TheTOMS RIVER Times Vol. 16 - No. 11
In This Week’s Edition
MICROMEDIA PUBLICATIONS
JERSEYSHOREONLINE.COM
Volunteers Perform Social Services While Social Distancing
Push For Homeless Shelter Continues
BREAKING NEWS @
jerseyshoreonline.com
Dr. Izzy’s Sound News Page 16
Dear Pharmacist Page 17
Dear Joel Page 22
Inside The Law Page 23
─Photo by Chris Lundy Major Stephen Ditmer gives a sermon one Sunday morning at the Salvation Army in Toms River. By Chris Lundy TOMS RIVER – How can you serve people when you’re not allowed to go near them? That’s the problem that service organizations like the Salvation Army have had to wrestle with since the onset of COVID-19. Social distancing regulations are still very import-
ant, which makes them adjust their operations in order to still help people in need, said Major Stephen Ditmer of the Salvation Army on Route 37 in Toms River. “We had to scale way back in gatherings,” he said. Even now that the state is slowly reopening, they still have to be outside.
The big dining area inside the building on Route 37 is not open for those in need right now, he said. Instead of dinners, they serve takeaway on Thursday nights. The line starts at 4:30 p.m. and lasts for the better part of an hour. There’s a line and people are told to keep six feet apart. However,
the homeless population isn’t plugged into social media so they aren’t aware of every detail of the COVID-19 situation. “The barrage of behavioral instruction via social media is not getting to them,” he said, at least in the beginning of the pandemic. (Social - See Page 10)
Looking Toward Shore’s Past, Future Hurricanes By Patricia A. Miller OCEAN COUNTY - The ominous weather reports before Hurricane Sandy hit just before Halloween in October 2012 were not anything you’d want to hear. Neither were the police officers driving down our street warning us to leave before noon the following
Monday. We had to sign paperwork that Friday night acknowledging that if we did not leave, the township was not responsible for anything that happened to us or to our home. We signed. We had never been ordered to leave our Bayville neighborhood
before. We left. In the end, we couldn’t return home for seven months, until the house was repaired. Sandy was within 50 miles of the New Jersey coast before it hit in Brigantine as an extratropical cyclone. The storm peppered the Jersey Shore with hurricane-force winds,
record low pressure, devastation is noted, and a huge storm surge particularly on Long Beach Island and the along the coast. “The storm becomes Barnegat Peninsula, the worst hurricane to whe r e t he Se a sid e affect the state on re- Heights boardwalk colcord, killing 37 and lapses into the ocean.” Sandy took the most causing nearly $30 billion in damages,” ac- lives, compared to a cording to the National storm in August 1806 Oceanic and Atmo- storm, which killed 21 spheric Administration residents. (NOAA). “Widespread (Hurricane - See Page 22)
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By Chris Lundy TOMS RIVER – A local councilman is renewing his plea to have a homeless shelter built in Ocean County. Currently, the county places the homeless in temporary housing. This solves the short term problem of shelter, but not the root cause of homelessness, Councilman Terrance Turnbach said. While in these motels, they continue to have access to drugs and alcohol; any behavioral issues are not checked. “If we do not address the underlying issues causing an individual to be homeless, we are akin to hamsters running on a wheel. It is time to admit that providing money for people to stay in motels is not a plan that will meaningfully address chronic homelessness,” he said. Toms River opened Riverwood Park Recreation Center off Whitesville Road for Code Blue during nights in the winter. This is a statewide regulation that opens shelters when the temperature reaches freezing. It is run by the nonprofit Just Believe, Inc. According to their figures, there were 193 different people who stayed in the Toms River shelter overnight last winter. During the winter of 2018-2019, that number was 178. These figures do not include those who stayed in other places that were open for Code Blue. Based on these numbers alone, Turnbach said the county’s plan is not working. “Respectfully we must reset our approach to addressing homelessness. The end goal cannot be providing temporary shelter. The end goal must be transitioning individuals into permanent housing,” he said. A shelter would provide people with not only a roof over their heads, but supervision and services that address the reasons that they are homeless in the first place. Shelter Location Part of the problem with homeless shelters is that people don’t want them in their back yard. The site would also need to be near jobs and public transportation, which means it wouldn’t be hidden away. Turnbach said the ideal location for a transitional housing facility would be where a shut down hotel presently is. (Homelessness - See Page 12)
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