City of Sarnia cleans up Rainbow Park after homeless encampment clears out

CBC News

· Posted: Mar 18, 2025 3:50 PM EDT | Last Updated: 1 hr ago

The City of Sarnia says it has cleaned up the garbage and discarded needles successful a parkland that was precocious the tract of a prolonged stateless encampment.

City assembly voted successful January to wide the encampment astatine Rainbow Park.

The past fewer radical near voluntarily connected Feb. 20, said Steve Henschel, the communications manager for the City of Sarnia.

Since then, the metropolis has besides disinfected the playground equipment, and it's readying much improvements successful the coming weeks.

"We're going to instrumentality each the soil that's the basal for that playground retired and enactment successful engineered wood fibre, repair immoderate fencing, and determination was besides immoderate harm to the writer successful the parkland from vehicles coming and going," Henschel said.

"So we're going to repair those ruts and reseed."

Complaints from residents

More than 80 radical were camping successful Rainbow Park past summer, Henschel said.

Residents of the surrounding country complained bitterly to metropolis officials astir unfastened cause use, needles successful schoolhouse yards and radical defecating successful nationalist spaces.

The colonisation of the encampment dwindled arsenic the acold upwind acceptable in, Henschel said. 

A fig of organizations worked to find structure for those camped out, said Myles Vanni, the enforcement manager of the Inn of the Good Shepherd, which operates 2 exigency shelters and respective different services for radical successful need.

"We brought immoderate radical into shelter," helium said. 

"Everybody's moving unneurotic to find supports and places for these folks to go." 

After the campers moved retired of the park, the metropolis called successful a contractor to tally magnets implicit everything, trial playground sand, and rake everything, Henschel said.

"Overall, radical are precise happy," helium said of the residents successful the surrounding area.

"It was evidently a large interaction for that neighbourhood to person the parkland benignant of occupied successful that manner."

It's not yet wide what volition hap erstwhile the upwind warms up again, Vanni said, due to the fact that immoderate people, erstwhile possible, similar the state and consciousness of assemblage that comes with sleeping outdoors.

Vanni said caller provincial backing for Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs whitethorn beryllium a "light astatine the extremity of the tunnel" erstwhile it comes to addressing the epidemics of poorness and opioid addiction that person contributed to the surge successful homelessness.

"That volition make those high-need … supportive lodging opportunities for radical with intelligence wellness and addictions," Vanni said.

"That accidental coming into the assemblage successful the adjacent portion is going to beryllium precise beneficial."