Barcelona“There was nothing. What you would find in a pavilion. I don’t know if they expected people to sleep lying on the basketball court.” The spokesman for Badalona Acull, Carles Sagués, criticizes the meager device that the city deployed on Sunday night so that homeless people would have a place to take refuge at night when the temperatures drop. The City Council opened the doors of the La Colina pavilion, but there were no beds or blankets, the activist explains, nor the option to use the showers or for those staying to bring their own sleeping bags or sleeping bags “due to the possibility of contagion”, which was argued by the council, according to Sagués.
The group of activists who visited the space even found it difficult – “we almost didn’t dare”, admits Sagués – to warn of this option to the people who continue to live in a settlement under a bridge on the C-31, approximately an hour’s walk from the Colina pavilion, since they were evicted from the old B9 high school more than two weeks ago.
Finally, no one saw in that pavilion a good alternative to tents or wrapping themselves in a flat blanket and no one spent the night under the baskets. Contrary to what the activists point out, municipal sources assure that there was food and drink in La Colina and confirm that no one wanted to sleep there that night. During the night there were representatives of Social Services, Civil Protection and the Urban Guard. Tonight and the following night the pavilion will be open again, and from now on also Red Cross members hired by the council will be in charge of the installation. These nights there will indeed be beds available for people who want to stay there, the City Council clarified to questions from ARA.
Sagués also criticizes that the accommodation in the pavilion was limited to 15 places despite the fact that there were no beds. “If it’s to sleep on the floor, the pavilion could fit 300”, he quips. However, remember that apart from the people who were evicted from B9, the last count of homelessness in Badalona was around a hundred people.
This Monday, the municipal groups of the Badalona opposition issued a joint statement in which they criticized that the cold operation “did not exist” because the council did not make available to the homeless “neither beds, nor mattresses, nor blankets, nor showers, nor any decent emergency accommodation resource”. The PSC, ERC, Badalona en Comú Podem and Guanyem Badalona see in the council’s “inaction” another example of the policies of the mayor, Xavier García Albiol, who they recall ordered the closure of the Can Bofí Vell hostel and who they accuse of “renouncing having a social and housing policy that responds to the emergency”.
Sense places extra a Barcelona
In the meantime, the social organizations have no news that any extra resource has been activated in the Catalan capital to help people living on the streets due to the drop in temperatures these days. The director of the Arrels Foundation, Bea Fernández, acknowledges that since Monday morning they expected the council to announce the opening of more accommodation places because they expected Operation Cold in the city – in the preventive phase since the beginning of December – to go to the alert level. When the alert phase is reached, explains Fernández, the council temporarily opens new accommodation places, only as long as the temperature drops. “I don’t know what is happening so that we are not informed of these places, I understand that they should be there. We are all seeing that today there was snowfall at very low altitudes”, he regrets.
At the moment, in the absence of any information on whether these positions will be opened, Fernández regrets that Arrels cannot indicate where to go to the people who ask them. Their place is open until a quarter past seven and until then they will share with users the information they have. In fact, he explains, when these emergency spaces are opened it is usually accompanied by a patrol by the Urban Guard focused on locating people sleeping on the street and inviting them to go to these spaces. This January 5th, however, he believes that it may be more difficult than usual to find these people: “Today is a complicated day, because there is a parade and there will be a lot of people on the street. If the squares open today, I think it will be difficult to locate the people on the street.”
For its part, in response to questions from the ARA, the council has limited itself to recalling that the preventive phase of Operation Cold has been activated in the city since December 2, as is done every winter, and that it is up to the teams responsible for emergency services and social emergencies to study whether additional resources are needed or to change phases. In this phase, the Emergency Overnight Reception Center (CANE) is opened, which has 100 places to spend the night there (74 for men and 26 for women). Since it opened in December until this weekend, around 370 people have been served.
The next level after the preventive phase is the pre-alert phase, which is activated when the weather forecast is for temperatures to reach 0 °C throughout the city in a generalized way or when the Municipal Snow and Ice Emergency Action Plan has been activated in the alert phase. However, this phase can also be activated at the discretion of the teams due to the accumulation of adverse phenomena associated with a general drop in temperature, without having to reach zero degrees, such as strong winds or rain.
