Melting snow reveals a sea of garbage at abandoned encampment sites in Sudbury

Officials in Greater Sudbury have been cleaning up garbage left behind at abandoned homeless encampments in the city.

As the snow melts, some unsightly debris and abandoned tents are showing up in Sudbury. The city has already completed one cleanup at an encampment close to downtown.

Greater Sudbury contracted a crew March 27-28 to clean up areas in Energy Court that have been determined to be abandoned.

There were old tents, electronics, clothing, furniture and drug paraphernalia amongst the garbage hauled to a dumpster in the middle of the encampment.

“We will put a notice on the tent to just alert someone (that) we will be removing this tent in the next little while if you don’t show back up or you don’t need anything here,” said Gail Spencer, the city’s manager of housing stability and homelessness.

“Then we make efforts to clean up those abandoned tents and encampment items. We try to make sure that we are working with people living in the encampments so that they can also keep their places clean as much as possible.”

The city said 16 people are still living in Energy Court and did the cleanup after bylaw officers determined there were some sites where no one was living anymore.

The city has received complaints about the area.

“Often people living in the encampment can kind of tell us, no, he’s moved of town or he has found housing or things like that,” Spencer said.

“We know that it’s abandoned -- we certainly don’t want to be taking anybody’s personal belongings that is important to them. But it is very common for people to sort of abandon an encampment when they move on to another situation.”

The city said there are currently 188 people living outdoors in 32 encampment sites. And more cleanups will be done as needed, with the city paying for them.