The crowd, mostly homeless, slept fitfully but gratefully the night of Jan. 19, said the volunteers who gathered them there.
But many of them spent the following night on the streets, they said, after the Red Cross moved the shelter to the McLane fire station on Delphi Road in rural Thurston County, 1.3 miles from the nearest bus line.
The decision to move exposed flaws in Thurston County’s emergency-response plan, including:
- The county depends on the Red Cross to open shelters after an emergency, but the charity had difficulty deploying volunteers and resources to open shelters. The widespread power outage made it hard to contact people, and road closures made moving supplies difficult. Only two shelters were open at any one time in Thurston County during the storm emergency.
- The Red Cross focuses on sheltering people who are driven from their homes, not the chronically homeless, making them a lower priority in emergencies.
- The county lacks facilities with backup generators for shelter, which sent emergency responders scrambling to find suitable shelters.
Kathy Estes, emergency manager for Thurston County, acknowledged the issues.
“With this incident, we’ve learned a lot about what the gaps are,” she said.
“We need to identify … what other options do we need to look at other than the American Red Cross. We actually need a stronger plan to identify some larger facilities that we can set up.”
DESPERATE NIGHT
Mark Collins knew something was wrong. The social worker was volunteering at a warming center at Olympia’s Temple Beth Hatfiloh after the ice storm when street people began coming into the center, saying they were turned away at the Salvation Army. The charity denies that.
About the same time, Interfaith Works Executive Director Danny Kadden fielded a call from the Red Cross, saying it had received nearly 150 calls from people seeking shelter in Thurston County. Volunteers found a shelter for the night at First Christian Church, which opened about 7 p.m. and advertised mostly by word of mouth.
Within 45 minutes of its opening, about 45 to 50 people were there, “completely soaked, exhausted, very thankful that they had a place to go,” Collins said. By the end of the night, the crowd would include two families, one with an infant, another with a young child and a scared, elderly woman with dementia who volunteers relocated from her home.
“It was clear we were serving a huge need,” said Lisa Strange, another volunteer that night.
Volunteers roused the crowd to leave at 6 a.m. Jan. 20, so they would have time to walk a few blocks to the Salvation Army for breakfast.
Collins pushed the Red Cross to keep the shelter there another night.
“I expressed concern how are we going to serve this population,” he said. “I was told again very sweetly that … that wasn’t their target population.”
By that evening, the shelter was relocated to the McLane fire station.
Steve Finley, director of emergency services for the American Red Cross Mount Rainier chapter, said the shelter was moved because power to First Christian Church going off and on.
“I had to look for another facility that I knew had backup generator power,” he said.
“We don’t open shelters … that don’t have power.”
By the time the shelter was open at McLane, power had been restored to First Christian. But “we had already pulled the trigger to go to the other shelter,” Finley said.
Probably “20-something” people stayed at the McLane shelter over the two nights it was open, he said.
Volunteers were upset that downtown was going without a shelter. Strange said she offered to drive homeless people to the new shelter in McLane, but McLane Black Lake Fire Chief Steve North told her not to.
“He was very clear that they were not set up to serve the chronically homeless,” Strange said.
North acknowledged the conversation.
“The reason for that is that we had limited capacity for the shelter not knowing how many that would be,” he said.
“Certainly that distinction between the homeless population and displaced residents gets fairly gray when everybody is in need.”
Finley acknowledged that the Red Cross’ priority was helping displaced people, not chronically homeless people.
“My concern when we were opening up the shelter at McLane was for the population that were displaced from their homes,” he said.
Collins doubted whether an emergency shelter for the homeless would have been necessary if the Salvation Army wasn’t turning people away, as homeless people said was happening. But Salvation Army Maj. Bill Lum said nobody was rejected from the shelter during the storm.
“Especially on … cold-weather nights … our doors are just open to anyone unless they are a danger to anyone,” he said.
“I would tend not to perhaps believe certain folks …” he added.
Estes, Thurston County’s emergency manager, said the county has heard that “they’ve got some policies at the Salvation Army shelter that are not necessarily palatable to everyone. There are still people who feel that is not an option for them … I really don’t have a solution now for that.”
The Salvation Army housed 65 people Jan. 18 at its shelter on Fifth Street, he said, when about a foot of snow fell. Fifty-one others were sheltered Jan. 19 after freezing rain fell, and 54 on Jan. 20, all over its 42-bed capacity. It remained open even as it lost power from Thursday to Friday afternoon.
SHELTER PLAN
Thurston County’s emergency plan relies on the Red Cross to set up shelters, Estes said. The Red Cross opened two shelters concurrently during the storm – the one at the First Christian Church that moved to the McLane fire station and another at the Moose Lodge in Yelm.
Finley said it was difficult to compete with Mother Nature; the ice storm cut power to more than 300,000 Puget Sound Energy customers area-wide. His chapter serves Thurston, Mason, Lewis and Grays Harbor counties.
“I think that the storm threw the loop at us to where we couldn’t get a facility and people couldn’t get out,” said Finley, the Red Cross emergency manager. “I don’t know if in planning that we could really adjust to that.”
Estes said Thurston County needs to look at shelter options other than the Red Cross.
“The resources available to the American Red Cross in our area really aren’t strong enough to meet the full community need when … we have a really high-impact disaster,” she said.
Finley said Pierce County has a plan to run its own shelter network during a storm, but Thurston County doesn’t.
For emergency managers, the challenge isn’t just finding a shelter, but finding one with a backup generator.
Finley said he was working with the Olympia School District during the storm emergency to find a school to place a shelter, but couldn’t find one with power. And the Red Cross doesn’t open a shelter without power, he said.
“If there’s any issue that we all have corporately in the sheltering world … in most jurisdictions there are very few facilities that have backup generator power,” he said.
Estes said the county needs to identify facilities that have auxiliary power.
Greg Wright, Olympia’s emergency-management director, said the city doesn’t duplicate Thurston County’s shelter work. He said the city doesn’t own buildings with sufficient space for shelter, and that finding buildings with generators is a “big part of the puzzle.”
The fire station has generator power, but it is used as the city’s emergency-operations center, not as a shelter.
Meanwhile, advocates for the homeless are left without a clear backup plan.
“I think there is not a real clear plan,” said Kadden, executive director of Interfaith Works, a consortium of churches and other organizations that help refer people to area homeless shelters.
Collins said faith-based groups need to form a partnership with the government to fix the problem.
“I’m hopeful that well-meaning people, municipal, county and then faith-based (communities) will get the message that we need to integrate …” he said.
Matt Batcheldor: 360-704-6869
mbatcheldor@theolympian.com
