ST. LOUIS — William Davis has lived on the streets since the recession cost him his job as a commercial painter. Over the past eight months, he has made it through heat waves, windstorms, rain, snow and ice.
But the 51-year-old finally sought help at a homeless shelter Thursday after enduring a night shivering along a downtown wall in temperatures that bottomed out at zero — the coldest reading in St. Louis in eight years.
“People gave me blankets and food,” Davis said. “I had about 15 covers on me. I slept under this parking garage where the wind came in only one direction. It was pretty rough. I can deal with it. But it’s hard.”
The bone-numbing blast of arctic air that lingered over the Northeast and Midwest on Thursday was especially hard on Americans whose lives have been upended by the economic meltdown.
Ray Redlich, assistant director of New Life Evangelistic Center in St. Louis, said the homeless population has changed as the financial crisis has grown worse. Now it includes more people like Davis who just months ago were working for a living.
“We found one young man in a sleeping bag under an overpass. He’d had his home foreclosed on,” Redlich said.
The bitter cold killed car batteries, idled ski lifts and sent millions of people scurrying indoors for warmth, and at least two deaths in Illinois and Michigan were initially attributed to Thursday’s freezing temperatures.
In Pollock, S.D., which dropped to a record-setting 47 below zero, Todd Moser, who works at a gas station, said it took about 10 minutes before the gas pumps started working. “It just hurts to breathe out there,” he said.
The weather system descended from a large, dry air mass that had been lingering over Alaska and northern Canada for a couple of weeks before moving south. The cold stretched from Montana to Maine and as far south as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Today was expected to be even colder in the Northeast.
