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About Appeal tribune. (Silverton, Or.) 1999-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 20, 2021)
4A | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2021 | APPEAL TRIBUNE Hunger Continued from Page 1A ready delayed planned returns to the of- fice for millions of employees and which could threaten school closures and oth- er shutdowns as the nation enters the winter flu season. Other obstacles in- clude the gradual expiration of several COVID-19-specific protections such as the eviction moratorium and expanded unemployment benefits. All told, families facing food insecuri- ty find themselves still dependent on outside assistance and extremely vul- nerable to unforeseen difficulties. In the Salem area, food distribution has also declined from its peak of six months ago, this past August being the “first month since January 2019” that pantry visits have dipped below pre- pandemic numbers. “We’re servicing about 10,000 fam- ilies or so now,” Sam Tenney, Marion Polk Food Share communications man- ager, said. “August, the last month we have complete data on, we had about 9,500 pantry visits among our pantries, when pre-pandemic we had about 10,000 pantry visits a month.” Pantry visits are the unit that the pan- tries measure their servicing, since most but not all patrons are individuals getting supplies for their family. At the approxi- mation of about 10,000 families serviced through the food share, that equates to about 45,000 individuals, of which 15,000 are children, Tenney said. By April 2020, pantry visits “went up by 50%, to 15,000 pantry visits,” Tenney said. A spike in November through the rest of 2020 led to food pantries having 16,000 pantry visits. “Things seem to be on the decline for how many folks are coming to pantries every month,” Tenney said. “I think some government assistance programs have definitely helped and resulted in fewer people having to visit pantries, but we’ll see how long that continues.” Tenney said despite the number of pantry visits being down, still forecasts the next few months to pick up because of the holidays approaching. Nationally, the food banks that work with Feeding America saw a 31% increase in the amount of food distributed in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the first quarter of 2020, just before the global pandemic reached America. When the nationwide closures of of- fices and schools began in March 2020, the impact was immediate. Feeding America-affiliated food banks distributed 1.1 billion pounds of food in the first quar- ter on 2020; in the second quarter, the number jumped 42% to more than 1.6 bil- lion pounds. The third quarter saw a smaller 5% increase up to nearly 1.7 billion pounds of food. While distributions de- Fund Continued from Page 1A high COVID-19-risk setting. Nationwide, Latinos have also repre- sented a higher share of job losses dur- ing the pandemic and saw their weekly earnings increase at a slower rate than workers overall during the first year of the pandemic, according to a report from the Center for American Progress. Eighteen months into the pandemic, coalition members also saw people ex- periencing pandemic economic impacts much longer than the four weeks they Warehouse employee Earl Lockwood places a one-ton bag of soy fines on a pallet with a forklift at the Marion Polk Food Share. CONNOR RADNOVICH / STATESMAN JOURNAL clined from the end of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021, recent data suggests that the decline has leveled off. The national data is mirrored in the ex- periences of individual food banks across the country. At the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland, Cali- fornia, the level of community need spiked in winter and early spring of this year. In February 2021, the organization set a record with 5 million pounds of food distributed. That record stood for one month as March 2021 saw 6 million pounds distributed. After the March peak, the numbers started dropping steadily – down to 4.6 million pounds in August 2021. But that’s still compared with 2.7 million pounds in June 2019. “The recovery is going to be very, very long and steep for families who are typi- cally reliant on food banks,” said Michael Altfest, the food bank’s director of com- munity engagement. Altfest said the cor- onavirus pandemic was an additional trauma for families already suffering from food insecurity, and it introduced a whole new category of client who had never used food banks before but had been pushed over the financial edge by the pandemic. Both categories are projected to remain in need of assistance well into next year. “Things are not getting any easier here for low- and moderate-income house- holds, and we don’t expect it to for a while,” Altfest said. Among those newcomers to the food bank system is Ranada James. The 47- year-old child care professional had re- ceived Supplemental Nutrition Assis- tance Program, or SNAP, benefits in the past but never dealt with a food bank be- fore the pandemic. On a recent overcast Wednesday, James was one of a few doz- en people lining up in their cars for a weekly drive-through food pantry oper- ated by a local charity called The Arc in southeast Washington, D.C., the poorest and most virus-ravaged part of the city. Volunteers loaded her backseat with pre- prepared hot