7/28/2022
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Range Media
Camp Hope residents try to keep bodies, heads cool in the heat
The Spokesman-Review
Frontier Behavioral Health sees 50% increase in calls
Valley postpones vote on law limiting camping, RV living and car accumulation
KREM
KXLY
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Range Media
Camp Hope residents try to keep bodies, heads cool in the heat
Carl Segerstrom
Tyler Petron helps to put donated bottles of water on ice at the supply tent at Camp Hope in Spokane, Wash. on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 (Erick Doxey for RANGE Media)
HEAT WAVE DAY 3 | The biggest needs beyond water, ice and sports drinks are toilet paper, hygiene products and prepackaged snacks
Carl is checking in with our unhoused neighbors at Camp Hope every day during this heat wave to see how they’re faring and what they need. Read Day 1 hereand Day 2 here.
Today, as temperatures rose to triple digits, Tammy McCray and her dog Jonah sat in front of one of the industrial fans in Camp Hope’s makeshift cooling shelter. The moving air and shade helped, but it was still very hot in the tent.
Misters were set to be installed right after I left at 4 p.m. and the camp is still waiting to rent a swamp cooler. There’s a shortage of such coolers in this heat, and Julie Garcia — executive director of Jewels Helping Hands, an organization that provides and organizes support for the camp — told us the equipment rental company was waiting on a return. When the cooler finally arrives, it will make a huge difference inside the tent and for the whole camp.
McCray said she has been living in her car for the last seven months since she got evicted from her trailer in Medical Lake shortly after losing her job at the Petro truck stop. She said she was evicted for not having a sufficient sewer system for her mobile home.
Normally when it’s hot, McCray stays in the car and turns on her A/C. Coming to Camp Hope has helped her make ends meet. “I ended up here because they’re supplementing my food, they’re supplementing my water,” McCray said. “I was spending half of my food stamps on water.” Hanging out on a cot in the cooling tent rather than with the air conditioning on her car was saving McCray on gas today.
For McCray, who said she has multiple sclerosis and degenerative arthritis, shelters with beds on the ground and tents aren’t an option. “I had to come here because no shelters would take me even after a doctor’s note that said she’s in chronic pain and can’t get off the floor,” she said. After waiting in her car outside the Cannon shelter for over two months, she moved to Camp Hope in early July. “My car has saved my life,” McCray said.
McCray said she’s working with the Spokane Housing Authority to get into housing and has a voucher to get into a townhouse in Airway Heights. Still, she’s worried it might not go through because she’s been homeless. “The longer you’re homeless, the more it works against you, you become a freak, you’re different, why aren’t you in a home?”
A vital part of McCray’s journey has been the companionship of her squirmy black collie Jonah. “I do treat him like my child, because if you take care of your child and your responsibilities, in the end you take care of yourself when you want to give up,” she said. “If it wasn't for my dog, who is my emotional support animal and service animal, I would give up,” McCray said.
Tammy McCray sits with her dog Jonah Happy McCray in the shade near her car and tent. Tammy stated she is on the Spokane Housing Authority's waiting list for a home of her own and hopes to move in this week. - At Camp Hope in Spokane, Wash. on Tuesday, July 26, 2022 (Erick Doxey for RANGE Media)
The challenges of living on the streets and in Camp Hope are always compounding. People search for glimmers of hope, companionship, community and a way out. But as obstacles stack up, the chaos of living on the streets can become all encompassing. Today, one of the main challenges people were talking about was theft within the camp.
Kenny Swaine, who said he’s 60, a kidney cancer survivor and a former semi-pro water skier, currently has some work at a local mechanic shop that services boats. He said $50 was stolen from his wallet last night after he fell asleep with it in his back pocket. “I came home from work, I was dog dead tired and I woke up and my wallet was all over my tent.”
Over the course of the afternoon, rumors circulated that an elderly man in a wheelchair had his generator stolen. That kind of major theft prompted a call to the cops. The generator was found and returned, but the woman who camp members suspected stole it was no longer at the camp.
