A public outcry in support of the Island’s homeless community followed the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR)’s decision to clear three homeless encampments in the state forest last week.

State contractors with the DCR cleared the encampments in the forest on Monday, July 29, razing tents and leaving several Islanders without essential medication and documents.

Superintendent of the state forest, Conor Laffey, said the encampments were cleared due to public safety and environmental concerns — chiefly the potential for a fire to start. Campers were alerted in advance, he added.

But Island police departments, county officials and aid groups said they were not warned in advance that the encampments would be cleared, raising concerns about communication between agencies.

“We’re spending local funds to help this subset of the population while the Department of Conservation and Recreation came in — without working with any of these local agencies — and just threw away all the things that our community donated to these people to make their life better,” said county manager Martina Thornton.

Case workers and volunteers with Harbor Homes, the Island’s leading homelessness relief group, scrambled in the days after the encampment was cleared to connect Islanders affected with necessities. Harbor Homes spokeswoman Meghan Burke said 25 Islanders lost property when the encampment was cleared, and 12 tents were removed.

Public health nurse Amelia Hambrecht said she has since helped multiple individuals restore their prescriptions for essential medications.

Contractors cleared the encampment on July 29.

Ray Ewing

Contractors cleared the encampment on July 29.

Ray Ewing

With the Island’s sky high housing costs and lack of a year-round homeless shelter, the forest has become a place for people with nowhere else to go. But camping in the forest is illegal, Mr. Laffey said, and DCR has cleared camps once a year for the last four years.

“I don’t really know the solution to it but it’s not for people to come and live in the state forest,” Mr. Laffey said.

Mr. Laffey said that the Department of Conservation and Recreation posted notices earlier in the month warning campers that their possessions would be cleared on Monday, July 29. He said he also alerted three individuals at the encampments on July 29 that the area would be cleared.

Mr. Laffey added that he asked Edgartown police officer Zach Townes, who was patrolling nearby on Sanderson avenue, to serve a trespass notice to one camper who refused to leave, an Edgartown police report shows.

Officer Townes said only two tents at the encampment appeared to be “livable or currently lived in.” He noted mold, waterlogging and weather damage across tents and sleeping bags.

“It looked like an abandoned campsite,” Officer Townes said.

Contractors arrived to clear the encampment afterward. Tents, personal belongings and trash from the campsite were taken away by dumpster.

“DCR is seeing an increase in unhoused individuals at our parks across the state, which creates public health and safety concerns for them as well as for those who visit our properties and for the land we steward,” a spokeswoman from DCR told the Gazette in a statement.

Sharon Brown, director of homeless services for Harbor Homes, said she started receiving calls Monday afternoon from contacts in the state forest who told her that the encampments had been razed and people were missing many of their essential belongings.

“They took everything — birth certificates, I.D., medication, everything,” Ms. Brown said.

Harbor Homes’ board called a community meeting last Thursday and about 75 people showed up on Zoom offering what they could, Ms. Brown said.

The next evening, local food pantries, addiction counselors and representatives from the county government gathered at the Harbor Homes facility in Oak Bluffs to offer “stabilization services” that could connect individuals with medical and nutritional support, as well as help filing for new identification documents.

Harbor Homes officials are still trying to find alternative places for those affected to sleep, but finding space is proving difficult, Ms. Brown said. There are no shelter beds on Martha’s Vineyard between late April and Nov. 1, and little is available on Cape Cod either.

One family of nine who was in the forest was able to find shelter with a church on Cape Cod, Ms. Burke said, but the rest remain unsheltered.

“We have nowhere for them to go [and] we’re afraid to provide more tents and sleeping bags because we’re not sure if this is going to happen again,” Ms. Brown said.

Officials from various agencies around the Island said they were taken aback by the decision to clear the encampment with no warning to local groups. Several said DCR has long ignored concerns about management of the state forest.

Dukes County commissioners Wednesday said they were dismayed by the way the encampment clearing was carried out, and voted to send a letter to DCR, the governor and other officials.

While still drafting the letter, commission member Doug Ruskin said the commission would tell DCR that it wanted better communication with Island groups in the future and called for better monitoring of the forest in light of DCR’s stated concerns about fire hazards.

He said that the county has for years called for the state to allow DCR to use an existing home in the forest for employees, ensuring someone was on the grounds at all times, available to communicate regularly with the homeless population and local aid groups.

Commissioner Randy Milch said that the time, effort and money that was spent to clear the encampment could have been better allocated.

“The forest is an important resource,” he said. “It is under-managed, it is under-resourced and those resources should be spent in a different way.”

At the commission meeting, Ms. Thornton said the Island boards of health met Wednesday with officials from the state Department of Public Health, which helps to fund homelessness relief efforts on the Island.

“We wanted the Department of Public Health to know what transpired,” Ms. Thornton said, to understand “that there are agencies working with the homeless population, addressing their issues . . . and that the local community came together to help rectify a situation that was created by another state department.”

Michael Hugo, director of strategies and government relations for the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards, had been part of efforts to help the state forest homeless population in the past and called the action “inexcusable.”

In a statement to state officials Dr. Samuel Wong and Juan Gallego, Mr. Hugo wrote: “We had an idea, and it would have worked — had it not been for the utterly ridiculous, inhumane, bullying and unforgivable actions of DCR in an ill-conceived storm-trooper-like attack on the dignity of those we all wanted so much to protect and help.”

State Sen. Julian Cyr also criticized DCR’s lack of communication, and said he had spoken personally with Brian Arrigo, state commissioner of the DCR, about the department’s decision to raze the encampment without contacting local groups.

“This action, particularly in the middle of our busiest season, really adds insult to injury for Islanders who are just trying to eke out a living in a very persistent and intractable housing crisis,” Mr. Cyr said.

Mr. Cyr said that he and state representative Dylan Fernandes had spent years petitioning DCR to address fire safety protocols in the state forest, a “consistent concern raised by Island fire and public safety officials.”

“The irony that DCR would take the time to hire an off-Island contractor to come over and disrupt the lives of vulnerable Islanders . . . and yet not pay attention to our needs and concerns otherwise, was disappointing,” Senator Cyr said.

He said Commissioner Arrigo had been “apologetic” and had “made a commitment to visit the Island this fall” to discuss fire risk in the state forest.

Ms. Hambrecht, a public health nurse with Island Health Care, has worked with Harbor Homes this summer on an outreach program that connects homeless Islanders with essential services. To have the encampment cleared in the middle of the summer not only jeopardized Islander’s physical well-being, but mental well-being, she said.

“This is a population who has multiple issues and this sort of disruption in their lives, when their lives are already so disrupted, is a huge impact on their mental health,” Ms. Hambrecht said.

“I understand that there were needs from [DCR’s] perspective,” Ms. Hambrecht added. “But I’m sorry this wasn’t done with more communication so that it could have been easy for everybody.”

Ethan Genter and Louisa Hufstader contributed reporting.