The increased traffic caused by the MBTA’s closure of the Orange Line and part of the Green Line will no doubt cause headaches for drivers, and it’s a concern for organizations that deliver food daily to homebound seniors.
Ethos is located down the street from the Green Street T station. Orange Line shuttles were spotted Friday afternoon practicing their route in Jamaica Plain, giving a glimpse at the number of additional vehicles on the road during the shutdown.
“When we have closures like the upcoming Orange Line closure, it definitely has ripple effects across the entire community for us. We have Meals on Wheels drivers on the road each morning we have case managers out to do home visits it really slows down our operations,” said Raymond Santos, chief development and community relations officer for Ethos.
Santos says drivers deliver 8,000 meals every day and they already battle rush hour traffic during their delivery window in the morning.
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“The clock is ticking every single morning to get hot nutritious meals out to consumers and so even a 20-minute delay from our caterer to our travel time to and from a consumer’s home might have a real impact on us,” he added.
Michael Finkley, who works in Ethos’ Nutrition Department, says many of their clients can’t cook for themselves anymore.
“A lot of seniors would survive off, believe it or not peanut butter and crackers, and we don’t want that, that’s not nutritious enough for them so we provide them nutritious meals, various cuisines based upon their ethnicities. We have various menu options that they can choose from,” he explained.
The food prepared to be delivered hot, which means the drivers have a certain window of time to deliver them.
“If that food drops below a certain temperature we can’t send it out because of course it’s going to be a risk to the senior’s health.”
The deliveries are lifeline, beyond nutrition, Finkley says.
“They want to stay in their home as long as possible but at the same time, they need someone because a lot of them they don’t have daily visits to look out for them and that’s what the drivers do.”
Their visits also serve as wellness checks, in some cases catching emergencies.
“It happens on occasion, a driver may arrive to a senior’s home, the door may be cracked ajar, the driver may peek in the door and the senior may be on the ground. The driver has to make sure that senior is okay.”
Santos says most of their employees drive to work or take public transportation. They plan to wait and see what the shutdown brings and make adjustments as needed.
“We want to provide some employees flexibility to work from home, for others we want to make it easier for them to get into the office and make sure they have parking spots so that they can get into the office and do their work and go out for their home visits. For others we’re working on making sure their schedules are a little bit flexible and maybe they are staggering their work day a bit to make it as easy as possible for our staff to do their work.”
He echoes the requests of the MBTA and City of Boston.
“If you can be off the road while we are delivering meals in the morning, if you don’t have to be in the office or don’t have to come into work, don’t have to drive and you can leave a little bit more room for the meals on wheels drivers that are out there and be patient we’d greatly appreciate it.”
