Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s mandatory evacuation order.
Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo. The photo showed an Amazon box on a bench in front of a glass door.
“Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders,” Riley wrote in the post. Riley’s home in the Pacific Palisades was included in the first evacuation order issued on January 7, about two hours after the fire started burning. “Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok.”
Amazon drivers have continued delivering packages in some areas of Los Angeles affected by ongoing wildfires, according to numerous posts by drivers on social media and corroborated by the company’s website.
Last photo we have of the house standing is from this #amazon delivery made after the mandatory evacuation orders. Bewildering! Sincerely hope this driver is ok 🤯 #PalisadesWildfire pic.twitter.com/ox3CIRJ7y1
— Ali Riley (@RileyThree) January 10, 2025
Since Tuesday, uncontrolled fires in the northern parts of Los Angeles have burned down over 12,000 buildings, and thousands of people have lost their homes.
Amazon closed the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale on Wednesday, the day after the fires broke out. But Amazon’s distributed delivery system has led to some confusion. Amazon uses a network of “Delivery Service Partners,” which are nominally independent businesses who hire delivery drivers. Amazon also delivers packages in Los Angeles with a system called Flex, which functions sort of like DoorDash or Uber in that drivers use their personal vehicles to deliver packages.
An Amazon Flex driver posted that they had been instructed to deliver close to the fires on Thursday. The screenshot of their route map showed a road in Westgate Heights, in an area that is now under an evacuation warning and is immediately next to an area under a mandatory evacuation order. A photo they shared taken in their warehouse parking lot showed a massive plume of orange smoke. They said in a comment that they had refused to deliver the packages.
While some drivers told 404 Media or posted on driver subreddits and Discords that their routes had been canceled, some said they were given delivery routes close to fires or in areas that were eventually evacuated.
Multiple drivers wrote that the DLX5 warehouse in Glendale, for example, had closed on Wednesday. “I was still scheduled to work on the 8th,” one driver wrote to 404 Media in an online chat. “I didn’t hear much from management until 30 minutes before our clock in time, that the station had closed due to the fires.”
The driver posted a photo of a brown smoke-darkened sky above the parking lot of their warehouse.
Another Flex driver posted a screenshot of a delivery cancellation notice they got from VAX5, a warehouse in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.
“The block you’re scheduled for on 09 January 2025 at 3:30 am at VAX5 has been canceled. Please don’t come to the delivery station. This cancellation is due to circumstances beyond your control. Your standing won’t be impacted and you will still be paid for the block.”
Multiple drivers on the Amazon delivery subreddit, r/AmazonDSPDrivers, have written that despite nearby fires and evacuation zones, their work days have gone on as normal over the last week.
“I deliver east in LA county and today was just another day on the job,” one user wrote in a comment on a post asking how drivers in the state were dealing with the fires. “Not really that bad out here tho[ugh], but one of our delivery areas is close to level 2 evacuation warning.”
Another driver wrote, “We cover the Burbank/Glendale area, still working. A lot of businesses are closed. Some unprecedented traffic. We were just given N95 masks for mild ashes falling.” Glendale sits just west of the Eaton fire, which is the second most destructive fire in the state.
A third driver in Santa Monica, about 20 minutes away from the Palisades, wrote last Wednesday that their workload had been reduced because of the fires. They posted a screenshot of a route with 192 packages. “I honestly thought they’d send us home since we deliver close to the fires but no they just gave us masks to wear,” the driver wrote.
Delivering in wildfire conditions can be dangerous even if you aren’t close to the source of the fire itself. In 2023, New York City was enveloped in smoke from Canadian wildfires, and the city’s air quality was categorized as “hazardous.” Delivery drivers at the time said they had spent their whole workday coughing. As of Sunday, Los Angeles’ air quality was “poor.”
The driver subreddits are also full of people discussing whether they would get paid for canceled routes, and screenshots of drivers talking to Amazon support. In many cases, Amazon appears to be paying drivers for routes cancelled because of the fires.
Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told 404 Media in a statement that the company was supplying drivers with N95 masks and was monitoring the air quality in the area.
“If [the air quality index] is over a certain threshold for extended timeframes as defined by Cal OSHA, we have mechanisms in place to reduce time on the road for drivers,” MacLachlan said. “If it’s still deemed safe to be on the road, we suggest DSPs [delivery service partners] advise their drivers to keep vehicle windows closed and to run the A/C on high with air recirculating, out of an abundance of caution.”
In a blog post written two days after the fires began burning, the company wrote that its customers would likely experience delays due to the “temporary closing of some Amazon facilities,” and that it would fulfill their orders “when it’s safe to do so from outside the affected region…Our top priority is ensuring the safety of our employees and partners.”
MacLachlan said Amazon had instructed drivers not to make deliveries in mandatory evacuation zones. “Safety is our utmost priority and drivers are encouraged and instructed to never make deliveries if they feel unsafe, and they will never be penalized for it,” MacLachlan said. She also said the company was investigating Riley’s post about the Amazon package.
“We’re looking into the details of this delivery,” MacLachlan said. “However, drivers have been instructed to not deliver in evacuation zones, or areas closed to public access. And if a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so, and the driver’s performance will not be impacted.”
