PORTLAND, Maine — As cold weather sets in, unhoused Mainers do what they can to keep warm.
On Monday, Andrew Bove, with the nonprofit Preble Street, said 300 residents were currently living outside in tents in Portland.
"That is unprecedented in our city," he said. "That is a crisis that we're facing."
He also called it "atrocious" that people were living outside heading into winter.
The previous weekend, two people died in tent fires. The first happened Saturday morning in Sanford, where firefighters say they found human remains in a burnt tent.
On Sunday morning, Portland police officers said they found the body of a 31-year-old man inside a tent that was still on fire.
The causes of those fires were not released as of Monday. But, at a city council meeting the previous Monday, Portland Fire Chief Keith Gautreau gave detailed accounts of his firefighters trying to help people whose tents caught fire.
"Two weekends ago, we responded up on the Eastern Promenade to a fire. On arrival, our fire companies encountered two propane tanks exploding before we could really go in and make sure this was safe," he recounted. He told the council the living conditions inside the city's recurring encampments were "a recipe for disaster," and advised them to vote against a measure that would conditionally allow camping within city limits through April. The council indeed voted 6-3 to not allow camping.
Shannon Lyons, of Portland, had a propane heater until, she said, her tent was recently looted and destroyed. Open flames and gas are dangerous inside a tent. But now, the alternative was as well.
"You just basically ask anybody and everybody for blankets, emergency blankets, anything to keep us warm," she said. "For instance, the other night, I had nothing; not even one blanket, and I was freezing on Congress Street; couldn’t even get a blanket."
Meanwhile, Bove was focusing everything he had on finding shelter space and moving people to it.
"We’re, kind of pivoting a lot—or all of our street outreach work for the next four, five, six weeks to focus exclusively on trying to get people inside," he said.
He was hopeful that combined efforts of opening a new shelter for asylum seekers—thus freeing up beds at the city's other shelter—and a newly lowered threshold for opening emergency warming shelters around the city would get more people out of the cold.
He said he needed to remain hopeful, but he could not be sure if it would be enough for all of his neighbors to weather the season.