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Hidden by the highway, ODOT clears years-old homeless camp

"I mean how many times did you drive by and not even know there were this many tents here?" Dayna, a recovering addict who'd been living in the camp for more than a year, asked.

PORTLAND, Ore. — After close to two years, living hidden in the brush where Interstate 5 crosses the Ross Island Bridge, close to a dozen homeless men and women packed up tents, bikes, piles of belongings and their network of hidden cameras Wednesday morning and moved out. They had to.

Crews with Oregon of Transportation had found the camp only 24 hours earlier, after getting unusual tips from drivers cruising by.

“We’d gotten complaints that people were running across the ramps and getting hit,” said Jeffrey Carlson, a maintenance specialist with ODOT.

A spokesman for ODOT noted most camps found on ODOT land are, per a years-old court order, given 10-19 days’ notice before they have to leave. That timeline can be shortened to 24 hours when camps are found on land marked “no trespassing” and when there’s a risk to public safety.

This week, campers saw crews coming on their cameras, which they said they monitored through a cellphone. They had nailed the cameras to trees in an effort to deter thieves.

Still, they were surprised to learn they’d been found.

“For the longest time nobody even knew we were here,” said Dayna, a recovering addict who’d been living in the camp for more than a year. “I mean how many times did you drive by and not even know there were this many tents here?”

Looking around at the piles of clothes, books, coffee cups and other items, she noted campers would have to leave a lot behind.

“I see the garbage, and I know that that's a really big thing,” she said. “There's a few bad homeless people who ruin it for everybody else.”

Carlson noted cleaning and restoring the site would probably take until Friday, an anomaly for his crew who are clearing an average of three per day.

Credit: KGW
Homeless camp swept by ODOT near I-5 and the Ross Island Bridge

Six or seven years ago, he said, he cleared one camp every three days.

“We posted 778 properties in the Portland area in 2017 alone,” said ODOT spokesman Don Hamilton.

Hamilton said the magnitude of the job is perhaps best represented by other stats, including the 126,000 pounds, or 63 tons, of trash ODOT collects each month from camps in the Portland area.

Currently, the agency has three crews, who would otherwise be maintaining local highways, working full-time clearing camps.

“We're doing this every day all the time, seeing camps,” said Hamilton.

The pace is exhausting but poised to change. With the start of 2019, a new state law is set to go into effect that will give the City of Portland enough jurisdiction to clear camps from ODOT land.

Hamilton said meetings between city and ODOT staff to work out the logistics have begun. In the meantime, operations like what played out Wednesday will continue.

Dayna said she’s already found another piece of land to camp, though she wouldn’t specify where.

ODOT crews let her and other campers leave before they started to clean.

“The conditions that these guys are living it, it’s not right,” said Carlson. “I know that.”

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