Cold snap drives Grand Strand homeless to shelters

Dwight Caraway said he won’t be surprised if his phone is busier this morning than it was Tuesday, when it was two to three times busier than normal.

At least some of the area’s homeless, said Caraway, manager of Myrtle Beach Haven, will try to tough it out for the first night of a cold snap, such as that expected last night.

But after the temperature plunges as low as was forecast, they understand the futility of trying to fight Mother Nature and make finding overnight shelter their primary task for the next day.

Caraway and the managers of the area’s other two homeless shelters said cold weather normally translates to at or near capacity demand. And when that happens, they improvise as best as they can.

Joy Hanner of Street Reach Ministries, which has the area’s largest homeless shelter, said shelters will call each other to try to find space for those seeking shelter from dangerously-cold nights. Hanner said it’s rare that Street Reach will have demand for all its 137 beds, but added that when it does, she will call Caraway and Dana Black at the North Strand Housing Shelter to see if they can accommodate someone else.

If that fails, she said her shelter would at least try to give those turned away extra blankets to help protect them through the night.

Street Reach has more than 50 beds reserved for what it calls emergency overnight shelter. The people who get the beds must show up at the shelter’s back door between 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., have valid identification and a shower as they report for the night.

Caraway said that Myrtle Beach Haven requires a background check before anyone can be given one of its 55 beds. But if someone comes seeking shelter too late for the check to be done, he may let them sleep on one of the sofas for a night if it’s expected to be so cold that the person might freeze to death.

Likewise, Dana Black of North Strand said it, and likely the other shelters, will allow homeless who don’t want to follow shelter rules to stay indoors in unusually cold weather.

“If it gets push-push,” Caraway said of the demand for shelter in dangerous weather, “normally there are other steps we can take.”

Caraway said that one or two of Myrtle Beach’s small, beachfront motels have been known to open seasonally-empty rooms to those in need of shelter when it’s a matter of survival.

Black said late Tuesday afternoon that there were still a couple of empty spaces at the 16-bed North Strand shelter, and she was thinking of trying to get some of those who sleep in the woods in the Little River area to come in out of the cold.

“We will do whatever to make sure nobody stays out in the woods,” she said, “because it’s so cold.”