Re “Storm moves in with growing power,” Feb. 26

Times photographer Francine Orr’s exquisite, deeply moving photograph on Saturday’s front page of Maurice, a homeless man wrapped in a foil-like blanket during the recent cold storms, was more heartrending and powerful than Gustav Courbet’s “Desperate Man” self-portrait.

Orr has captured a mighty symbol of every human struggling to survive in the wily and wicked machinations of Mother Nature. Her photo also shows the harrowing conditions endured by the unhoused on streets of the great city of my birth.

I remain shamelessly romantic that on the “battlefield” of L.A., none of our homeless must be left to fail and die beneath life’s thinnest tarps of foil. Michael A. Meng

Fullerton

Re “Finding their own refuge,” Feb. 25, and “Sky is hazy shade of winter as Bay Area gets blanketed,” Feb. 25

Two stories appeared side by side on Feb. 25. In one, people were “reveling in the snow”; in the other, as a result of “pounding rain and freezing temperatures,” homeless people “merely endured.” What a juxtaposition! Eleven thousand shelter beds for the 48,000 people who live on the streets of L.A. County just do not cut it. Why do we in California who do have shelter from the elements allow this to happen?

That’s a rhetorical question. Ronna Siegel Van Nuys