meals, lunch sacks, fresh vegetables from The Arc’s garden and sealed boxes of durable goods. had initially assumed in the spring of 2020, Sonato said. The most recent monthly snapshot for the fund shows that at the time of application, 86.4% of applicants had ex- perienced more than five weeks of hard- ship. Thirty-one percent of relief recipi- ents work in agriculture, 28% work in food service, and the rest in construc- tion, janitorial and housekeeping, land- scaping, child care and other industries, according to the fund’s most recent monthly snapshot. Hoping to reach more “I never thought I would need it,” she said. “It helped tremendously, and it still really helps.” Even as the situation slowly improves, James finds herself in need. She has two grandchildren and two nieces living with her, and she’s keeping them from attend- ing in-person school out of fear of the pandemic – which means she can’t go back to work. “They really do eat,” she said with a laugh, adding that broccoli and fresh string beans were household favorites. “They’re growing, and they’re picky.” Other food banks across the country are reporting similar trends: a gradual de- crease this year, starting in about April, but still far higher than any pre-pandemic numbers. At the Central California Food Bank in Fresno, the numbers have “lev- eled off” in recent months but remain 25% higher than in 2019, said the food bank’s co-CEO, Kym Dildine. “Many people are still out of work, par- ticularly women, who are the primary caregivers in the home,” she said. At the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., the amount of food dis- tributed in July 2021 was 64% higher than in the same month in 2019. “COVID isn’t over by any means,” said the food bank’s president, Radha Muth- iah. “We’re still seeing existing need.” Just how long the elevated level of need will last is a matter of debate, with the most conservative estimates project- ing it will last well into next summer. Some are predicting that the country’s food banks may never return to normal. Parallel government food assistance programs like SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, also saw a pan- demic-fueled spike in usage. The Depart- ment of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, reports that the number of SNAP users increased by 7 million between 2019 and 2021. In August, President Joe Biden instituted a permanent 25% boost in SNAP benefits, starting this month. But the SNAP program doesn’t come close to covering every family in need. Muthiah said many of the clients who de- pend on food banks for their nutrition are either ineligible for SNAP benefits, intimi- dated by the bureaucratic paperwork or fearful of applying due to their immigra- tion status. That leaves food banks as the primary source of aid for millions of hun- gry people. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told the AP that at the peak of the pan- demic, 14% of American adults were re- ceiving SNAP benefits. That number is now down around 8%, but the need re- mains highly elevated, and nonprofit charitable options like food banks serve a vital role in papering over the remain- ing holes in millions of family budgets, he said. “We just need to understand what this pandemic has done in terms of sig- nificant disruption of what was proba- bly a pretty fragile system to begin with,” said Vilsack, who also filled the same Cabinet post under former Presi- dent Barack Obama. ”It has exposed the fragility of the system, which makes programs like SNAP, programs like sum- mer feeding programs, school feeding programs, food bank assistance ever more important.” Vilsack said the Biden administra- tion has moved to strengthen the na- tional food bank infrastructure by de- voting $1 billion in June to help fund re- frigerated trucks and warehouses that will allow food banks to store and pro- vide more fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products. Now the country’s food bank net- work is busy trying to project the level of need going forward, factoring in multi- ple influences – positive and negative. Theoretically, the boosted Child Tax Credit payments, which started in July, are meant to alleviate the monthly bur- den for lower-income and middle-class families by providing money to use as the families see fit. But food bank exec- utives and researchers estimate that it could take six to 12 months to see a real impact on food security as families ini- tially devote those funds to issues like rent or car repairs. And the end of the nationwide evic- tion moratorium looms as a major pres- sure point that could push vulnerable families back into crisis. The Biden administration allowed the federal moratorium to expire in late August, and Congress did not extend it. While the federal government now fo- cuses on pumping money into rental as- sistance programs, the national mora- torium has devolved into a patchwork of localized moratoriums, in places like Washington, D.C., Boston and New York state – all expiring on different sched- ules. At the southeast Washington drive- through food pantry, volunteers there have developed friendships with some of the regulars, including Rob and Deve- reaux Simms. A retired bus driver and a school aide, both in their 70s, they con- sider themselves solidly middle class and had never used food stamps. But when the pandemic hit