Pounded by yet another storm , Orange County’s only cold weather emergency shelter had its own emergency this week, when water started coming in and workers had to quickly move to divert a potential flood and plug leaks.
A temporary shelter inside a gymnasium at Independence Park in Fullerton was at risk of flooding, beginning late Tuesday afternoon, March 14, until workers put up sandbags to prevent water from going inside while others dug a drainage ditch near outdoor bathrooms, according to homeless advocate Michael Sean Wright.
Related: Homeless advocates pitch igloos to offer warm shelter during cold snap
“Outside, where the bathrooms are, we had flooding about four inches deep … and we had to carry a person that was stuck in the ADA bathroom,” said Wright, chief of field operations for Wound Walk, a “street medicine team” of Lestonnac Free Clinic which provides free services to the uninsured and has set up a triage clinic at the shelter.
No one seeking services was displaced. County officials said clients have full access to the facility.
Within half an hour of calling for help, Fullerton city workers were on hand, and so was Ed Gerber, the clinic’s executive director, who immediately took to digging a drainage ditch himself.
“The water smelled like sewage,” Gerber said on a video posted to the Wound Walk OC Facebook page. “This was not a healthy place to be tonight. So thankfully city workers came out … with shovels.”
Wright, who tends to the medical needs of homeless people at parks or wherever they’re at, set off a series of phone calls and emails to county leaders and others, alerting them to what was happening. While praising some for their actions, Wright also called attention to the overall homeless situation during the cold weather snap, saying it is “now officially an emergency.”
“The County of Orange has no working emergency plan for the unhoused,” Wright said in an email early Wednesday morning.
Frank Kim, Orange County chief executive officer, said the problems at the temporary cold weather shelter were remediated by Wednesday, and he disputed the idea that pooled water co-mingled with sewage. He also disagreed that Orange County doesn’t have a plan to address homelessness during cold weather snaps.
County officials began planning for cold weather shelters last summer, Kim said, but then hit a snag when Santa Ana — which already houses homeless shelters — fought back against another facility .
Fullerton “welcomed us into this gymnasium site, which is not the most ideal site for a program like this,” Kim said in an interview, but it “is operating very successfully.”
Kim then pointed to other homeless shelters that operate year-round and said they’re all “part of our emergency operational system.”
“These things did not exist 10 years ago. So we look at it and say every year, we’re adding an additional brick to the foundation that we’re laying to support our homeless population,” Kim said.
According to the 2022 homelessness count in Orange County, there were 5,718 homeless people; of those, 2,661 had found shelter.
This story was udated Thursday morning, March 16, to correctly identify Frank Kim as the county official interviewed.
