EDMONTON - For the past six months, 17 year-old Tyler Clarke has been spending much of his time at Edmonton's Youth Emergency Shelter. But for the first time this season, he's about to experience temperatures more reflective of an Edmonton winter.
"I've started preparing for it. I've made sure I've got all my winter clothes ready and set to go," says the teen.
Sue Keating, the Associate Executive Director at YESS, helps provide teens like Tyler with the clothes they need to survive the freezing conditions - something not all of them are equipped with when they arrive at the shelter.
"Most of them leave home because the streets are a safer place to be, and they don't leave with a sleeping bag and a tent and the whole bit. They leave with what's on their back."
Up until now, that may not have been as much of a problem.
"This winter has been so mild that there have been kids that have doing sort of 'winter camping,' living down in the ravine, living outside," says Keating.
She expects with temperatures dropping, though, the number of kids coming to access the YESS programs will start going up.
However, it's not just homeless teens that are preparing for a big cold snap. Many of the 2,400 homeless Edmontonians make use of places like Boyle Street Community Services. But some stay out in the cold, and it's up to people like Aidan Inglis to make sure those individuals stay safe.
Inglis, a team leader at Boyle Street Outreach, goes around checking that the homeless are prepared for the cold snap and aware of the services available to them.
"When it's getting cold like this, the first thing is safety," he says. "Really letting people know that this is what's going to happen, that it's going to get cold and that we need to prepare properly and not get taken aback by it...that you're looking out making sure that you're not falling asleep somewhere where you're going to wake up the next morning and be extremely cold."
Global Edmonton weather specialist Kevin O'Connell says Wednesday will be the coldest day so far this year, with temperatures dipping down to about -31 degrees, and that's not even counting wind chill. And unfortunately, he sees no sign of it warming back up within at least the next ten days.
With files from Slav Kornik, Global News
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