. She found out she was pregnant with her first child two weeks after closing escrow and they spent four years restoring and remodeling the house. They were two weeks away from completing the renovation when the fires hit, she said.
“I’m not saying all of this because I’m asking you to feel more sorry for us than someone else,” Moore explained. “Like I said, I am grateful. We’re so lucky! By the grace of god we found a place to stay in the meantime and the kids are happy and safe. We’ve even starting collecting the books and toys that they’ve lost. It’s not a competition of who lost what or more. Real human beings across this town, regardless of their jobs or socioeconomic status, lost the life they’d come to know and count on in an instant. My whole heart is with them. Every one of them. This place, our home and the town itself, was our dream and I hope in time it will feel like that again… just a slightly different one.”
State investigators have not yet determined a cause for the Eaton fire, but video of flames at the base of a Southern California Edison transmission tower in Eaton Canyon the night the fire began has raised suspicions that the utility’s equipment was at fault. Residents have filed more than 40 lawsuits against SCE since the fire.
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