Timothy Morgan helps deal with situations like the stolen generator and working with the police. Morgan said he started working at Camp Hope after he reached out to the security company that works the site for a job. Now, he’s a fixture in the community.
“The reality is when you steal you shouldn't be staying in a place like this, when you're dealing drugs, you shouldn't be staying in a place like this,” Morgan said. “There's still rules and regulations that need to be followed when you're living.”
“The police feel as though they have no responsibility there, they can't do anything because their hands are tied [by drug decriminalization laws],” Morgan said. “I will enforce the rules that we have set. Since day one, I've worked with Jewels [Julie Garcia] on enforcing — making sure that everyone knows kind of what's going on.”
Camp Hope has three main rules: no fighting, no drug dealing or open use, and no stealing. As I walked through the camp with Garcia, who was doing an afternoon round of wellness checks on the residents, we saw the remnants of the two encampments of people who had been thrown out the night before.
Garcia says she knows each community member within the camp and knows when something’s not as it should be. When I raised the concern with her that a man was passed out in his tent – out of fear he may have fainted from the heat — she told me he was a heavy opiate user and that she could see his chest moving. When we passed a tent with a syringe left outside the tent, she noted where the tent was and took a picture. They would be kicked out later for not abiding by the camp’s rules.
But enforcement attempts like this can be fleeting. “We don't really have any authority. The stuff that they do here, they do out of respect for each other and us,” Garcia said. “Really that’s all there is.”
Danny, a camp resident who didn’t give his last name, told me he ends up doing a lot of the mediation and conflict resolution in the camp. He said things have been busy lately. “People steal on one side of the camp and go sell it on the other,” he said. “With this heat people be losing their minds.”
Morgan described dividing lines in the community that echo the challenges I’ve heard from camp residents about the struggle to keep things together and to help rather than hurt each other. He explained it as a struggle between the people who come here to live, and those who come here to die.
“There's people here that just want to be here because they have a free range of habit and they can sit in their tents and use — that's why they don't go to shelters and those people are the ones here to die,” Morgan said.
The people trying to live are “the ones trying to gain access to social security cards, IDs, birth certificates, resources for housing, jobs,” he said. “And they just ran through a rough end of it when they were dealing with the COVID situation and because they weren't up to par with their rent at the end of it, they got kicked out. There’s a lot of those situations here right now.”
This creates a natural tension, Morgan said. “The ones that come here to die are trying to overrun the ones trying to live.”
Problems with theft compound the challenges of the heat wave. People don’t want to leave their tent, lest their belongings get taken. This reality underscores why the opening of cooling centers offsite is so untenable for Camp Hope residents. It also shows why pallet shelters are so attractive to residents: you can lock them.
Beyond the loss of property that comes with theft, a major challenge is that, if someone’s identification is stolen, it hurts their ability to access other services. Tammy Meyers, an outreach specialist, spends four or five days a week working with Camp Hope residents trying to get them the basic identification and support they need to move on from the camp.
Meyers said that lack of identification is already one of the biggest barriers for people trying to get into housing or services, and theft compounds that. “There's a bunch of us collectively that they're trying to get funding for [identification support],” Meyers said. “That's something that really needs to be looked at to remotely even get some of our folks on the trajectory to housing.”
The challenges people face at Camp Hope are no different from anywhere else in the unhoused community. “It's no different than anyone living under the bridge, living on the outskirts of town — they’re just people trying to survive, people getting their basic needs met and just really wanting help, but not knowing where to go for that.”
Meyers said she wants people in the community to understand who the people of the unhoused community are, apart from the stereotypes. “Our homeless community as a whole is one of the best communities that you could ever work for,” she said. “They're genuine, they're authentic, they're loving. A lot of them have just been treated so poorly by the systems in place to help them, so they've lost hope. You have to work a long time to build trust.”
