REGION BRAVES FREEZING TEMPS NOT FELT IN YEARS
Hundreds of homeless people sheltered from deadly cold
Yes, it was that cold. As the temperature plummeted to a bone-chilling -10 degrees in Boston Friday night, the coldest the city’s been in more than half a century, the region tacked on weather records and dealt with minor fires, power outages and plenty of burst pipes.
Most importantly, in Boston, the city rallied to keep people out of the cold. Hundreds of people who needed a space to stay safe and warm flocked to Pine Street Inn.
At least 60 people slept on beds and mats in the lobbies of Pine Street’s four shelters as its roughly 460 beds had been taken.
The agency had two to three extra outreach vans driving around the city to ensure those out on the streets had warm clothes, blankets and food, said Barbara Trevisan, Pine Street’s vice president for marketing and communications.
“It’s crazy,” Trevisan said of the bone-chilling cold. “Because it’s been a pretty warm winter, our teams had to start going out earlier in the week because people out on the street might not be aware of what’s coming in terms of the weather.”
Similar scenes played out across Boston’s homeless shelters Friday into Saturday.
All nine of the city’s overnight homeless shelters were filled to capacity Friday night, and day shelters extended their hours Saturday to those looking for refuge from the bitter, arctic air, city Chief of Housing Sheila Dillon told the Herald.
As cold as -10 degrees sounds, it felt much colder as wind chill pushed conditions down to -36 late Friday, the coldest night in Boston since 1957 when it last hit -10, according to the National Weather Service.
Temperatures were barely warmer, at a recorded -9 degrees in Boston at around 7 a.m., as the sun rose and highlighted sea smoke off the coast. The fog-like effect is achieved with the evaporation of vapor from the relatively warm sea water against the dry, frozen air.
The bright sunshine throughout the day tried its best, but temperatures were slow to climb. In Boston, it took until just before 11 a.m. to reach 2 degrees and was 13 degrees by around 3 p.m., but the wind chill made it feel like -1.
City leaders were out in force to coordinate efforts and try to get shelter for as many people living on the streets as possible. Many city workers worked double overtime, said Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the city’s Public Health Commission.
“They did God’s work,” said Ricardo Patron, the mayor’s chief spokesman. “I think they saved lives. It was dangerously cold.”
The city started getting the word out earlier in the week about this weekend’s forecast and the dangers of the extreme cold, said Tania Del Rio, the director of the coordinated response team in the mayor’s office.
Boston EMS responded to 16 cold-related incidents Friday and 12 by 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Incidents involved people with underlying health conditions, particularly respiratory, as well as people exposed to the outdoors, whether homeless or running errands but unprepared for the cold.
Though it appeared many heeded the city’s advice, Del Rio said, those who did stay on the streets were safer after the city handed out warming equipment, hats, gloves and blankets that were collected through donations.
With the “extremely dangerous” temperatures, the Public Health Commission’s main concern for the homeless population is hypothermia, especially as “it could kind of come on slowly and lead to impaired thinking,” Ojikutu said.
“If you think about our unsheltered population around the city who may be experiencing substance use disorder or may have mental health disorders, that makes them extremely high-risk,
and it’s extremely dangerous,” she said.
Roughly 80 people took refuge at Boston’s South Station overnight Friday, Dillon said. Gov. Maura Healey this week changed a policy to allow the transit hub to stay open on very cold nights instead of having it close at midnight.
“We do appreciate South Station being open on very cold nights,” Dillon said, “but that’s not going to be how people will get the services and the housing that they need.”
Boston didn’t get the worst of the arctic blast. All four NWS stations in southern New England, from Hartford to Providence and from Boston to Worcester, set new low temperature records for Feb. 4, according to NWS meteorologist Rob Megnia. Worcester was the coldest at -13 real temperature and down to a deadly -40 degrees with wind chill factored in.
At the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the night and early morning was other-worldly. At 5:39 a.m. Saturday, the observatory reported an alltime record low of -47 degrees, with 100 to 115 mph sustained winds gusting up to 135 mph and contributing to an extreme wind chill level as low as -110 degrees.
Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in Milton dropped to a record-setting -14 around 3:45 a.m. Saturday.
First responders across the Bay State responded to a huge number of calls despite — and often because of — the freeze. Emergency communications in Boston were an endless stream of small fires, burst pipes and power outages.
The Wareham Fire Department rescued a dog through ice on a pond around 7:20 a.m. Saturday.
In Mansfield, roughly 400 residents lost power Friday night forcing that town to set up an emergency warming shelter at an elementary school, and firefighters there assisted at fires in neighboring Easton and Foxboro early Saturday.
The strong winds that have provided the extra chill were also a headache for regional power customers and the crews “working around-the-clock.”
“We have been responding since last night to power outages across Massachusetts that have been mainly caused by strong wind gusts bringing tree limbs down onto power lines, and continue working to restore power for customers without power as quickly as safely possible,” said Jamie Ratliff, a spokeswoman for Eversource Energy, in a statement Saturday evening.
Now that the peak of the cold weather is past us, the region is in for a major warmup Sunday, NWS meteorologist Rob Megnia told the Herald.
“We’re going to rebound significantly,” he said of Sunday’s temperature climb possibly into the 50s. “It will be quite a swing from this afternoon to tomorrow afternoon.”
The week ahead could stay in above-average temperature range, he said, largely staying in the 40s region-wide with the possibility of peaks into the 50s through the “pretty mild week.”