City opens overflow shelters after Coliseum hits capacity overnight
By Karen Morfitt
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DENVER (KCNC) — As the cold moved in, emergency shelters started filling up faster than expected.
“We have flexed, and we flexed overnight, we went beyond our number of cots and just started taking people in to get in out of the cold,” Britta Fisher said.
Fisher is the Director of Denver’s Department of Housing and Stability, one of the agencies helping with the cold weather response.
The Denver Coliseum was set up in preparation for the arctic storm. It has a capacity for 225 people.
“What can we do, it’s cold out here,” one man said as he made his way inside the emergency shelter.
Wednesday night, more than 350 people showed up ready to get out of the cold. The Denver YMCA was opened to help with overflow.
Thursday, the Wellington Web Municipal Building was also transformed into a 24-hour warming center.
“It’s hard to say how many people will come inside,” Fisher said, “but that’s why we had the plan, the back up plans and the back up to the back up plans.”
Still, many chose to stay outside, doing what they could to survive.
Denver Fire Department says they responded to 21 calls for cold exposure on Wednesday night.
Fisher says the weather emergency, on top of an influx of migrant families arriving in Denver and the city’s ongoing homeless crisis, has stretched the city’s resources thin.
“We expect to see more than 3,000 people across all our shelters. When you think about that, just a couple of weeks ago our capacity in our homeless shelter system was about twenty-one hundred and now, we are seeing that go up by almost 50 percent. That is a huge increase in just a couple of weeks,” Fisher said
The 24-hour shelters will remain open through Saturday morning. We know some of them are being staffed with help from the National Guard.
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