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Feature
When weather worsens, encampments pay the price — shelter or no shelter
BY JUSTIN WAGNER
For many, unsheltered life is a last resort. With no home in the city, the ultimate refuge a person has may be the ground beneath their feet and whatever supplies they can pull together.
It’s only possible to live this way through unceasing effort. It often involves trekking between temporary havens in dangerous areas, enduring the elements with limited cover and clothing and learning survival skills on the fly.
When temperatures drop below freezing, thunderstorms roll in, tornadoes gather, hail rains, campsites flood and so on, all this effort can turn futile in a matter of seconds.
“If you’ve ever been camping in below freezing weather, that’s what they’re dealing with every single day,” said Julie Bendler, an outreach specialist with Mental Health Cooperative. “This has been a very mild winter, but you’ve gotta figure, with our low temperatures and our freezes, no amount of clothes is gonna get them warm enough. I think it really affects them mentally and it breaks them down and weakens them.”
As an outreach specialist, Bendler has seen firsthand the toll inclement weather can take on unsheltered people. MHC works with all populations in Nashville on behavioral health, mental health and substance-use services.
“There’s a distinct different feeling in the camps when it’s cold versus when it’s hot outside … when it’s cold outside, you’re not gonna get them out of their tent, the tents are wrapped in tarps there’s fires around the various encampments, but they’re freezing. It’s definitely taking a mental toll on them.”
Meredith MacLeod from Shower the People, an organization that provides shower and laundry services for people in Nashville, echoed this sentiment, saying that mental health issues can present more during harsh seasons.
“Just the added stress of not being able to sleep well because they’re up all night walking, because it’s so cold they have to keep their bodies moving, or they haven’t been able to sleep because they’re being woken up by a storm,” McLeod said. “The resources that can help keep them warm like propane and heaters and blankets are so scarce, I think that has a lot to do with it.”
Bendler explained that while in the summertime, camping is time-consuming, in the winter, it can be debilitating and paralyzing. Storms compound this issue.
“That was something [people at one camp] had mentioned last week, they had their tents up on these pallets but they were soaking up the water. The water had gotten so high from the storm that it got everything in the bottom of their tent wet.”
In times like these, additional shelter options such as Metro’s cold weather and extreme weather shelters do open up — and more frequently than ever, due to a raise in the temperature necessary to be forecast before the shelters can open — but many unsheltered Nashvillians feel unsafe in shelter environments on principle, Bendler explained. In other cases, they are too cold to leave their camps for food, let alone walk to the city and make their way to a shelter.
“I think they’re making [shelters] accessible, but people are afraid to leave their stuff. You leave for a couple of hours and everything’s gone… that’s all they own. If they’re scared to leave their stuff, how do you get them out of a camp or what do you do to make them feel safe?”
Photos by Alvine
Furthermore, access and information can be a barrier. During the most recent storms that hit Davidson County, where tornado chances crept up to 10 percent, three tornado warning sirens were not in operation, according to the Nashville Office of Emergency Management.
Many people who live outdoors unsheltered may not have a phone — let alone a charged, working one — at any given time, which can leave them unaware that a storm is coming until it is too late to be proactive.
Lisa Wysocky of Colby’s Army, an organization that often provides services and supplies to unhoused neighbors during extreme weather, noted that this information barrier presents a major safety issue.
“We do call or text people when bad weather is coming in. We don’t know how many people actually receive that, if their phone is charged or if they even have their phone with them,” Wysocky said. “News channels did a good job of getting that word out, but that’s not going to affect our homeless population.”
“It’s a big safety hazard,” she said. “Just say high straight line winds or a tornado did come through a specific area where there were homeless. There’s no notification and there’s no place for them to go, really.”
Wysocky explained that sometimes the people she works with are able to make it to a nearby store or other building and take shelter during harsh weather, but as Bendler noted earlier from her experience, many were reticent about leaving their belongings.
“You have to plan to get wherever the bus is going to be,” Wysocky said. “And some of our people, if they’ve got developmental delay or if they’ve got issues with addiction or mental illness, they might not be able to plan that out ahead of time.”
Renee Pratt, executive director of Metro Social Services, said the following when the Severe Weather Overflow Shelter opened Feb. 16.
“It is imperative that we provide special covering for our neighbors experiencing homelessness, not just when it’s dangerously cold, but when there is a severe stretch of weather that can endanger our neighbors. It is not only the mission of Metro Social Services, but it is our duty to do so. We’ve successfully protected Nashville’s most vulnerable during such times for years. Though it means long days and nights for our staff, it more importantly means lives saved for those who need our help.”
Wysocky noted that while the weather shelters were accessible, they were not necessarily accessible to those in encampments, who may not have the resources or information needed to plan a trek to the nearest shelter. It presents a problem which, given weather just bad enough, could be deadly for many.
“It’s a significant problem, and one that could be very devastating,” she said. “If a tornado or a significant cold snap came through, our people would not be prepared, it would be very tragic. I wish I had the solutions, and I don’t.”