and two of their children were laid off, “things started running short,” Devereaux Simms said. Now, with three grandchildren living at home, they’re fixtures at the Wednes- day drive-through. They even make a point of taking home extra supply boxes to distribute to needy neighbors and re- cently took small gifts for the volun- teers. “God’s been good to us,” Devereaux Simms said, “and you should never be too proud to accept help.” Associated Press writer Michael Ca- sey in Boston and data journalist Ca- mille Fassett in Oakland, California, contributed to this report. The coalition is trying to reach more people to let them know about the funds and is investing in its communications strategy to connect with speakers of In- digenous languages such as Mam and Mixtec. The program has created radio spots in Indigenous languages and brought speakers of those languages to a recent community forum on the relief fund, Sonato said. “We’ve got a little more work to do, but definitely understanding that hav- ing Spanish isn’t enough has been a good step in the right direction,” Sonato said. The program will also ask the Oregon Legislature to allocate another $65 mil- lion during February’s short session, as the fund is projected to run out of money by the end of the year, Sonato said. To apply for the fund, call 1-888-274- 7292. Reporter Dianne Lugo contributed to this article. Dora Totoian covers agricultural workers through Report for America, a program that aims to support local jour- nalism and democracy by reporting on under-covered issues and communities. You can reach her at dtotoian@statesmanjournal.com. Wildfires Continued from Page 1A The difference this year, compared to 2020, was that while fuels were critical- ly dry during the hottest summer in Ore- gon’s recorded history, the type of ex- treme winds that fueled the Labor Day Fires didn’t arrive. In 2021, September brought relief rather than disaster. “What really helped was that Sep- tember temperatures moderated and then rain arrived in pretty good amounts,” said Jim Gersbach, a spokes- man for the Oregon Department of For- estry. “Overall, wildfire conditions were actually worse this summer than in 2020. But for the most part, we were fighting the fires in wildland situations rather than it burning down communi- ties.” Robertson lauded the thousands of firefighters who labored through smoke, heat and a pandemic for keeping com- munities safe – despite multiple injuries and one fatality. Frumencio Ruiz Cara- pia, 56, died after getting hit by a falling tree on the Gales Fire outside Oakridge in late August. “They dealt with very difficult condi- tions this season, given how big the fires were and how long the season lasted,” Robertson said. In many ways, the 2021 wildfire sea- son represents something close to a new normal, said Gershbach and Robertson. While 2021 was well above average in terms of acres burned, it’s doesn’t stick out in the way it might have just a few years ago. The Bootleg Fire throws a large smoke plume up in July. INCIWEB The average number of acres burned annually jumped to 691,016 in the dec- ade from 2012 to 2021. That’s far higher than the 198,000 acres blackened per year from 1992 to 2001 or the 307,000 yearly acres burned from 2002 to 2011, according to data from NWCC. “As temperatures continue to warm and fuels continue to dry from human- caused warming, every fire that escapes that first response to put it out has the potential to burn a lot more than in the past,” Gersbach said. “That’s what we heard from our crews out in the field this year: they’d respond to a fire and it would grow to 10 acres before they could even unpack their hoses. What we’re seeing, unfortunately, is more of the new normal.” Wildfire smoke punishes most of state Perhaps the most widespread conse- quence of the 2021 wildfire season – both in Oregon and across the West – was wildfire smoke that degraded air quality for long periods of time, mainly in the south, east and central parts of the state. While the smoke wasn’t quite as po- tent as 2020 – when air quality dropped to historically awful levels in September – the 2021 season lasted far longer, in- flicting more days overall with less than ideal conditions for breathing. Klamath Falls, near the Bootleg Fire, suffered through 41 days of air quality of “unhealthy for sensitive groups” or worse, narrowly edging out its 2018 total of 37. Bend, likewise, had 18 days of de- graded air quality, including one that registered as “hazardous” to best its to- tal of 15 in 2017. In southern Oregon, where smoke came from Oregon and northern Cali- fornia fires, Medford recorded 26 days of degraded air quality, the second- most behind 35 in 2018. The Willamette Valley generally es- caped the worst of the smoke in 2021. Eugene was the only valley town with degraded air quality, with three days at “unhealthy for sensitive groups.” “Data for 2021 in southern Oregon and Central Oregon show a continua- tion of a trend going back more than five years: we’re having more days with smoke, and more days with higher con- centrations of smoke,” said Dylan Dar- ling, a spokesman for DEQ. Zach Urness has been an outdoors re- porter in Oregon for 13 years and is host of the Explore Oregon Podcast. To sup- port his work, subscribe to the States- man Journal. Urness can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.
