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QuickTake:
When the temperatures dip below 30 degrees, Egan’s three locations open to give unhoused people a place to get warm, sleep and enjoy a hot meal. The organization has been serving as many as 400 guests per night during the recent cold snap.
Bill Barnard is the one who makes the call each winter night — will the Egan Warming Centers activate?
Barnard is director of operations for St. Vincent de Paul, which oversees the Egan centers, and he takes three different independent weather companies’ predicted temperatures for the next day and averages the lows to decide whether to go.
Lately, there has been little doubt.
With a string of nights that have dipped into the 20s, Egan’s three locations have been open every night for nearly two weeks and could stay open through Monday.
If they go through Monday, it will be 15 nights in a row that the centers have been activated, which would break the previous record —13 nights — set in 2025.
The shelters typically open at 6 p.m. and stay open until 7 or 8 a.m. the next morning. The three locations — one in Springfield, where Egan is deploying modular shelters this year; one on Highway 99; and a third at the Lane Events Center — are set up to host a combined 320 to 330 overnight guests. But lately they’ve been blowing past that, to about 400 people per night.
“This program has never turned anybody away,” Barnard said.
This year, they’ve been able to maintain operations amid a 50% cut in state funding by compressing into the three larger sites rather than the six smaller ones that operated last winter.
The current cold snap is testing St. Vincent de Paul staff and volunteers, who work four-hour shifts: 6 to 10 p.m., 10 p.m to 2 a.m., and 2 to 6 a.m.
“The greatest need is absolutely volunteers, more people to spread the load,” Barnard said. “Second to that would be warm clothing, hoodies and blankets are a big one. But volunteers, without a doubt.”
The organization runs regular training orientations to get people up to speed.
As for Barnard, he spends the early evening hours arranging transportation, making sure the sites are stocked with food and other supplies, and working at whichever site needs him most. He’ll go home at about 5 a.m. for a few hours of sleep before returning to St. Vincent de Paul in the early afternoon to do it all over again.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about my sleep; it’s about keeping people alive,” said Barnard, 41, who said he had struggled with addiction and homelessness in his past.
“That’s something I take super, super seriously, and getting to see the positivity from people when they get to come in and get that meal and get a bed and just kind of watch the stress kind of bleed off of them. It’s something incredibly valuable in my life that I’ll never let go.”
The Egan program, he said, “is the Super Bowl” for him and his St. Vincent de Paul co-workers on the emergency response team.
