PORT ANGELES — There’s truly no place like home when there’s no home, period.
People without a safe place to spend the night face even harder hardships as Clallam County shivers beneath its frigid blanket of snow, say agencies that aid them.
By day it’s a challenge to keep warm.
Homeless people can get a hot meal between noon and 1 p.m. daily at the Salvation Army, East Second and Peabody streets.
It serves about 100 people per day.
Otherwise, they can take temporary refuge in businesses that are open 24 hours a day, libraries and public buildings from which they won’t be turned out, and on Clallam Transit System buses if they can afford the fare.
By night, their choices are even slimmer — although their chances have greatly improved.
The Serenity House Single Adult Shelter, 2321 W. 18th St., can put up people in a pinch, said Kathy Wahto, Serenity’s executive director.
Although the shelter is full, she said, “if someone’s there in the middle of the night, they’re not going to send them away.”
Outreach shelter opens
Moreover, the Serenity House Emergency Outreach Shelter has harbored homeless persons in the Tempest building, 535 E. First St., since Nov. 2.
It opens at 9 p.m. and houses people until early the next morning.
Designed to let about a dozen people spend the night, the outreach shelter has housed as many as 16 during the cold snap, Wahto said, including teenagers and pregnant women.
“Long before this is over, we’re having to push that number up,” she said.
“We’re serving numbers that really stretch our resources.”
People staying at the shelter recently included a couple who had been living in Joyce in a substandard building that became untenable when the power went off.
Three others had been camping in the woods until the weather turned nasty.
Still others had stayed in motels until their Social Security or disability payments ran out.
