Community worried about unhoused South Bay residents amid deadly heat wave
The heat wave that hit the Bay Area may have killed over a dozen people in the South Bay, and it's prompting volunteers to do what they can to help the unhoused community.
For the past week, Shaunn Cartwright has been trekking across Santa Clara County checking on all the unhoused people.
"People are just so hot, and I mean they have no energy for anything," said Cartwright.
Cartwright is with Unhoused Response Group, or URG, an all-volunteer team that provides supplies and aid to the homeless.
She said this latest heatwave continues to be unbearable for so many people living on the street.
"I mean you go out there and you see women in minimal clothing and all the guys are just in minimal clothing too, and now you've sweated through everything that you have, everything is filthy, it's not like you can go to the laundromat," said Cartwright.
According to the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office, 14 deaths are being investigated as potentially heat-related.
Two of those individuals were unhoused and one other was an unhoused person in transitional housing. Shaunn said sadly those numbers don't shock her.
"It's just in this kind of a heat wave people just cannot sustain that. Your body is not made to basically be left out in the heat with no food, no water," said Cartwright.
Cooling Centers have opened across the county to help people beat the heat but Shaunn said those aren't much help to the unhoused when they don't stay open overnight.
"They should be open overnight to follow along with county recommendations and that would really be helping people, you know having cots that people could lay in with electrolytes and things like that to give people some sort of respite but they're not," said Cartwright.
Shaunn said she's certain more people will die in the coming days as temperatures again peak over 100 degrees.
"I just accept that they're going to die because nobody is getting it together. People say that there's an emergency but nobody's responding like it's an emergency," said Cartwright.
Shaunn said all she can do is continue to check on all the people she knows over the coming days and provide what supplies she can.
Her hope is that more people will join her in doing that to try and save as many lives as possible.