Report IDS places for possible outdoor homeless shelter

A new report analyzes and ranks potential sites in Tuolumne County for an outdoor homeless shelter, but there’s currently no place for people like Kenneth Deome and his 74-yearold physically disabled sister to go.

Deome, 61, originally from Salinas, and his sister, Sandi, are examples of how someone can suddenly find themselves on the streets due to a series of unlucky events in life.

The pair have been living in their vehicles since about mid-march as they get booted from one parking lot to the next. Deome stays in a singlecab pickup, while his sister is in a compact SUV.

It’s the first time either of them have been homeless, Deome said in an interview Friday.

“Someone should write a book called ‘How to be Homeless,” Deome said while standing outside his pickup in the latest parking lot where they’ve set up camp. “If you’ve never been in this situation, you have no idea what you’re doing, and you end up weeks and months behind.”

Deome’s path to homelessness begins with the death of his wife, Carol, in 2004 after battling cancer for 12 years.

Carol’s death left Deome “an absolute trainwreck,” he said, so he put a pause on life and moved back in with his parents for a time.

“I thought I would get back on my feet, but 18 years later, I’ve never really recovered,” he said.

Deome’s father died a year later, and his mother’s health began to decline. His sister, a retired nurse, moved in with them to help out.

The family rented a place in Cottonwood near Redding for several years until they were evicted after the owner decided to sell the property in the wake of the November 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, which killed 86 people, destroyed the entire town of Paradise and burned down thousands of homes.

“We couldn’t find a place, because there were thousands of people in the area who were suddenly homeless,” Deome said.

They finally found a place in Copperopolis that they could rent and moved into it in April 2019.

Deome’s mother died before they had to leave the place they were renting in Copperopolis at the end of January, when their landlord got an offer to purchase the property from a prospective buyer who didn’t want the liability of tenants.

“We were in motels looking for places to rent, but it was difficult to find anything, and everything we could find was way out of our price range,” he said. “We spent a lot of money trying to stay out of the streets and the situation we’re in now.”

When they ran out of money, Deome typed in “safe places to park if you’re homeless” on Google and found something online saying that Walmart allows people to stay in the parking lot for one night.

Deome and his sister ended up staying in the parking lot and moving around the shopping center for about two weeks until a business owner lodged a complaint with the Sonora police.

The officers they encountered were sympathetic to their plight, Deome said, citing how they tagged his pickup for having lapsed registration but didn’t tow it.

said in a press release earlier this week. Forest management and prescribed fires help restore and maintain complex forest communities, reduce hazardous fuel loads, improve wildlife habitat, restore nutrients to soils, protect park infrastructure, and reduce chances of larger, out-ofcontrol, catastrophic megablazes.

Ambitious plans to do prescribed burns in the extremely threatened 6,400acre South Grove — home to more than 1,100 mature giant sequoias in Tuolumne County — potentially planned for this spring are now on hold until autumn.

A contract firefighter was fatally injured May 6 when a dead tree fell on him while he was doing prescribed burning prep work in the South Grove section of Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Tuolumne County, his employers and a state parks superintendent said.

Darin Banks, 26, of Red Bluff, was assigned to an initial attack hand crew working to prepare an area for prescribed burning in Tuolumne County, Jess R. Wills, president of Firestorm Wildland Fire

Suppression, Inc., said in a statement.

Banks was a father with a 4-year-old son, Wills said. He also leaves behind his mother, siblings, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Firestorm has set up a Gofundme page to raise money for Banks’ survivors at https://gofund. me/3e716ce7. As of Friday afternoon the page had raised more than $30,000.

Calaveras Big Trees State Park and partners with Cal Fire for several years have been preparing for badly needed prescribed burning in the park’s North Grove and South Grove of Giant Sequoias, where the nonprofit Calaveras Big Trees Association earlier this year described threats to the endangered sequoias as a crisis and an emergency.

Overgrowth in Calaveras Big Trees State Park is now considered a crisis, because 13% to 19% of the world’s giant sequoias have been killed or mortally burned by wildfires in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks and the Sequoia National Forest since August 2020.

Earlier this year, giant sequoia advocates with the nonprofit Calaveras Big Trees Association called out the state parks director to speed up plans for more prescribed burns to try and save the giant sequoias in the North Fork Stanislaus River watersheds in Calaveras and Tuolumne counties.

Severe fire threats to the overgrown Calaveras Big Trees South Grove of 1,000 giant sequoias in Tuolumne County prompted the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, a group of federal, state, local, tribal and academic partners that formed in July 2021, to try to protect the world’s remaining giant sequoias from threats of climate change and catastrophic wildfire, to declare the South Grove the “most at-risk” remaining unburned sequoia grove on earth.

Banks “was doing dangerous, vital, and crucial work to protect our giant sequoias and prepare the forest for a prescribed burn that will help prevent a catastrophic fire in the park,” Vida Kenk, president of the nonprofit Calaveras Big Trees Association, said earlier this week. “We are grateful for his service, which will always be remembered, and deeply regret his loss.”