[As climate change worsens wildfires each year, unhoused people in
Oregon and Washington experience the worst of the smoke.]
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CAN YOU AFFORD TO BREATHE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST?  
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Taylor Griggs
September 29, 2020
The Progressive
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_ As climate change worsens wildfires each year, unhoused people in
Oregon and Washington experience the worst of the smoke. _

Nearby wildfires bring very smoky conditions to a neighborhood in
south Eugene on September 8., Taylor Griggs

 

Even if you’ve never visited the Pacific Northwest, you might have a
mental image of what the region looks like. Essentially, everything
west of the Cascade Range is a temperate rainforest, with tall,
moss-covered trees and lush greenery providing plenty of oxygen to the
area’s inhabitants. 

But in the two weeks after Labor Day this year, aided by a months-long
regional drought
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and an extreme wind event
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Oregon and Washington were as flammable as California, which has been
notorious for destructive wildfires in recent years.

Blazes in Oregon were out of control, effectively destroying small
towns across the state. These fires, combined with those in eastern
Washington and northern California, blanketed the Pacific Northwest in
thick, toxic smoke, with no respite in sight.

Throughout the week of September 7, public health officials advised
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residents to stay inside and shut their windows, as breathing in this
much bad air for an extended period of time can potentially lead to a
range of long-term health effects.

Many Oregon and Washington residents, however, couldn’t stay inside.
According to a

2018 federal report
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from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development,
both states top the list for the highest rates of homeless
individuals. Between 2007 and 2018, Oregon’s unhoused population
went up by 12.8 percent, while Washington’s increased by nearly 24
percent.

In 2018, there were more than 36,000 people experiencing homelessness
in Oregon and Washington combined, with almost 20,000 of those people
living unsheltered. And with country-wide layoffs in the midst of
COVID-19, little government assistance, and the destruction wrought by
the wildfires, those numbers aren’t expected to improve any time
soon.

Inez Cooper is a thirty-eight-year-old woman who lives in Eugene,
Oregon, located about 100 miles south of Portland. Eugene is a college
town, home to the University of Oregon and more than 170,000 people.
It also has the highest rate
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individuals, per capita, in the nation.  

[unnamed.jpg]
 
Taylor Griggs

Inez Cooper gets some fresh air on a day with good air quality.

Cooper has been staying at a local facility that provides
military-style tents where people experiencing homelessness can sleep.
This facility, located about a thirty-minute bus ride from downtown
Eugene, has recently increased its capacity, but due to COVID-19
public health requirements, it has very limited indoor space during
the day. 

Cooper says that, during the ten-day period when the air quality in
Eugene was really dangerous, the facility didn’t have indoor space
available for its residents. She says that unless they could find
another place to go, there were a few hours during the day where
everyone had to sit outside in the smoke.

“I had a friend who let me come over to his place. The first time I
went over there, I was just covered in ash,” she says. “It was
pretty smoky all around.”

Cooper suffers from multiple chronic health conditions, including
asthma and chronic migraines, and uses a wheelchair. According to a
2019 Point in Time Count
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for Lane County, where Eugene is located, almost 40 percent of
unhoused individuals were chronically homeless, often indicative of a
mental or physical disability. In Multnomah County, which includes the
city of Portland, more than 70 percent of all unhoused people are
disabled. 

These disabilities not only make it difficult for people to secure
work or get permanent housing—Cooper says that she has found it
nearly impossible to find housing that would accommodate her
wheelchair—but they also vastly increase vulnerability to harmful
weather events, like the smoke. In the presence of a global pandemic
that targets the respiratory system, this is even scarier.

Wildfires pose a uniquely hazardous threat . A 2019 University of
Washington School of Medicine article
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says that because wildfire smoke contains particulates(pieces of burnt
plant material that are less than 2.5 micrometers), it’s easy for
unknown matter to accumulate in a person’s lungs. When wildfires
come into contact with human-made materials, like plastic and trash,
the smoke becomes even more toxic. 

Cities across the Pacific Northwest offered some resources to their
unhoused community members during the wildfires, but many say that
those weren’t enough. And even if these cities offered more
substantial resources for unhoused people to get some respite from the
smoke, there has been a breach of trust between unhoused communities
and city officials. 

Daniel Rushton, an activist based in Portland, works with unhoused
people to provide water and sanitation supplies for their communities.
He says that people experiencing homelessness in Portland have no
reason to trust the city to provide them with adequate help during a
crisis.

“No one has any misconceptions that the city gives a shit about
their wellbeing,” Rushton says. “It’s hard to say how the city
could improve. They’re doing so little that if they were to do
anything else, it would be better.”

Rushton says that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the wildfire
smoke, the city of Portland has made excuses to sweep camps of
unhoused people out of public areas, citing social distancing concerns
or fire hazards. 

“They don’t actually care about fire hazards, they only care
because a private property owner complained about them,” Rushton
says. 

But even as local governments have failed to provide for their
unhoused communities, the Pacific Northwest is rich with
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mutual aid groups, direct action coalitions, and individual people who
just want to help out. 

[unnamed.jpg]
 
Taylor Griggs

Pat Hadley stands near the house she stays outside after the smoke has
cleared.

Pat Hadley is a seventy-five-year-old woman in Eugene who has been
unhoused since she was evicted from low-income housing two years ago
for letting her family stay with her before they passed background
checks. She is currently living in a tent in a local homeless
advocate’s backyard, and says that, while the city hasn’t provided
her with much help, the neighbors have been great. 

“That’s how I survive out here, the people,” Hadley says. 

She says that local mutual aid groups have been passing out N95 masks
to people on the streets to help filter out bad air. Other groups in
Eugene have given out food, medical care, and raised money for
unhoused people to stay at local hotels during the fires. 

Seattle and Portland have both had extensive Black Lives Matter
protests this summer—most recently, both have been designated
“anarchist jurisdictions
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by the U.S. Department of Justice—and activist groups there are
stronger than ever. 

When the protests against police brutality in Portland receded due to
the wildfires, mutual aid groups  involved with the protests shifted
their efforts to helping people who’ve been impacted..

“There are things you can do right now to help the people around
you,” Rushton says. “The protests are the fruit of people feeling
extreme empathy and righteous anger and love. It’s made it much
easier to get involved and to find ways to fill a need.”

The Pacific Northwest, which has previously been expected to fare
better
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than other regions of the country as the climate warms, wasn’t ready
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for these fires. As climate change worsens, which is happening faster
than expected
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the region will only be more of a tinderbox. 

Droughts and hot temperatures across the region will mean larger fires
every year, and as more people are displaced by climate catastrophe,
they’ll need a place to go. 

“What we need is housing for all. It’s not profitable to house
people who can’t afford it, but it’s the right thing to do,”
says Indi Keith, a climate justice activist in Portland. “Climate
justice is also everything else.”

Taylor Griggs is a freelance writer based in Eugene, Oregon. Find her
airing her grievances on Twitter at @taylorjgriggs.

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