“I think that's the biggest thing. These aren't invisible people. They're people with dreams, hopes, and aspirations, they're people that have needs just like we do,” Meyers said. “We all have to brush our teeth. We all use the bathroom. Everyone has just basic rights to do that. Our folks just need to be given a chance and be treated with dignity.”
Cindi Sarvis sought the shelter of the cooling tent today. She’s been struggling in her tent where all she has to cool off is a cardboard fan. “You don’t even know, I was sopping wet,” Sarvis said. “It’s scary, especially for my age, I’m 60.”
“If I had money, I could probably buy ice. If I had electricity, I'd be able to run a fan. I don't have a generator or anything like that,” she said. “So I'm just stuck winging it with what I can to keep cool.”
Sarvis said she first became homeless when her house in Wenatchee burnt down six years ago. She came to Spokane three years ago hoping she’d have better opportunities to find a place to live. “I came here seeking housing because I heard the housing over here was a lot better, but I found out it’s not,” she said. “Ever since I got here I’ve been on the streets.”
For Sarvis, who has been at Camp Hope since it began, living here has been a hardship. She showed me swelling and a rash on her shin that she said is cellulitis from the dirty conditions in the camp. Sarvis said she is a breast cancer survivor and that she has bad knees and a bad back. She uses a walker to get around.
Sarvis first applied for housing two and a half years ago. “I’ve just been waiting and waiting and waiting,” she said. “They lose my information, I get lost in the system. It's always something.”
Despite all the struggles she’s faced trying to get into housing and fighting to get social security, Sarvis said she’s still grateful for whatever support she can get. “It makes me appreciate the small things in life. What other people take for granted, I appreciate it,” Sarvis said. “Anything I get I'm grateful for. I don't take anything for granted at all.”
—edited by Luke Baumgarten
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The Spokesman-Review
Frontier Behavioral Health sees 50% increase in calls
By Julien A. Luebbers
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Following the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s transition to the streamlined 988 phone number on July 16, call centers across the nation saw a 45% increase in Lifeline calls, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Eastern Washington’s regional call center, operated by Frontier Behavioral Health, had a 50% increase.
The national increase in Lifeline calls is “really good news,” said Health and Human Services Regional Director Ingrid Ulrey. “The more people who call, the more people who are going to get the support and help they need to stabilize.”
Ulrey visited Spokane’s Frontier Behavioral Health call center on Tuesday to “hear firsthand the stories of the responders about how they’re catching people before they fall.”
The visit was part of a tour of behavioral health facilities, following up on the nationwide move to 988 as part of the federal government’s initiative to focus on mental and behavioral health.
According to Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services to the Biden-Harris administration, “the president’s budget proposes a historic investment in behavioral health, some $50 billion over the next 10 years.” Becerra made the remarks Tuesday during a meeting of the Western Governors Association in Coeur d’Alene.
Frontier is one of many organizations nationwide that have received increased funding .
“The movement in this country for an easy-to-remember three-digit number for the purposes of the suicide and crisis lifeline has been truly a national and inter-governmental effort, led nationally by HHS,” Ulrey said Tuesday.
According to Ulrey, the Biden-Harris administration and Beccera have had a “laser focus” on this issue since taking office. Funding for lifeline services has increased 18-fold to support 988, she added.
“There has been $282 million invested in crisis centers nationwide,” she said, and $105 million of that has been directed to states and territories to strengthen 988 call centers, including Frontier’s facility.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law on June 25, included an additional $150 million for 988 among its mental health funding and gun control laws.
Washington also set aside funds for the Native and Strong Lifeline, a resource directed at Indigenous callers, to be integrated into 988 in the near future.
The rapid increase in call volumes coincides with a labor shortage in behavioral health.
The Frontier center has been able to keep up with the uptick in call volume, “even though it’s challenging for recruitment and retention, and there’s vacancies,” said Ulrey, who met with Frontier CEO Jeff Thomas, COO Jan Tokumoto and others earlier Tuesday.
Increases in funding from the state and federal governments “have assisted with our ability to recruit and retain staff,” Thomas said a couple of weeks ago. Julien A. Luebbers can be reached at (509) 459-5318 or at julienl@spokesman. com.
Ingrid Ulrey (right) talks with Frontier Behavioral Health Crisis Triage Specialists Kim Kesner (left) and Paxton Scarburgh (right) on Tuesday.
JULIEN A. LUEBBERS/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Valley postpones vote on law limiting camping, RV living and car accumulation
By Colin Tiernan
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
For the second time in a month, the Spokane Valley City Council has postponed a vote on proposed nuisance law changes.
The City Council and staff have been working on updates to city law in hopes of cracking down on nuisance properties. The updates seek to address properties where residents amass large collections of cars, live in RVs and allow people to camp in tents on their land.
Council members have said those activities create a public health risk and become eyesores. Neighbors tend to complain about the homes, too, and direct their frustrations toward City Hall.
But not all disheveled properties violate the letter of Spokane Valley’s nuisance code, which includes a host of restrictions aimed at preserving public health and maintaining neighborhood aesthetics.
The amendments would attempt to beef up city code by banning adult camping, living in an RV without a city-approved permit and owning a large number of unconcealed cars.
“These are reasonable rules to try to get to the problem,” City Councilman Arne Woodard said.
The City Council likely will approve some amendments in the near future. But after nearly two hours of public comment and debate Tuesday, council members voted to remove an entire section of the draft law and postpone a vote on the full ordinance.
City Councilman Ben Wick motioned to strike a section of the draft that would have prevented homeowners from storing on their property more than five operable vehicles, one RV and one boat on a licensed trailer.
“I think we kind of went a little too far, especially when we talk about operable vehicles,” Wick said.
City Council members Tim Hattenburg, Laura Padden and Brandi Peetz voted alongside Wick, while Mayor Pam Haley and council members Woodard and Rod Higgins opposed the motion.
Members of the public took both sides of the nuisance amendment debate.
Some argued stricter regulations are desperately needed. Real estate agent Keri McCombs said nuisance properties can bring down the values of neighboring homes.
Others said the proposals infringed on private property rights.
Valley resident Dan Allison said it’s “great” that the City Council is trying to prevent homeless people from camping.
“I think what we’re trying to do is make it so we don’t come up with mini Camp Hopes everywhere,” he said, referring to the homeless encampment on Second Avenue and Ray Street with more than 600 residents.
At the same time, Allison mostly objected to the proposal and told the City Council “this is weird that this is happening in America and Spokane Valley.”
Resident Chuck Simpson said the amendments would be antithetical to Spokane Valley’s ideals.
He said he supported the move to incorporate nearly 20 years ago, when Spokane Valley became a city.
“The reason we wanted it is because we wanted less government,” Simpson said. “What about our personal property rights?”
Wick, Padden and Peetz all said they want city staff to bring back a less restrictive draft ordinance for the City Council to consider.
The revisions could include a more relaxed policy for allowing individuals to live in RVs and remove any fees associated with the required permit. The original draft ordinance would have prohibited living in an RV for more than 30 days in a year, unless an individual’s house was under construction or the city manager granted an exception during an emergency.
All seven City Council members voted in favor of postponing a vote on the full amendments, but not everyone was happy about it.
Woodard and Haley both stressed that the city has to deal with these nuisance properties soon.
“I’m about ready to throw my hands up,” Woodard said. “The longer we put it off, the longer the police cannot come take care of these issues.”
Haley said the updates are desperately needed. Everyone who lives next to a nuisance property understands the need for stricter regulations, she said, adding that she believes the properties tend to be hot spots of drug dealing and prostitution.
“It’s about the people who now have taken advantage and are now doing everything that they can do to make a living not working,” Haley said.
City Manager John Hohman told the council that his staff need clear direction on how to tweak the draft laws.
“You have been receiving complaints year, after year, after year, after year,” Hohman said. “You have a neighborhood that’s very consistently maintained and then you have one house with 10, 15 cars on the front lawn. That’s what you were trying to tackle.” Colin Tiernan can be reached at (509) 459-5039 or at colint@spokesman.com.
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KREM
The tent can hold up to 200 people at a time, providing relief to a large portion of the people currently living at the camp.
Spokane Fire Department confirms one person dead after being pulled from Spokane River
SPOKANE, Wash. — As the Pacific Northwest heat wave continues to scald Spokane, a local organization is taking steps to ensure those experiencing homelessness have a safe place to cool off.
Jewels Helping Hands (JHH), a local homeless advocacy group, set up a large cooling tent at the homeless encampment located near I-90 and Freya. Construction of the tents began on Tuesday and was completed and ready to use by Wednesday afternoon.
The tent can hold up to 200 people at a time, providing relief to a large portion of the people currently living at the camp.
At last count, more than 600 people reported living at the encampment, according to Julie Garcia, JHH Executive Director.
Chris Sen is one of the people living on the state-owned property. He said he has lived in a tent on the camp for the past four months and relies on rivers and splash pads to cool off.
"It is excruciating. You cannot stay cool. I mean, we're taking ice water and pouring it on ourselves to try to cool down works for a couple of minutes," Sen said. "And then you're right back to like, you see, I'm sweating and it's hot."
Sen said some campers have transportation to go to the river or one of the local splash pads on a hot day. However, Sen and other campers now won't have to go as far to get relief from the heat.
With triple-digit temperatures predicted through the rest of the week, Garcia said she wanted to step in to support the vulnerable people living nearby.
"Any Tent City would need this," she said. "I mean, it's a lifesaver. You know, in triple digits, people die in the seat. So I love it."
Garcia said the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is aware of the cooling tents, but JHH did not receive an official permit. While WSODT does not permit the activity on WSDOT land, Joe McHale told KREM 2 the department does not want anyone to have a medical emergency on its property.
McHale added WSDOT understands people need relief from the heat through the weekend and won't be getting in the way of the services JHH provides.
The Empire Health Foundation is paying for the tent and JHH is paying security to staff the tent and walk through the camp.
The tent will operate at the homeless encampment for the next 10 days.
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KXLY
Posted: July 28, 2022 5:34 AM by Destiny Richards
Copyright 4 News Now
How to prevent and treat heat illnesses
SPOKANE, Wash. — With these hundred degree temperatures, you might be looking to beat the heat at a splash pad, swimming pool or the lake with your family.
But just being out in the sun for a long time can be deadly.
Heat stroke and heat exhaustion are two heat illnesses that can strike if you’re outside doing activities or even just standing around.
According to a physician at Providence Urgent Care, heat exhaustion is more common.
You can feel faint or dizzy while sweating excessively. You can also experience muscle cramps and a rapid, weak pulse.
Heat stroke isn’t as common, but it’s harder to notice.
It comes with a throbbing headache, no sweating, a high body temperature and a strong rapid pulse.
Someone with heat stroke can also lose consciousness.
Both heat exhaustion and heat stroke come with feelings of nausea and sometimes vomiting.
In last year’s heatwave, a majority of the people who died from heat illnesses in Washington were 65 and older.
Dr. Josh Beers with Providence Urgent Care says older people as well as infants and toddlers are more susceptible to heat illnesses because their body temperatures can’t regulate as well as a healthy teen or adult.
But anyone can start to feel sick if they go out in the heat unprepared.
Dr. Beers says on a regular day, we should be drinking about 60-80 fl. oz. of water.
On an extremely hot day, especially if you’ll be outside, you should drink a gallon (128 fl. oz.) or more — and start early, before you go outside.
It also helps to wear loose, light-colored clothing and avoid alcohol or caffeine.
Beers says mild dehydration is what’s typically sending people in our region to the doctor.
It can lead to full blown heat exhaustion if you don’t get out of the heat quickly.
If you or someone around you is experiencing heat exhaustion, get somewhere cool immediately.
In the case of heat stroke, call 911 right away.