Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani is donating $500,000 to help firefighters and animals forced to flee the deadly wildfires around the region.

Ohtani announced his intention on Instagram, with LA Strong in white lettering against a black background.

“We’ll be donating $500,000 to help those firefighters and those forced to live in shelter to help animals in need,” he wrote.

The Dodgers and other Los Angeles sports teams are partnering in selling an “LA Strong” collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts, with all proceeds benefiting the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and American Red Cross.

During the first hours of the Eaton Fire, a group of Pasadena bus drivers headed to the inferno to help evacuate senior living facilities as flames closed in.

Pasadena Transit operations manager Erasmo Rodriguez was the first to jump into a bus that night and race to a spot where he saw a chaotic scene of facilities on fire while firefighters and nurses gathered residents in wheelchairs and gurneys outside.

The evacuated facilities included The Terraces at Park Marino. The staff used a 7-Eleven parking lot across the street as a staging area to help drivers easily load roughly 95 residents. In addition to the buses, authorities tried to utilize any available vehicles to quickly evacuate residents, including an armored vehicle typically used to transport SWAT officers.

A Malibu woman has reunited with the firefighter who rescued her when she got stuck while fleeing the Palisades Fire.

Patty Phillips was racing to evacuate her home in the Big Rock neighborhood of Malibu last week with her dog, Koda, when she found herself surrounded by smoke and flames that seemed to be closing in on her.

As she struggled to see through the smoke, she accidentally drove offroad and up a dirt path that was littered with large rocks. Her car ran into a boulder and she got stuck — unable to move any further.

She began to fear the worst as she and her dog sat trapped inside the car, surrounded by the hellscape of the Palisades Fire. To make matters worse, Phillips had gotten separated from her husband, James, who had already made it down to the Pacific Coast Highway she was struggling to reach.

There are 31 missing persons reports under investigation in connection with the Los Angeles area wildfires, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said Thursday evening.

However, the agency noted that of those cases, the remains of nine people have been recovered from burned structures associated with missing persons reports in the Eaton Fire, and the remains of four others were recovered from burned structures linked to missing persons reports from the Palisades Fire.

Structures connected to 16 of the 31 active cases were searched by deputies and cadaver dogs, the sheriff’s office said, but no human remains were found in them.

And two more structures were in the process of being searched, the sheriff’s office added.

Human remains that are found are being examined by the L.A. County coroner’s office to determine identification.

The coroner’s office reported earlier Thursday that the death toll from the fires has risen to at least 27. 

Thousands of structures have been damaged or destroyed by the Los Angeles area firestorm, and now comes the arduous task of making sure fire-ravaged communities are safe, as residents and business owners start to return to survey what, if anything, is left.

“The properties have been damaged beyond belief,” said Mark Pestrella, director of Los Angeles County Public Works, at a news briefing. “They are full of sediment, debris, silt and hazardous materials.”

Pesticides, fuel and lithium batteries need to be removed, while utility companies are also working on power and gas lines.

Altadena homeowner Aaron Lubeley has already seen his home.

She says the impact of her role weighs on her.

“Sometimes the hardest part is just not knowing if you have a home to come down to,” Fouts said. “So getting that information out to people I think is really important so that they just know either way.”