A final push to get homeless into shelters
Outreach workers help vulnerable citizens find safe place to stay
As the early gusts of Hurricane Irma picked up strength Sunday in Orlando, Dewey Wooden donned a poncho, grabbed his cell phone and hit the streets, hoping to coax the last holdouts of the city’s homeless residents to take shelter.
“Hey, brother, you know there’s a hurricane coming?” Wooden called to a figure curled up in a storefront, a hoodie pulled over his head and a sandbag for a pillow.
The figure stirred slowly — a man emerging from a light sleep. “Yeah,” the man said. “I’m OK.”
“The shelters are all open,” Wooden persisted. “We can get you in. No fee. … It’s going to get ugly out here tonight.”
“I don’t like shelters,” the man said.
Wooden, director of behavioral health at the Health Care Center for the Homeless, would have better luck with others. In the final 24 hours before Irma’s rain bands began to pound the region, he and a dozen staff members of Central Florida’s homeless agencies and the city of Orlando combed parks, alleys and the region’s woods to warn of the impending danger.
By Sunday morning, more than 450 of the homeless had entered the city’s three main shelters — the Orlando Union Rescue Mission, the Coalition for the Homeless and the Salvation Army.
Fred Clayton, president and CEO of the Rescue Mission, had spent the night there himself, supervising as his staff provided meals, showers and hygiene kits to a gymnasium filled mostly with families.
And when Wooden came across a man in hospital scrubs and a wheelchair, he called Clayton to personally transport the man to shelter.
Lynx bus service had already stopped Sunday by the time workers found Woodrow Akers. The 55-year-old homeless man had spent Saturday night on the porch of a home near Lake Eola, but he was eager to have some walls between himself and the storm.
“I just got out of the hospital,” he said, still wearing an ID bracelet from his most recent back surgery. “It’s going to be bad. Palm fronds are going to be flying around. I got hit by a palm frond one time, riding a bicycle. It hit me and knocked me right into a busy highway.”
Joel Miller, an outreach specialist for the Health Care Center for the Homeless, knew Akers well — as he did most of the men lingering on the streets in the final hours. For years he had tried to help most of them get aid, sobriety and housing. Sometimes it worked; too often it didn’t.
“Really, we started three days ago trying to notify every person, every church downtown, everybody who serves meals [to the homeless],” he said Sunday. “I think we got everyone who was willing to come in.”
For the rest, he and Wooden told them a parking garage or concrete stairwell was their best bet.
One man, who identified himself only as Doug, told them he had spent Saturday night at the Salvation Army but had to leave.
“It’s too crowded,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “I can’t be around that many people. I have know?”
He asked them for food. “Sorry, we don’t have any,” Wooden answered. “I’ve got some bottled water … but the shelters will feed you.”
The man said he would walk the half-mile to the shelter in the rain.
Martha Are, executive director of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, followed after him for a bit, trying to make sure he headed in the right direction. No one could force Orlando’s homeless into a shelter at this point, though police in Miami had invoked a controversial Florida law known as the Baker Act to round up homeless people there, taking them to a mental hospital for up to 72 hours.
It was believed to be the first time the law, applied to those who are deemed a danger to themselves or others, had been used for a hurricane evacuation.
In Orlando, homeless advocates relied only on their powers of persuasion.
“Sometimes if you can get one person to go, their buddies will follow,” Are said. “They don’t want to be the only one left outside.” issues, you