House fires continue

On New Year’s Eve, Socorro Firefighters rushed to a home on Blue Canyon and Peralta in Socorro and were notified of the possibility of victims inside the home.

“I pulled up probably like three or four trucks away, and I could feel that radiant heat on my face, and I was like, wow, it’s too hot. We gotta hurry up and get some water on this fire,” Daniel Pacheco, Socorro Fire Captain, said.

Pacheco said that, with the possibility of people inside, he sent a team to search the house.

“I had to send two of my firefighters in there with the line and they were searching and putting out the fire as well but it got too hot and too intense so I had them pull back out because it was too unstable,” Pacheco said.

Luckily, no one was in the house, but while communicating with firefighters, he became aware the house was a two-story. Pacheco, a retired captain and a lieutenant, had to do roof operations.

“It’s a scary thing to do roof operations,” Pacheco said. “We knew that the roof was already about to collapse, and we were up there … a part of it already kind of sank in, and we knew it was already unstable, but we needed to get underneath.”

He said he could tell neighbors were getting worried about the fire spreading, and it was essential to get it under control.

“We were standing up there, and it shook the whole house, and we were holding on for dear life, but we needed to cut away so that we could get underneath what had caved in,” Pacheco said. “I could see the little bit of chaos it was for all the other nearby homeowners.”

He said the New Year’s Eve fire was the fourth structure fire in the last two months.

“I don’t know if it’s any worse (than last year). I just know these last two months have been busy… and all signs point to people just trying to stay warm,” Pacheco said.

Pacheco said he would be supportive of an overnight shelter for people experiencing homelessness. Although he feels frustrated with the structure fires and not being able to hold people accountable, he recognizes a need in the community. The Fire department has talked about providing meals for people without housing or giving back in some way.

“It would be nice for Socorro to be able to provide something like that,” Pacheco said. “I know we got Puerto Seguro, but they’re tapped out as it is, too; they are understaffed just like we are. They have a lot of issues with very little resources, if the county or the city could do something like that (shelter) or even get a grant to help that would be amazing,” Pacheco said.

Shay Kelley, Puerto Seguro Chair, said when she saw the fire posted on Facebook, she was disappointed that many were commenting about arresting people.

“Criminalizing homelessness and jailing people for squatting is completely cost ineffective, in terms of when you compare the cost of keeping somebody in a jail cell to keeping somebody at an overnight facility. The overnight facility wins every time, as far as what’s the most economical choice,” Kelley said.

Puerto Seguro Safe Harbor (PSI) has offered emergency shelter for people without housing on nights below 32 degrees since 2018.

“Prior to 2018 we were losing clients to exposure, and that’s why we started it because people were dying every winter because of the elements,” Kelley said, “We all just got together as a team at Puerto Seguro and just decided to do it, even though we had no money and hadn’t done it before. We just figured something out,”

Kelley said they would like to offer an overnight shelter every night but have a zero-dollar budget and only two volunteers. There have been times when it has been below freezing for a week consecutively, and they can’t open because they don’t have enough volunteers. Also, the current facility is too small and people have to rotate the use of cots.

“We would love to move that trigger temperature higher because it is still freezing at 33 degrees. People are still going to start fires to stay warm at 33 and 34 degrees, but without any resources, we can’t,” Kelley said, “We know from decades of data it’s cheaper to house people, it is cheaper to shelter people, because, you have the cost of the firefighters putting out the buildings that are that are catching on fire from people trying to stay alive.”

She said other costs include the burden on the police department, the county jail and the hospital.

“We have all this fallout from people’s effort to stay alive, and all that could be mitigated,” Kelley said, “Paying a couple of staff members is cheap, in contrast to the economic costs on a community of trying to manage this.”

When they first opened, she invited the chief of police and fire chief to look at the PSI facility, and they were supportive of it. When the police make contact with people freezing outside, they bring them to PSI.

“You know, the police don’t want to find people frozen to death either,” Kelley said.

At PSI, they collect demographic information, and a little less than half of their clients are women and children; many are seniors and have disabilities, some are veterans, and they also have a significant amount of young adults under 24 years old. Native Americans and Hispanics comprise 75% of their clients, with the majority being local to the county.

She hopes that in the future, with support from the local government that, PSI could have employees to support the overnight shelter.

In the meantime, both firefighters and individuals experiencing homelessness in Socorro are in precarious situations. First responders put their lives on the line, while those without permanent shelter navigate the realities of their circumstances to stay alive.