Last summer, a mass of high-pressure air, known as a heat dome, settled over the Pacific Northwest and hovered for days. The result was record-breaking heat, with temperatures reaching 115 degrees in Portland. The event may have killed as many as 600 people, according to one analysis.
Heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest. Image courtesy of weather.gov
Jonna Papaefthimiou, the city’s chief resilience officer and interim emergency management director, grew up in Oregon and has never seen anything like it. “We had a heat response plan, but it was kind of tied together with cold and other kinds of bad weather,” Papaefthimiou said. “From the perspective of emergency management, it was a failure of imagination that so many people could die of heat in Oregon.”
Heat is the deadliest natural disaster. Recent research estimates that approximately 5,600 Americans die each year from heat-related illnesses. It can cause heat stroke (an inability for the body to regulate its temperature), cardiac arrest and kidney failure, and is especially dangerous for the elderly and those with chronic health conditions.
However, the biggest risk factors are often poverty and race. In U.S. cities, low-income residents, mostly non-white neighborhoods, endure higher temperatures than richer, whiter areas. A 2021 study in Earth’s Future found that neighborhoods with high poverty rates experienced summer temperatures as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer compared to richer neighborhoods. This is due to the urban heat island effect – poorer neighborhoods usually have less tree cover, a legacy of racist policies on red cover. A recent report by the New York Department of Health and Hygiene found that “heat-related deaths are affecting black New Yorkers unfairly.”
Climate change is making extreme heat events, such as the one that plagued the Pacific Northwest, more intense and frequent. Earlier this month, 125 million people – more than one-third of the U.S. population – were on heat warnings as a heat wave swept across many of the Southwest and Central states. Even worse heat waves are expected in the coming months; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said above-normal temperatures are likely to continue over most of this country this summer.
Four officials – in Portland, New York, Miami-Dade and Phoenix – discussed their cities’ unique heat challenges and how they plan to keep residents safe this summer.
Portland, Oregon
Last summer’s heat wave was responsible for at least 115 deaths in Oregon, according to state figures. Papaefthimiou, who grew up growing up in Oregon’s historically mild summers, said last summer’s death toll was eye-opening. “We have always thought of extreme heat as a problem for Southern states,” she said. “We need to change our thinking in a profound way.”
In Portland, the biggest difference between life and death was access to air conditioning, she said. Almost none of the people who died last summer due to the heat had working air conditioners, according to local reports. Isolation also played a role: almost everyone who died was alone. “People who died in the heat – they did not have anyone to call,” she said.
Papaefthimiou and her team are recruiting volunteers and organizations like Meals on Wheels to call risk portlanders during heat events. They also work with community-based organizations to spread the word about the dangers of heat and open hyper-local refrigeration spaces.
“We recognize that many of those communities that are poorly served by the government are not neighborhoods where we have earned trust,” she said. She said she believes residents are more likely to hear warnings from their local religious or community leaders and hide in local community centers.
In the long run, Papaefthimiou said the city needs more fair tree cover and better access to air conditioning in the home. “But trees take time to grow … For now, our focus really needs to be: how do we get people cool somewhere?”
Miami-Dade County
Miami-Dade County has not had a day above 100 degrees in years. Nevertheless, the area’s “biggest risk is chronic heat exposure,” said Jane Gilbert, the province’s heat chief. Although southern Florida does not experience three-digit heat waves like other parts of the country, temperatures in the 90s, coupled with high humidity, can be deadly.
Some of those at greatest risk are the country’s some 300,000 outdoor workers and those struggling to pay the bills to cool their homes. Those two groups often overlap, Gilbert said.
“Most people have access [to air conditioning], but it can be substandard access. It could be that they do not want to use it because they cannot afford it, ”she said. “Someone may have the combined challenge of being exposed to a lot of heat during the day and then coming home and not being able to afford the AC.” Miami-Dade County reported 43 heat-related deaths last year, but Gilbert said it was likely a countdown.
