Last week was a difficult and deadly week and I want to share some of my thoughts after reflecting over the weekend.
Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Last week was a difficult and deadly week and I want to share some of my thoughts after reflecting over the weekend.
First, I want to send my condolences to the families and friends of our neighbors who we tragically lost in this severe weather event. Emergencies and the tragic deaths that occurred invite necessary reflection and scrutiny.
During the freezing temperatures, Multnomah County and its volunteers opened a record number of emergency warming shelters and served a record number of people. There is no doubt that lives were saved during those five nights because of this effort. I am truly inspired by the amazing, compassionate people my team and I met while helping set up and operate different shelters throughout the County. Thank you for helping us save lives. I also want to extend my appreciation for all those working in public service—transportation staff keeping our roads clear, first responders, TriMet bus drivers, and everyone who put in long, difficult hours to help keep our community safe. I am grateful.
The policies and decisions regarding when to open and close a network of warming shelters can place our humanity and hard logistics at clear odds. I know County leadership care deeply about each one of our residents. I can understand the decision made to close our emergency shelters last Wednesday given what they knew and when they knew it: an inaccurate weather forecast as late as 5am and too few volunteers to safely continue to operate every shelter are understandable factors. While there’s been no reported County resident who died of exposure after emergency shelters closed, it was so incredibly distressing for all the ways we failed those who needed our community’s support beyond the end of freezing temperatures. It revealed that we collectively have more to do, within the County and beyond, to prepare for the next emergency.
We deployed the largest warming shelter network in our region’s history, with food, places for pets, hygiene stations, and security personnel at any shelter that agreed to it. Still, the County must build deeper volunteer pools and create better systems to respond to rapid and unforeseen weather changes. We also need more jurisdictions to go beyond reluctant partnership.
Emergencies require all hands on deck, and so many public servants across jurisdictions and utilities worked tirelessly. But as local governments, we all fell short providing enough safe, warm space to our neighbors. We needed more available beds, with more volunteers. Almost 70% of all emergency shelter shifts were taken by Multnomah County employees, followed by the general public (7.1%) and then City of Portland employees (6.7%) —and many County employees worked multiple, sometimes back-to-back shifts. Only Multnomah County offers pay incentives to our employees to work shifts at emergency shelters—an incentive other jurisdictions should consider to boost staffing in an emergency. Not only was the recruitment of public employees limited, but we had less access to public facilities for temporary shelter than ever before.
We all must adapt to be more resilient to an increasingly volatile climate, and be prepared for an earthquake—we count on our governments to help lead us in that. We all need to do better and I join so many at the County who are committed to the continuous improvement of our emergency response work. I believe other regional governments will do the same. I hope we can include increased partnership during future emergencies to keep residents safe and warm among those improvements. Collectively as a society we fail our most vulnerable neighbors every day when such rampant inequality persists. I hope we can turn our justifiable frustration and sadness of this past week into the continued advocacy required to house everyone, every day as a basic human right.
Sincerely,
Jesse
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