DEEP FREEZE
Shelters, volunteers, emergency services help vulnerable
The frigid weather in Ottawa is bringing together shelters, volunteers and emergency services to help homeless people get to warmth and safety this week.
“It’s a challenge this year,” said Peter Tilley, executive director at the Ottawa Mission. “Normally the people who stay at the shelter love nothing better than to come down, have their breakfast, and be on the road by eight.
“And we encourage that, that people get out into the city — except on days like this,” Tilley said.
One concern, he said, is that many of the people who go to the shelters are not used to being in confined spaces for longer than a night. That can result in increased tension among clients waiting to leave the shelters.
“This morning I saw an incident that had escalated and was almost beyond control,” Tilley said. “But our front-line staff were quick to intervene, get between the two gentlemen and calm things down.”
Tilley said staff are trained in non-violent crisis intervention and de-escalation tactics, and more staff can be brought in if needed to help manage the higher number of people using the shelter.
“We normally have about 225 to 230 beds. We’re up to around 260 now because we’re putting mats down on the chapel room floor,” Tilley said.
The Salvation Army’s Ottawa Booth Centre is also looking to expand its capacity by clearing out its common area and chapel, said Glenn van Gulik, a Salvation Army spokesperson.
The Centre has gone into “overdrive mode” to deal with the cold and can soon add about 50 emergency beds to its current capacity of 168. In addition, the Salvation Army’s outreach van has begun working around the clock to help bring homeless people to shelters.
They’ve also partnered with Veterans Emergency Transitions Service, a non-profit that focuses on veterans in need, to boost their patrols and give even more resources to the outreach teams. The outreach teams will be bringing people to wherever there are open spaces, be it the Booth Centre, the Ottawa Mission, Shepherds of Good Hope or “any other shelter,” said van Gulik.
Ottawa’s first responders, for their part, said they are helping out with the effort to get people into shelters during the extreme cold. Const. Marc Soucy of the Ottawa Police Service said that when they encounter someone on the street, police try to get them to a safe, warm place, and arrange for transportation to a shelter. Soucy said it’s a joint effort among police, paramedics and Ottawa Public Health.
Marc-Antoine Deschamps, a spokesperson for Ottawa paramedics, said there are a couple of difficulties addressing the challenge of keeping homeless people warm and safe in this bitter weather. First, one of the clinics that they often bring homeless people to, at the Shepherds of Good Hope, is closed because of a fire last week.
Also, “it’s a bit more of a challenge to take people from the shelter community to the hospital,” Deschamps said, “because usually they want to go back to the shelter and be dealt with in their environment, the stuff that they know.”
He noted that the emergency medical teams are carrying around extra equipment — blankets, hot packs — to help deal with incidents outdoors and to help when carrying people from inside buildings to the ambulance outside.
The cold weather will also affect how paramedics prioritize emergency calls, Deschamps said. A normal slip-and-fall outside, where there is a risk of frostbite or hypothermia, might take precedence over something that has happened indoors.