A sweltering dry heat enveloped downtown Spokane on Tuesday as temperatures climbed up to 102 degrees, breaking the record for hottest temperature recorded for that day in August.
From a six-sided canopy tent on the corner of Division and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Angelique “Angel” Tomeo and her daughter Devina offered cold bottles of water, snacks, and a seat in the shade to every passerby.
Tomeo called out to any person walking, skateboarding, or cycling by who was within shouting distance. Those who stopped by were invited to take as many water bottles, electrolyte water mix-ins, bags of chips, and fruits as they needed. In between passing out refreshments, Tomeo and her daughter added more ice and water bottles to their multiple coolers, opened boxes filled with mini bags of chips, and cut open bags of fresh clementines.
The canopy is one of three cooling stations set up throughout downtown Spokane by the volunteer-run mutual aid group Cool Spokane. Cool Spokane offers a fourth indoor cooling location at Compassionate Addiction Treatment’s building on Division. Cool Spokane’s mission is to provide shade and water to everyone and anyone downtown who is outside experiencing the heat.
“It's truly a community driven effort, we really truly care so much about the people who don't have the advantage of being inside,” said Tomeo, one of the group’s founders.
For the past five years, Tomeo has been an activist and advocate for people impacted by the criminal legal system in Spokane, with a particular focus on the Indigenous population. Tomeo, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, currently serves as the co-chair and co-founder of Yoyot Sp’q’n’i, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Tomeo said she started Cool Spokane with other volunteers and community partners in 2022 as a response to the previous year’s record heat and high number of heat-related deaths in Spokane.
In its 2021 annual report, the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office highlighted the heatwave across the Inland Northwest as an important trend factoring into deaths that year. The report states 20 people died in deaths related to hyperthermia in 2021 and lists hyperthermia as the third leading cause of accidental death in the county overall.
Tomeo partnered with local organizations including the Empire Health Foundation, Mutual Aid Survival Squad (MASS), Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR), and other organizations to gather resources including canopy tents, coolers, water bottles and ice. Then, Tomeo and other volunteers mobilized, setting up the tents and handing out water on the hottest days of summer.
The group does other forms of outreach as well, like checking in on people with disabilities living in apartments and driving through downtown looking for overheated people who might need help. Volunteers were often “finding people in alleys with heat stroke" in Cool Spokane’s first year, Tomeo said.
Cool Spokane hopes their efforts contributed to the dramatic drop off in heat-related deaths in 2022. That year, the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Office counted just three deaths from hyperthermia.
Now, with temperatures again rising above 100 degrees, Cool Spokane volunteers are most worried about unhoused people living on Spokane’s streets.
Being surrounded by pavement and with little shade, people in Spokane’s urban core don’t have many ways to escape the heat. In accordance with city code, the city of Spokane designated public libraries as cooling areas for the homeless. But these cooling spaces are not always enough to keep unhoused people safe from the heat, said volunteer Crystle Burgett at Cool Spokane’s pop-up cooling station located in front of city hall.
The newly-remodeled Central Library is on the list of designated cooling areas and serves as an important resource for downtown’s homeless population because it offers access to wifi, a computer lab, and plug-ins to charge cell phones. However, "a lot of people are trespassed from there," Burgett said.
Being banned from the library means losing one of the few welcoming places to cool down. Other buildings and businesses downtown can be much less friendly, discouraging homeless people from coming inside or even lingering in patches of shade outside of businesses. “It’s just a vicious cycle all day long, being chased from one place to another,” said Tomeo.
Cool Spokane is attempting to help fill in the gaps in resources and support for homeless people during periods of extremely hot weather. With their mutual aid approach, Cool Spokane volunteers are able to set up pop-up locations quickly and offer resources on short notice during the hottest days when people need it the most.
Amidst the sometimes unfriendly urban landscape, Cool Spokane volunteers offer water and shade to everyone with no strings attached.
Throughout Tuesday afternoon a steady stream of people approached Cool Spokane’s canopies. Some took one or more water bottles and continued walking, others sat in the shade for a while chatting and eating turkey sandwiches prepared for them by the volunteers. A variety of people utilized Cool Spokane’s pop-up, from a couple pushing a metal shopping cart filled with their belongings, to a family of two adults and three children coming out of Riverfront Park riding Lime scooters.
"This is an effort to keep our friends on the street safe, but this is for everybody,” said Tomeo. “Everybody needs water."
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In response to high temperatures and the National Weather Service’s Excessive Heat Warning, Cool Spokane will have pop-up cooling stations set up downtown through Friday.
Cool Spokane pop-up times and locations are posted by their partner organizations, you can find and share the latest updates on the Instagram pages and Instagram stories of SCAR and Compassionate Addiction Treatment.
Donate or sign up to volunteer for Cool Spokane here.