The region’s increasingly frequent and intense hurricanes pose another danger: power outages. Nursing homes in Florida reported a 25 percent increase in deaths the week after Hurricane Irma in 2017, which exposed millions of people to heat. (The state has now assisted living facilities to have a generator with enough backup power to keep a community room cool for at least four days.)
“Anything that will cause a widespread and widespread power outage during our hot months can be quite disastrous from a heat point of view,” Gilbert said. “Our evacuation shelters have enough backup power to keep the lights on and [provide] critical services, but they do not have the ability to keep a shelter cool – so that’s one of our top priorities. “
phoenix
Phoenix is one of the hottest big cities in the United States, with temperatures often exceeding 100 degrees in the summer. Dave Hondula, the city’s heat chief, said Phoenix is struggling with the same heat inequalities seen around the world. “In most places we look, there is a very close link between income and indications of neighborhood-level heat,” he said, adding that there is a subsequent correlation between heat-related deaths and diseases and hot, low income neighborhoods.
Heat exacerbates almost any other public health challenge, Honduras said. For example, in recent years, nearly half of the city’s heat-related deaths have been linked to drug abuse, he said. Many have experienced homelessness. Others were isolated in their sweltering houses. “It’s not this is not a situation where a friendly volunteer hands out a water bottle at a bus stop [or] “Pools that are open will make a difference,” he said.
Despite all its challenges, Phoenix could serve as a kind of laboratory for how cities can adapt to a warming planet, Hondula said. In addition to increasing tree cover, the city is looking at cool roofs and cool sidewalks – cover these surfaces with reflective paint so they absorb less heat – as ways to lower temperatures.
Even in a city where residents are accustomed to extreme heat, Hondula said messages and education are crucial to saving lives. “We can monitor babies from our smartphone on the other side of the country and we can feed our pets remotely,” he said. “There is no reason why people should fall through cracks [because they don’t realize] it’s just too hot in their house. We should be able to detect those cases in one form or another. ”
New York City
More than 350 New Yorkers die annually from heat-related illnesses, according to city estimates. “The majority of those affected are seniors, mostly African-Americans, mostly from indoor exposure,” said Kizzy Charles-Guzman, the city’s executive director of climate and environmental justice. “These are mostly people who did not have access to cooling or who had access to mechanical cooling, but they were worried about the energy bill.” She said the city’s aging and often poorly ventilated building supplies make indoor heat exposure particularly dangerous.
In her previous role, in the city’s office for climate resilience, Charles-Guzman developed the city’s first heat adaptation plan ever. The plan focused on growing the city’s tree canopy in poor neighborhoods, expanding the use of cool roofs to reduce buildings’ energy costs and consumption, combating insulation through a buddy system, and distributing air conditioning. to low-income households.
Editor’s note: See also Cool Neighborhoods NYC: A Comprehensive Approach to Keeping Communities Safe in Extreme Heat
She said 10 years ago, many in the environmental movement attacked her because she distributed air conditioners and called it a maladaptation to climate change. “Mechanical cooling is necessary in a climate-changing world. We need better, cleaner energy sources, but we cannot achieve our goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the backs of the poorest people, ”she said.
Two years ago, the city created a $ 55 million program to distribute more than 70,000 air conditioners to low-income households; the city also encourages those households to apply for energy bill relief so that they can actually use the AC units.
Charles-Guzman said New York could also take a lead from cities with lower air conditioning and do more to pull New Yorkers outside during heat emergencies. “I wish we had created more cool corridors in the middle of the city, such as Paris and Barcelona [have done]. they really [seem to have] invented a way to activate the public empire to provide cooling solutions to the general population, ”she said. ‘This is one thing that can pull New Yorkers out of their homes, this is where they’re bird safest but [where] they are not possible. ”
This article was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, non-profit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.
By Danielle Renwich and Emma Pattee
Republished from Nexus Media.
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