Heat wave provides a warning we should heed about preparing for a warming Earth

Last week’s heat wave felt like a new kind of pandemic: suddenly empty store shelves, business shutdowns, and an urgent need for emergency health measures. In this case, different shelves were empty; it was ice, bottled water and ice cream that disappeared rather than toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Restaurants that had been preparing for a full reopening suddenly closed.

Freeways buckled. Power outages were scattered across the region. Hotels and motels ran out of rooms for people desperate for air conditioning.

We don’t know what comes next. Was our 109 peak temperature a one-off, to be followed by a normal summer? Or was this just the opening act of a brutal season of heat and fire? Either might be true. But what we can be pretty sure of now is that our scorching heat wave was a preview of what’s in store as the earth warms.

Just as in the COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, people in poverty, and the elderly suffered the most from the heat. These are the groups of people least likely to have air conditioning, most likely to have underlying health conditions and disabilities, and most likely to have jobs that require them to endure prolonged heat. And many are more likely to be isolated — especially people with disabilities and elders.

Here’s another group that suffered from the heat: salmon. If we are serious about saving them from dying in warming rivers, we’d better step up in a big way to the challenge of climate change.

We hope this year’s heat pandemic will help push a robust federal climate change bill over the finish line so we can limit the severity of warming and adapt to the changes that are already inevitable. We hope it will cause a look at whether current green building codes — especially for housing for elders — take extreme heat into account. We hope it will result in a safe and green electrical grid that can handle a growing load of air conditioners.

At the local level, last week triggered some laudable fast actions to help vulnerable people, but they were not enough.

A cooling center in downtown Olympia was open to all, but mostly served houseless people. City and county staff worked well together, and many citizens who read about it on Facebook showed up with donations of bottled water, snacks and other supplies. The center even had an on-site nurse. It was quiet, cool, and soothing to the 60 or so people who were there. Vans were sent out to tent camps to invite people in, but many homeless people declined the invitation.

There was a second pop-up cooling center at the Virgil Clarkson Lacey Senior Center, organized by Senior Services of South Sound and the city of Lacey. It was open and welcoming to people of all ages, but few came, most likely because many didn’t hear about it or have a way to get there. One man who lives in his car didn’t come inside because he said he “didn’t want to get accustomed to being comfortable.”

The state Department of Health reported 1,648 hospital emergency room visits for heat-related illness over three days. Forty percent of them were people over 65. It’s not yet clear how many died.

Heat is the most deadly form of weather. In the last decade, there were about 12,000 annual heat-caused premature deaths in the contiguous United States.

So what can we do? France offers one answer. In 2003, a heat wave there led to the deaths of over 15,000 people, most of whom who were old and isolated. That caused national soul-searching. When a similar heat wave struck in 2019, the death toll was reduced by 90 percent, in part because France now requires local governments to keep a register of all senior citizens so that health workers can check up on them by phone or in person. It takes a strong and trusted network of health workers to do that, and resources to get people the help they need quickly.

That’s just one strategy for preventing heat-caused deaths and emergency room visits. Our local public health and social service professionals will undoubtedly have more ideas. Their bosses should listen to them.

We know that if our nation had faced up to COVID-19 more quickly, and had been better prepared, many thousands of people would have been spared. In a world that’s becoming hotter, this is our chance to do better. We need to ensure that everyone has a way to stay healthy — maybe still sweaty, but healthy — when the next heat wave, and all the ones after that, endanger lives.