An encampment fire earlier this year in Williams Place Park
With codes and categories for responses ranging from brush fires to rope rescues, the Seattle Fire Department has added new designations for the significant number of 911 calls it faces in an environment home to thousands in the city — encampments.
A SFD spokesperson tells CHS the new categories including “encampment aid” and “encampment fire” are important for tracking both the number and the circumstances of the department’s responses to incidents involving homeless encampments.
“In order for us to better track our responses to homeless encampments, we have added in new dispatch type codes that list ‘encampment’ if this information is known when someone calls 911 to report it,” spokesperson Kristin Tinsley said.
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Tinsley says crews can also change the code by contacting dispatch once they arrive on scene if the response involves an encampment.
The “type code” for encampments joins Seattle Fire designations including those for single family-style homes, multifamily residential buildings, commercial buildings, and highrises. Unlike the other designations, however, SFD is utilizing the new encampment coding to also categorize non-fire responses involving medical aid.
Tinsley says the new SFD encampment coding goes beyond keeping track of stats and categories.
“In addition to tracking, it also gives responding crews improved situational awareness that the response is at an encampment location,” Tinsley said, adding that the “new tracking mechanism does not currently change our dispatch protocol.”
As for how many encampment-related dispatches Seattle Fire is responding to, Tinsley said the new codes have only been in place for a few days.
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This is a really good start to uncovering the total cost associated to the city councils hands-off/encouragement approach to homelessness and encampments in the city.
All we ever see is the headline numbers, a $100 million a year here from city, a $100 million there from the state, etc. but what has never been calculated is the total cost of the councils approach. The costs of significantly more fire calls (OD resuscitations, victims of violence, and fires), park department spending on cleaning ups and restoring, metro transit police calls, etc etc all are currently unquantified as are private costs like grocery stores having to raise prices to cover cost of hiring security or cover inventory shrinkage costs from theft.
If the total cost of supporting a few thousand people living on the streets (and placating their activist advocates) is in the range of $300-500M per year maybe, just maybe, a few Seattle voters will begin to wonder why we are asking taxpayers and businesses to cover the cost of about $100-150K per person per year to support people living in our parks and street. At some point this council has to be held accountable for their complete and total failure on this issue in spite of virtually limitless resources.
It’s like we’re in the 1940s where people thought dumping toxic chemicals in the woods out back, or dumped radioactive material off the coast made the problem go away, or ahem letting a country collapse. Agreed getting data is the only way forward, the problems don’t go away and these are easy to solve with money, they’re not rocket science problems.
The PSBJ calculated the cost to the region as over a billion dollars back in 2017.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of-homelessness-seattle-king-county-costs.html
Those “calculations” included non-standard items from other cities (making comparisons difficult), were done by two smart reporters who still as far as I can tell, are not trained in data or stats or have any background in anything closer to the topic than Business, and were calculated over a 6 month period and doubled. I’ve looked for but not found adequate supportive data for their numbers, a follow up report of any kind, or any kinds of links to calculate numbers further out but since it’s now 5-6 years old, a new report would be great but not done by a business journal…or maybe a group effort? A small team to look at the different costs that all major cities factor in, discuss, publish.
Inaccurate numbers around supporting the homeless abound. How much was made of that “75% come from King County” that was never vetted, and that was anyone who had lived at Mission Gospel for 2 weeks was therefore “from Seattle.” Or then there’s Scotty Morrow and his funny accounting practices, and his failed transitional housing that never results in anyone transitioning.
I agree with Nochop – once we have actual data on how much the homeless camper community costs Seattle in terms of actual, real-world dollars, it will make the ability to create policy.
I would think the activist community would like to have these figures, because it makes the argument that instead of spending X to put out fires and provide emergency aid response, we could be spending Y on providing housing and long term care.
Unless, of course, as has been suggested before, the activist community and people like Scotty Morrow actually don’t want the homeless crisis solved, because that would put them out of a job.
Don’t forget the cost of all the petty theft. Chain stores with locations all over the country report that shoplifting losses in Seattle are twice the national average.
Agree completely! Thank you.
I’ve probably spent 2 full years of my life living in tents, camping with the family. Never burned one down once.
You forgot to get high while you use open flame INSIDE your tent.
I know plenty of folks who’ve started fires with open flames while sober. :)
Oh, wait…they were indoors. Does that still count? ;)
denialism
Well….. doing the math, from the figures I could find that at the city keeps there is about one fire response per every 40 citizens in Seattle. (737,015 population / 18,343 fire calls) Now that is fires of every sort, because I couldn’t find it broken down into just house fires – so that’s also calls that were the result of false alarms, car fires, brush fires, garbage fires (and encampment fires)…
There is one actual fire in a homeless encampment for every 4.5 unhoused people in Seattle (approx. 3,700 unhoused people – note not homeless, but those found to be living outdoors/ 825 encampment fires)
Who exactly is at more risk for burning things down then…. housed or unhoused people?
The % of EMS, police, and FD time devoted to “camps and “campers” is pretty shocking considering what a small % of the population they are.
Another question – will someone camping in a garage that starts a fire be considered an Encampment? That happened on Boylston Ave E just this AM. Was called a “Garage Fire,” but 911 dispatch said it was due to homeless campers.
I am glad this is finally being tracked. They should also track the number of businesses and vacant houses burned down by homeless addicts. I can think of at least a dozen on Capitol Hill over the last several years. The cost in dollars, lives, and quality of life of the city’s policy of letting anyone from anywhere do anything they want in this city is astronomical.
This isn’t really totally relevant to this story, but I never really hear anything about the vaccination rates of the homeless, has anyone else?
You can’t solve a problem before you know how big a problem is. This is a positive first step.