Mystery Samaritan Pays For 70 Homeless People To Stay In Hotel Amid Big Freeze

In the UK, we're all feeling a bit sorry for ourselves at the moment, as temperatures hover around the zero mark.

Sure, it's cold, but it's absolutely fuck all compared to what's going on in parts of the US at the moment.

In Chicago, temperatures have plummeted as low as -32C, which really is incomprehensibly freezing. To add insult to injury, the wind chill factor made temperatures feel like -45C.

Fortunately, for 70 of the city's homeless people, an anonymous good Samaritan has paid for them to stay in hotel rooms.

The kind-hearted mystery person paid for the homeless people to stay in the hotel for the rest of the week, with only one person turning down the offer, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Salvation Army spokeswoman, Jacqueline Rachev, told the paper the homeless people had previously set up a makeshift campsite using donated propane tanks to keep warm. However, one of the tanks exploded on Wednesday afternoon and the Chicago Fire Department subsequently confiscated all of the tanks.

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Department chief, Walter Schroeder, explained the rationale behind the decision.

According to The Hill, he said: "We responded to a fire, when we got there, the fire was extinguished and they found all these propane cylinders. That's when we escalated it to a Level I Hazmat.

"There was a significant amount of propane there, and with that many cylinders, that's like a bomb going off."

The homeless people were then facing the exact opposite safety risk - namely freezing. Ms Rachev said she was in the midst of preparing a makeshift warming centre at the downtown Chicago Salvation Army when she was informed that an anonymous donor had paid a hotel bill for the group.

Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, she said: "All the folks there, some wonderful citizen is going to put all of them up at a hotel for the rest of the week."

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What a brilliant thing for this mysterious person to do. Not only did they massively improve the safety and comfort of 70 people, they also managed to do it without making it about them; a lot of virtue signalling pricks on social media could take note.

It's difficult to appreciate how much this must mean to these people. The city is so cold at the minute that Lake Michigan, the world's fifth largest lake by area, has frozen over.

If that doesn't make you want to shudder, then listen to this advice issued by the National Weather Service to people in the city: "To protect your lungs from severely cold air, avoid taking deep breaths; minimise talking".

Topics: Winter, Weather, US News

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey