Problem: You live outside, off the grid, in a self made or tent dwelling made of flammable materials. When it gets cold, you have little to no way to maintain your own temperature.
Solution: Start a fire using improvised materials in an enclosed space.
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| Feb 10th 2022. A smoldering tent near the inoperative "Car Wash" fountain |
Whether it is warm or cold most people that sleep in tents have limited options when it comes to heating themselves. Homeless people have to get creative because they don’t have access to electricity. Additionally their access to stoves and or any sort of safe kitchen equipment is extremely limited. Devices like open cans of hand sanitizer that are lit on fire, homemade candles with cardboard wicks, and propane heaters are common place if not necessary. These devices are especially unfortunate because homeless people are frequently disabled or sleeping in conditions that are not optimal for fire safety, such as clutter, or holding tarp materials very close to the flame to create a better insulated bubble. Some people are wrapping themselves and their pets in a tarp inside of a tent and placing candles next to them. As a homeless gentleman quoted in the Portland Mercury put it, “in here, every damn thing’s flammable”.
There are little known dangers to certain methods as well, for instance, propane tanks release the propane into the air when they get too warm and in a closed even slightly insulated space they can begin to release propane in a gaseous state into the atmosphere. Obviously this can read to a chain reaction, and if the person using the tank has any sort of open flame or spark it can literally cause their dwelling to explode. A not insignificant issue is carbon monoxide poisoning, because it’s a colourless odourless gas that can build up in enclosed spaces like tents and cause a slow death, frequently while the victim is sleeping. Carbon monoxide is released from the burning of most combustible materials such as propane, kerosine, and traditional fires.
I’m sure if you’ve walked to Portland on a regular basis you’ve seen many campfires and small fires left on the street. I’ve certainly seen multiple tent fires from my window, and couple from the ground level, it’s a raging inferno of plastic and black smoke. The only upside that I can imagine, is that if your tent is on fire hopefully the door melts fast enough for you to get out; however, as you might know melting plastic turns into a sticky, extra flammable liquid. In the end, the reality of freezing to death is a real issue and even being constantly cold leads to worse health outcomes for things like the immune system, wound healing, and mental health. The alternative of the heater, is to use drugs that numb the body to the temperature outside like heavy drinking or heroin. These are far from solutions however as many people die when their body’s heating system is made less effective by a depressant drug.
Fires in the city are expensive. If it gets out of control, damage to property can balloon extremely quickly in price. Between 2016 and 2017 (before the pandemic even) there were 218 homeless related fires that cost $1.39 million dollars worth of fire damage in the area around the Springwater corridor in Southeast Portland alone. A large part of it was because of a dumpster fire that spread to the building for the International School in Portland.
I think this is one case where you could try to blame homeless people, but their survival ends up becoming an externality to the lives of everyone else. Here there’s a clear discrepancy between the conditions that we are willing to let people live in and the damage that they are forced to inflict to be able be able to ensure their basic survival. Not every fire catches a tent on fire, but it truly only takes one bad one for things to get tragic. This is of course yet another conflict between personal liberty and Public Safety that tends to characterize American life.
The current solution the city has proposed is warming shelters, and while these are effective they suffer from the same issue as normal shelters in that they won’t cover the Service resistant. One proposal is constructing and making public the information behind safer heating devices ones that separate their fuel from their flame and can fall over or be bumped essentially anything that’s not an open flame. One such type of heater is the classic ceramic flower pot heater off and with a candle under it or in the linked article with an alcohol fed fuel source. The alcohol fuel source is key to preventing carbon monoxide buildup in an enclosed space. While Oregon has always been regarded as a generally temperate climate going forward with climate change is likely a bit more extreme weather will become more prevalent if you want to avoid public liability in the form of these tent fires we have to find a solution to homeless people shivering in their tents. As of July of last year city Council banned homeless encampments in high-risk areas to prevent wildfires. This is a preventative measure but does not exactly solve the overall issue. I think we can expect to continue seeing this issue more in the future until solutions can become more widespread.
-BD
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