Roads were closed, neighborhood streets were covered, power was lost and cars got stuck. The reverberations of the record-breaking snowstorms that blanketed the entire region in more than 3 feet of snow two weeks ago were felt in many different ways throughout the county, essentially keeping people snowed in their homes for nearly a week.

Many individuals, however, did not even have the luxury of having a home to be snowed into during that treacherous week. Fortunately, the county’s far-reaching and tightly knit homeless support community was there to fill the void. Groups like FACETS, The Lamb Center and others kept emergency services running around the clock for the entire week, ensuring that no homeless person in the area had to face the snow and cold without shelter.

"We have a tight knit community that wants to make sure that people who need emergency services get them," FACETS Executive Director Amanda Andere said. "So many people came together to help the people who had the least during the storm."

FACETS, a Fairfax-based non-profit organization that provides a variety of programs and services to the homeless and disadvantaged throughout the county, was at the forefront in dealing with the fallout that the inclement weather created. The organization provides a wide range of services including counseling, short-term housing and medical outreach, but according to FACETS Director of Development Tycie Young, two programs felt the crunch of the storms more so than any other.

According to Young, FACETS operates a walk-in center in Fairfax for the homeless where they can get a meal and a bed for the night, and in addition, has partnerships with churches and other religious congregations throughout the county in which the faith groups offer temporary shelters on a rotating schedule. Young said that on a typical night, FACETS’ walk-in shelter serves an average of 60 to 70 people, but during the week of the storms, they saw a significant spike in attendance. Because of this influx, the center and the temporary shelters at area churches were forced to stay open all day and night.

"There was a huge increase that week [in people coming to the shelter]," Young said. "We usually average about 60 to 70 people per night, but from Feb. 5 on, we started averaging 80 to 90 people a night. Our faith communities stayed open the whole time. Some staff that went in Feb. 5 didn’t leave until the following Tuesday."

Andere said that FACETS’ hot meals program was also affected by the storms. The hot meals program provides warm meals every evening of the year at sites along Route 50 and is operated entirely by volunteers who cook the meals, bring them to the sites and then serve them. Andere said that FACETS anticipated the storms. Before the first snowfall, they stocked up on food products and collected non-perishable items that would last the entire week. Then, as the snow started falling, Young said that volunteers continued to deliver food even though driving conditions were less than ideal.

"It was difficult that week, but we kept our critical services running," Young said. "It was definitely a hectic week, but it went as smoothly as you could expect it to go."

The Lamb Center, located on Old Lee Highway in Fairfax, like FACETS, operates a walk-in center that provides food and temporary shelter for the homeless. According to Assistant Director John MacPherson, the Lamb Center is usually open only during the day and after it closes at 3 p.m., its guests must find a place to sleep for the night. The week of the storms, however, the Lamb Center stayed open 24 hours a day, and even had to close its doors at one point so that homeless people would not try to get to the center at a time when no public transportation was available.

"We didn’t necessarily have more people walking in, but for a couple of days, we actually closed," MacPherson said. "We closed so that people could stay at their local hypothermia centers so that they wouldn’t try to travel to us in the snow."

MacPherson said the center experienced few problems during the week, but for the most part, things ran smoothly. He said that after a few days of being locked in with the same people, many of who already knew each other from the hypothermia shelters and the Lamb Center itself, began to get "cabin fever" and bickered with each other or staff members.

"There’s a certain amount of cabin fever that occurs with our guests," MacPherson said. "They go to the hypothermia centers for 36 straight hours then they come here together. They get a little bit tired of each other because they know each other and know how to push each other’s buttons, but they think of the Lamb Center as home so they tend to behave better when they’re here."

The Lorton Community Action Center (LCAC), a non-profit organization that serves the underprivileged in the Lorton area, was another organization that was negatively impacted by the massive snowstorms. According to Deputy Director Maryam Ulomi, the LCAC’s Food Pantry program was especially affected by the weather, to the point where it could not serve some of its clients.

Ulomi said that the program operates by having volunteers bring in canned food, vegetables, bread and other non-dairy items into the center, and in turn, the center schedules appointments with its clients to come in and pick up their allotment of the donated food once a week. During the week of the storms, however, the roads in the Lorton area were so bad that most volunteers were unable to bring in food donations and as a result, the LCAC had no food to give out and was forced to close Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

"Our agency is mainly run by volunteers and most of them couldn’t make it out of their homes to buy food and bring it in," Ulomi said. "A lot of our clients were calling frantically to see if we could help them, and that was definitely problem number one."

The following week, Ulomi said, the LCAC was able to open full time, and to recover from the previous week, opened its doors so that all of their clients could go and get food without an appointment. From the time the doors were opened that Monday morning, she said, until the end of the week, the LCAC was completely swamped.

"Last week, when we opened, it was chaos," Ulomi said. "Everyday we did distribution, almost every client we have came in to get served because many of them went for over a week without getting food from us."

While the county’s providers of homeless services may not have gotten to provide the level of service to their clients that they are accustomed to for nearly a week during the snowstorms, they nonetheless are proud of what they were able to accomplish. Things may not have been perfect, they said, but given the circumstances, it was pretty close.

"Everyone was well-fed, and no one froze to death, so we did our job," MacPherson said.

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