County Opens Cold Weather Shelters as Portland Awaits a Slushy Morning

One man died of hypothermia on Sunday.

Snow in Sellwood in December 2022. (Blake Benard)
By Aaron Mesh

Multnomah County officials opened three emergency shelters on Tuesday evening after meteorologists forecast Portland would receive its first snowfall of the year on Wednesday.

After County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson declared a state of emergency today, the county medical examiner disclosed that a man died of hypothermia on Sunday in a zip code at Portland’s southwest edge. The low temperature that night was 37 degrees, well above the county’s threshold for opening warming shelters.

A winter front is expected to move into the Portland region tonight, with snow mixing into the rain between midnight and 3 am Wednesday. On the Willamette Valley floor, “an inch of slushy accumulations” is possible, wrote National Weather Service meteorologist Jon Liu.

“Most of the Willamette Valley (including Portland) sees around a 40-60% chance of accumulations over 1 inch,” Liu added, “between 10pm Tuesday and 10pm Wednesday.” The West Hills could get two inches of snow.

The county’s thresholds for opening warming shelters—in addition to the 3,000 year-round shelter beds it and the city oversee—are lows of 25 degrees or below, 32 degrees and raining, or an inch of snow.

The triggers for opening and closing shelters have vexed Vega Pederson’s tenure in office since last January, when the county closed its shelters while Portland was still encased in ice. The resulting backlash resulted in city and county officials blaming each other for understaffed shelters.

“Severe weather shelters save lives during the very coldest and harshest nights of the year,” Vega Pederson said in a statement. She added county outreach teams had distributed thousands of mittens and blankets over the past month.

The emergency shelters operated by the county’s nonprofit contractors tonight are:

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