In 2021, KCRHA partnered with the City of Seattle Human Services Department to begin the process of taking over the lead role in homelessness services response to severe weather events. By 2022, KCRHA had become the lead agency, and has been working since then to improve and expand our county-wide response during heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfire smoke, and heavy precipitation including snow and ice.
In the summer of 2023, we shifted away from using Heat Index alone to determine when we activate. We started using NWS’s HeatRisk tool, allowing us to activate in alignment with the functional risk heatwaves pose to the specific population we serve: people experiencing homelessness in King County.
That winter (2023/24), we shifted our communication strategy to include earlier and more robust communications with service providers and the public. This summer, we were able to adapt and implement those changes for our heat activations, too.
Having managed severe weather response for three summers now, and as we look back on the 2024 summer season, we can see a lot of progress! We also see opportunities to shift our response to enable our community to serve more people, in more areas, more efficiently.
Summer 2024: The Numbers
Our first activation of the summer began on July 5, and our last day activated was September 7. For the 63 days between those two dates, we were activated for 27 days, or 43% of the time. During those activated days, we were able to stand up cooling centers, distribute cooling and hydration supplies, and leverage our severe weather materials distribution system to also get COVID-19 mitigation supplies from Public Health – Seattle-King County into the hands of local service providers.
In that first activation in July, which lasted for 17 days, we were able to distribute:
- Over 300 cases of water and electrolytes
- 80 cooling towels
- 20 misting fans
- 30 box fans
- 8 air purifiers
These items went to 17 service providers in Seattle, Bellevue, Federal Way, Maple Valley, Renton, Kent, and Snoqualmie Valley. Approximately 2,178 people were served across the 17 service providers that received supplies during that severe weather activation.
In addition to our severe weather supplies, over the course of the summer season we were also able to distribute more than 11,000 N-95 masks, nearly 4,000 COVID-19 tests, 83,300 pairs of exam gloves, and nearly 3,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.
Lessons Learned
The critical lesson that we learned this summer is that, while we are proud of our supply distribution efforts, it is an inefficient and labor-intensive way to get critical supplies distributed to communities across the 2,130 square miles that is King County. In addition to KCRHA staff time and redeployment, it also cost local service providers staff time to come to downtown Seattle and pick up their supplies.
As such, starting in February of 2025 as new funding opportunities open, we are amending how we structure severe weather contracts so that we can rapidly distribute funds, not supplies, to contracted service providers. This will empower service providers to purchase the supplies that meet the needs of the specific populations they’re serving, nearby in their community, and on their own schedule, rather than needing to travel to the KCRHA office during set supply pickup hours. We will share more details about this process change in upcoming communications.
Winter is Coming
As we look toward the winter, we can take the lessons we learned over the summer and adapt them for what are typically our most intense activations of the year: severe cold with snow and ice. Severe heat is dangerous, and challenging in its own rights, but when roads are shut down and transit slows—sometimes to a halt, like it did in winter 2022/23—getting staff and supplies to service providers is incredibly challenging.
We are, however, preparing for the challenge. Over the next several weeks, while we’re in between severe weather seasons, we are participating in conversations and tabletop exercises, wherein we roleplay activations to test our systems and workout any identifiable issues, with our partners at City of Seattle and King County.
It is imperative that as a community, we continually improve our severe weather response, because for those living unsheltered, the response we activate can be life or death.
As the agency tasked with administrating the homelessness services response to severe weather events, we take this task seriously, and are deeply committed to continual improvement, with every more efficient and stronger than the last.
