Updated at 10:22 a.m.
A half dozen tents and RVs lined Front Street south of downtown early Tuesday afternoon, with Sacramento’s temperature well on its way to a record-breaking 116 degrees.
Residents at the small homeless encampment had no nearby option to seek relief at a cooling center and most remained out of sight during the scorching heat of the midday sun. But they received something just as critical: Bottles of water distributed by volunteers.
“We got some water in our RV but it’s not potable water,” said Jon Rocha, who lives in his vehicle with his girlfriend, two dogs and a cat on Front Street. Volunteers left bottles outside of his door. “It’s really important to have that water, because I drink a lot of it.”
Teams of volunteer homeless advocates hit the ground across Sacramento this week to deliver water, ice, wet towels and food to unhoused residents at parks and encampments. They did so as the city and county also distributed water and opened a limited number of cooling centers — efforts that reach only a fraction of Sacramento’s unhoused population.
“We’re filling those gaps wherever we can. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” said Caity Maple before handing out bottles at Cesar Chavez Park and later at encampments south of downtown.
Maple, who is running for the District 5 seat on the City Council, is a founding member of Sacramento SOUP, also known as Solidarity With Unhoused People, one of several networks of volunteers that provides resources to unhoused residents.
Sacramento County contracts with the nonprofit Safer Alternatives Thru Networking and Education (SANE) to hand out more than 18,000 gallons of water per month to people experiencing homelessness, said county spokesperson Janna Haynes.
The city does not have a contract for water delivery, though the city’s park rangers and neighborhood resource coordinators are carrying water with them to distribute to people in need this week, city spokesman Tim Swanson said.
Those efforts provide water to many homeless encampments across the county, but not all of them.
Meanwhile, some Sacramento residents have shared their own places to cool down.
With help from Alchemist Community Development Corporation (Alchemist CDC), volunteers this week set up cooling stations with water, ice and shade structures in their own yards or driveways, serving anyone who needed to escape the heat including unhoused residents.
“It’s a pretty simple little thing that communities and neighbors can do to help each other out,” said Joe Robustelli, Alchemist CDC’s neighborhood empowerment manager. The organization provides supplies including ice and water for anyone who wants to use their property as a cooling station.
Robustelli said several of the eight stations established with help from Alchemist are near sidewalk encampments and have welcomed unhoused residents, including one south of Oak Park.
Sacramento can’t rely solely on the city and county-run cooling centers, he said, “because frankly there’s just not enough of them.”
Minimal use of cooling centers
Downtown Sacramento hit 116 degrees Tuesday, breaking a record set in 1925. Relief from heat will come over the weekend, when temperatures are expected to return to the low 90s and high 80s in valley areas, according to the National Weather Service.
The weeklong heatwave prompted both the city and county to open cooling centers this week. But those locations are limited in number and it can be difficult for people experiencing homelessness to hear about or get transportation to them.
As a result, few take advantage of the centers.
Sacramento’s only city-operated cooling center is the former Science Center at 3615 Auburn Blvd. It can provide relief for 50 people at a time, but only between seven and 10 people have used it daily from Thursday to Monday, according to city spokesperson Gregg Fishman.
Despite the low number, he said more people have accessed the center during this heatwave than others.
“We can handle more, obviously, and we would like to have more people who need it be aware of that and use that center location,” Fishman said.
The city on Tuesday extended the center’s hours to 10 a.m. to midnight in response to the excessive heat warning stretching to Friday. The city is also keeping seven community centers open until 8 p.m. through Friday, which is when county cooling centers will close.
Sacramento County’s three cooling centers have also failed to exceed capacity during the first five days of the heatwave, according to the county. Only three people used the center on Florin Road in South Sacramento on its two busiest days — the most that location has seen so far. Another center on Watt Avenue in North Highlands had 10 people on its most crowded day.
The midtown center on 28th Street has been used the most, reaching a high of 32 people when temperatures soared to 114 degrees. Still, only 14 people on average have used that cooling center each day.
Sacramento County’s homeless population grew to nearly 9,300 this year, up 67% from three years ago, according to the 2022 Homeless Point-In-Time Count published in June.
The survey found 72% of unhoused residents were found outdoors in tents, vehicles, abandoned buildings or other locations not suitable to live in.
To get to and from cooling centers, people can ride Sacramento Regional Transit buses and light rail for free. People must show a flier valid through Thursday to drivers or inspection staff upon request.
Last winter, drivers bused people from designated spots near homeless encampments directly to warming centers. But the county and SacRT aren’t doing that during the heatwave, county spokesperson Janna Haynes said.
The city’s Department of Community Response outreach teams could drive people to cooling centers if they find residents who want to go, Fishman added. But there isn’t a specific shuttle service for the respite centers.
Correction: Jon Rocha’s name was misspelled in a previous version of this article. It has since been corrected.
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