NBC News correspondent Chloe Melas Light the Empire State Building Red on Tuesday, March 25, starting Red Cross Day. In his speech to the event, Melas, 38, honors the important work of the American Red Cross.
“The Red Cross volunteers are often among the first on the stage to comfort affected families and help with emergency needs such as emergency rooms (s). In a typical week, they distribute financial aid of $ 1 million to those who have lost everything for home fires,” Melas said.
During her speech, Melas also affected her own personal experience with a home fire, which destroyed her family home in Pelham, New York five years ago.
Melas remembered the night in January 2020, beginning like any other normal evening. She and her husband Brian Matz, founder of HPL Ventures, were sitting in a fire in their living room and talked around the day when their two young children Leo, then two, and onion, only six months at that time, slept firmly in their beds. Only after Melas saw Dima hanging under the lights, she began to worry. Within hours, her home was consumed by the fire, forcing the family to evacuate.

“I started crying. I didn’t have a coat, just my kids, our dog and my phone,” Melas recalls.
Five years later, during the event on Tuesday, Matz, at the age of 40, he shone with pride as his wife lit the Empire State Building Red. He said exclusively USA The importance of her partnership with the American Red Cross. “Our family went through something truly traumatic, losing their home, and it was a very important point as a family for our growth and resilience together,” he said. “Today it’s just a full circle with () the Red Cross and how they help so many people.”
As the fires devastated Los Angeles last January, the US Red Cross responded to the crisis. Desire Ramos Rainer, a Red Cross Foreign Office in Big New York, explained to USA The role that the organization plays in support of the LA community during the fires.
“The Red Cross is still in LA, helping families take their next steps as part of our long -term recovery project,” she said. “While the fires were burning, we had open shelters, we spread food and supply to the family. We had hundreds of volunteers on Earth from all over the country who were there to help people in different ways.”

Mellas’s fly, Joe Matsa, who also attended the event on Tuesday, was one of the first people Melas called the Night of Fire in 2020. Joe, a 50-year-old HGTV star Home Inspector Joeto say USA What to be careful initially during a fire in the house.
“The first sign will be this smell of smoke,” he said. “The moment you smell it is not a matter of running everywhere and you are looking for. You enter the phone and call 911 and you will immediately get the firefighters there. You don’t even waste a minute.”
For more information about the US Red Cross, visit redcross.org