For the third time in seven years, hundreds of people had to flee a homeless shelter in downtown San Diego this week after a powerful storm dumped a month of rain, causing flooding.
The area received 2in of rain on New Year’s Day, which broke local records and forced multiple water rescues, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Officials evacuated the Bridge shelter, a massive gray tent, on New Year’s Day, and about 325 men and women moved into a gym in a local park, the newspaper reported.
Southern California has seen strong storms in recent weeks – which led the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to declare a state of emergency – and the rain was expected to continue over the weekend.
The winter storms come less than a year after wildfires destroyed much of the area. The Los Angeles fire department issued an evacuation warning in a burn scar area due to a potential debris flow due to the rain, and the National Weather Service issued a flood watch and stated that areas near burn scars are prone to flash flooding.
Such extreme weather events are expected to increase due to climate change and the people most affected by such disasters are often those who experience homelessness, according to recent research.
“Not a good start to the new year,” Bob McElroy, CEO of Alpha Project, the nonprofit organization that runs the shelter, told the Union-Tribune.
Hundreds who lived in the shelter also had to evacuate in 2018 and 2024.
“We’re definitely seeing more homeless people, more housing disruption, as a result of these disasters,” Steve Berg, of the Washington-based National Alliance to End Homelessness, told NBCNews in 2023.
Such events often reduce housing supply and make it more difficult for people who lose their homes to find affordable housing. In 2024, 11 million people in the United States were displaced from their homes due to natural disasters, reported the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international non-governmental organization.
After the 2023 wildfires broke out in Maui, Hawaii, the state saw an 83% increase in homelessness, according to a report by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes cause the displacement of housed and unhoused people alike,” stated a Georgetown Environmental Law Review report. “In short-term events, such as evacuations, stop-gap measures such as temporary housing and camping may be sufficient to meet needs. But when disasters damage or destroy housing, survivors may seek permanent solutions, such as new homes, only to find such additional housing unavailable because it was also destroyed and other shortages in play in the wider real estate market.”
In 2024, flooding forced residents of the Bridge shelter to flee waist-deep water, the Union-Tribune reported. About five years earlier, a sudden flood hit the same shelter.
“It takes a lot to scare me, and it scared me,” one shelter resident told the Union-Tribune.
This week’s storm has again damaged the property, at a time when the city already did not have enough beds for people who need shelter.
Michael Coats, 68 years old, who had been staying under the tent with his wife, remained optimistic even though he was homeless and had to run away from the shelter.
“I call him God,” Coats told a local NBC affiliate. “It gives me my inspiration to keep going through this, from being on the road to where I am today and where I’ll end up one day” with “My wife and I are going back to another apartment”.