Dozens still sleeping rough in Kelowna as emergency shelter mats get put away

Now that the bitterly cold weather has disappeared, at least for now, emergency shelter mats have been put away in Kelowna.

During the cold and snowy weather of recent weeks about 30 mats were set up at the Salvation Army and Cornerstone shelter in Kelowna to give overnight shelter to those who could not or would not use other shelter beds. Those have been put away until the weather turns bad again, if it does this winter.

“Forty people continue to shelter outside overnight in the city,” Darren Caul, the City’s community safety director told iNFOnews.ca. “That’s consistent with the number of people we saw sheltering indoors during the extreme weather last week.”

The Stevens Road emergency winter shelter opened in West Kelowna on Friday, Jan. 24. That first night they had mattresses but the bed frames didn’t arrive until Saturday.

“We had a really good weekend,” Kevin Hill, administrative operations manager for West Kelowna Shelter Society told iNFOnews.ca. “Everything went smoothly.”

There have been nine to 10 people staying there each night, B.C. Housing said in an email.

The society offered 10 mats at its Brown Road shelter. Those have now been removed. Hill said some of the residents at Stevens Road had been staying on the mats and some were new.


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Rob Munro

Rob Munro has a long history in journalism after starting an underground newspaper in Whitehorse called the Yukon Howl in 1980. He spent five years at the 100 Mile Free Press, starting in the darkroom, moving on to sports and news reporting before becoming the advertising manager. He came to Kelowna in 1989 as a reporter for the Kelowna Daily Courier, and spent the 1990s mostly covering city hall. For most of the past 20 years he worked full time for the union representing newspaper workers throughout B.C. He’s returned to his true love of being a reporter with a special focus on civic politics