The warming tent at the rail trail encampment in Kelowna on Feb. 4, 2025.

(JESSE TOMAS / iNFOnews.ca)

With temperatures below -10 Celsius this week Kelowna is breaking out its extreme weather supports to help keep the city's homeless folks warm.

The city has partnered with community organizations like Kelowna's Gospel Mission to operate a warming tent by the Okanagan Rail Trail encampment, warming buses and extra shelter beds.

“We all work collaboratively together down there,” Kelowna Bylaw’s outdoor sheltering coordinator Ali Westlund told iNFOnews.ca. “Bylaw is doing their regular daily visits down there. Just monitoring what's happening down at the site and things like that.”

This year the gospel mission has added 12 extra shelter beds and Turning Points has an extra 25 spaces until March 31. Metro Central is also running a 12 person women’s only mat program to provide temporary shelter when temperatures are below -10 C. There are currently a total of 315 shelter beds in the city.

The gospel mission operates the warming tent and buses, but workers from bylaw, RCMP, Kelowna Fire Department, BC Housing, Interior Health and other outreach organizations are out providing people with support and supplies to keep warm.

The warming tent is open between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m. and the warming buses are available from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. The tent and stationary bus have a combined capacity of roughly 100 people.

Westlund said there's also a bus that drives around town helping warm people up who aren’t at the rail trail encampment.

"It's a bit of a smaller bus, but they're looking for people to get them into shelters. So, we are operating with quite a few seats for everybody based on the numbers that we know are out there in the community," she said.

In 2024, the city conducted a review of its efforts to tackle homelessness in Kelowna and it found that it needed to improve coordination between the various groups working on helping homeless people, particularly community groups.

“The biggest considerations were community partners and the needs of all the individuals in the community. So just working together with all our community partners and just making sure we're covering all our bases for everybody's needs that are unhoused at this time,” Westlund said.

Another issue the city found in its response to homelessness was the fact that spending wasn’t always properly tracked. Westlund did not have a cost estimate on hand as of Feb. 4.

READ MORE: Kelowna didn't properly track $20M spent on homelessness last year

“We definitely are tracking everything that we're spending on for extreme weather response,” Westlund said.

The city has three levels for its cold response. Level one is when temperatures are between 0 C and -9 C, level two is when the temperature is below -10 C, and level three is when it’s below -20 C.

“This is our first level two and we just started it yesterday,” she said. “So we're expecting to be operational until Friday morning at 8 a.m. and after that, we'll sort of re-evaluate and decide if we'll continue further. Because we just need to be at -10 C to -19 C for a consistent amount of time, about 48 hours.”

When the temperature gets below -20 C the roaming bus, warming tent, and stationary bus run 24 hours a day.

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