Late Tuesday afternoon, March 14, homeless advocate Michael Sean Wright of Wound Walk OC was leading efforts to stop rainwater from flooding in and around a homeless shelter in Fullerton.
About 24 hours later, he was fired.
Wright and Ed Gerber, the top executive of the free health clinic volunteering at the shelter, say their group was dismissed because Wright called attention to the impact of the rain on the shelter and the plight of the homeless in Orange County. Both men said there was a strong smell of fecal matter in the water pooling outside the shelter earlier this week.
Related: Orange County’s homeless cold weather shelter hit by rains
“I think it’s retaliation,” said Gerber, CEO of Lestonnac Free Clinic, whose Wound Walk “street medicine” team of volunteers, led by Wright, had set up a weekly triage clinic at the shelter.
“We blew the whistle on what was going on over there,” Gerber said. “There was no action taken by the facility. The people who volunteered had to call the city and dig a trench (to divert flood water).”
But the shelter administrator who fired the volunteer group said Wright mischaracterized what had happened and caused unnecessary panic.
“It was not an emergency. There was no need to get everybody riled up,” said Tescia Uribe, chief program officer for PATH, which runs shelters across California, including the temporary cold-weather shelter inside a gymnasium at Independence Park.
Due to the cold weather and rains, the county opened the facility on Feb. 1, through the end of this month. Contracted to accommodate 90 people, the shelter has housed as many as 116 men and women seeking refuge from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m., when the shelter closes each morning.
In Orange County, a 2022 count tallied 5,718 people without a home. Of those, 3,057 did not have shelter.
According to Wright, the ground was already “untenable and hazardous” by the time he arrived around 5 p.m. Tuesday. Water started coming into the…
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