Sodden blankets, swollen hands and police sweeps: Surviving on the streets during LA’s historic storm
In a small Metrolink car park north of Los Angeles, Carla Orendorff packs up a trolley with plastic storm kits – containing items such as plastic cutlery, sleeping bags and socks – to distribute among those living on the streets on Thursday morning.
Her dog, Lavi, “insisted” on coming with her, she tells The Independent.
Carla is barely out of the parking lot when she spies someone she knows, who waves. “How did you do in the rain?” she asks.
“Horrible,” comes the response, “I was soaking wet and cold as s***”.
Carla is one of several outreach workers for the unhoused community living in Van Nuys, an area in the San Fernando Valley of LA. The informal team – composed of volunteers – often goes out providing supplies bought with their own money to those in need, but operations have been ramped up in recent weeks during the intense storms that have battered the state of California.
For many of LA’s unhoused population, which numbers in the tens of thousands, the impacts were acute and devastating.
As the storm system shifted further south east on Friday and sunny blue skies returned, clean-up operations had begun across the . It was clear
