PHOENIX (AP) – Hundreds of blue, green, and gray tents are placed under the scorching rays of the sun in central Phoenix, a fragile, plastic canvas curl along the dusty sidewalks. Here in the hottest big city in America, thousands of homeless people are suffocating when summer’s three-digit temperatures arrive.
The suffocating city of tents has soared amid pandemic-era evictions and rising rents that have thrown hundreds more into the creepy streets that become strangely quiet when temperatures peak in mid-afternoon. A heat wave earlier this month brought temperatures of up to 114 degrees (45.5 degrees Celsius) and we are only June. Highs reached 118 degrees (47.7 degrees Celsius) last year.
“During the summer, it’s pretty hard to find a place at night that’s cool enough to sleep without the police running away from you,” said Chris Medlock, a homeless man in Phoenix known on the streets as “T-Bone.” he carries everything he has. with a small backpack and often goes to sleep in a park or in a nearby desert reserve to avoid congestion.
“If a kind soul could only offer a place on the couch inside, maybe more people would live there,” Medlock said in a dining room where homeless people can get some shade and a free meal.
Excessive heat causes more weather-related deaths in the United States than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.
Across the country, the heat contributes to about 1,500 deaths a year, and advocates estimate that about half of these people are homeless.
Temperatures are rising almost everywhere due to global warming, combined with a brutal drought in some places to create more intense, frequent and longer heat waves. The last few summers have been the hottest in history.
In Phoenix County alone, at least 130 homeless people were among the 339 people who died of heat-related causes in 2021.
“If 130 homeless people die otherwise, it would be considered a mass casualty event,” said Kristie L. Ebi, a global health professor at the University of Washington.
The story goes on
It is a widespread problem in the United States, and now, with rising global temperatures, heat is no longer a danger only in places like Phoenix.
This summer is likely to bring temperatures above normal in most parts of the world, according to a seasonal map that volunteer climatologists created for Columbia University’s International Research Institute.
Last summer, a heat wave blew through the normally temperate northwestern United States, causing Seattle residents to sleep in their backyards and rooftops, or flee to air-conditioned hotels. Across the state, several homeless people were killed in the open air, including a man who fell behind a gas station.
In Oregon, officials first opened 24-hour cooling centers. Volunteer teams scattered water and paddles at homeless camps on the outskirts of Portland.
A quick scientific analysis concluded that last year’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest was virtually impossible without man-made climate change adding several degrees and breaking previous records.
Even Boston is exploring ways to protect several neighborhoods such as the Chinatown, where population density and few shade trees help raise temperatures to 106 degrees (41 degrees Celsius) on some summer days. The city is planning strategies such as raising the tops of trees and other types of shade, using cooler roofing materials and expanding its network of cooling centers during heat waves.
It’s not just a US issue. An analysis by the Associated Press last year of a dataset published by Columbia University’s climate school found that exposure to extreme heat has tripled and now affects about a quarter of the world’s population.
This spring, an extreme heat wave has gripped much of Pakistan and India, where homelessness is widespread due to discrimination and homelessness. The high in Jacobabad, Pakistan, near the border with India, reached 122 degrees (50 degrees Celsius) in May.
Dr. Dileep Mavalankar, who heads the Indian Institute of Public Health in the West Indian city of Gandhinagar, said that due to bad information it is not known how many die in the country from exposure to heat.
Summer cooling centers have been opened every summer for the homeless, the elderly and other vulnerable people in several European countries since a heat wave in 2003 killed 70,000 people in Europe.
Bicycle emergency service workers patrol the streets of Madrid, handing out ice and water pads during the hot months. However, some 1,300 people, most of them elderly, continue to die in Spain every summer due to health complications aggravated by excessive heat.
Spain and southern France suffered unusually hot weather in mid-June last week, with temperatures reaching 104 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) in some areas.
Climate scientist David Hondula, who heads the new Phoenix office for heat mitigation, says that with such extreme weather now being seen around the world, more solutions are needed to protect the vulnerable, especially people. homeless people who are about 200 times more likely to die than protected people. for causes associated with heat.
“As temperatures continue to rise in the United States and around the world, cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, New York or Kansas City that lack the experience or infrastructure to cope with the heat also need to adjust.”
In Phoenix, officials and advocates hope that an empty building recently converted into a 200-bed homeless shelter will help save lives this summer.
Mac Mais, 34, was one of the first to move.
“It can be hard. I stay in shelters or anywhere I can find it,” said Mais, who has been homeless since she was a teenager. “Here I can stay out, rest, work on job applications, stay out of the heat.”
In Las Vegas, the equipment provides bottled water to homeless people living in camps around the county and within a network of underground drains under the Las Vegas Strip.
Ahmedabad, India, with a population of 8.4 million, was the first city in South Asia to design a heat action plan in 2013.
Through their alert system, non-governmental groups reach out to vulnerable people and send text messages to mobile phones. Water tankers are shipped to slums, while bus stops, temples, and libraries are turned into shelters for people to escape the flashes of lightning.
Still, the deaths are piling up.
Kimberly Rae Haws, a 62-year-old homeless woman, was seriously burned in October 2020 while lying for an unknown period of time on a paved Phoenix road. The cause of his subsequent death was never investigated.
A young man nicknamed Twitch died from heat exposure while sitting on a sidewalk near a Phoenix dining room in the hours leading up to its opening on a 2018 weekend.
“He was supposed to move into a permanent home the following Monday,” said Jim Baker, who oversees the dining hall of St. Vincent de Paul’s charity. “Her mother was devastated.”
Many of these deaths are never confirmed as heat-related and are not always noticed due to the stigma of homelessness and lack of connection to the family.
When a 62-year-old mentally ill woman named Shawna Wright died last summer in a hot alley in Salt Lake City, her death was not known until her family released an obituary saying the system did not protect her. during the hottest July ever recorded, when temperatures reached three digits.
Her sister, Tricia Wright, said that making it easier for homeless people to get permanent housing would go a long way in protecting them from extreme summer temperatures.
“We always thought she was tough, that she could get over it,” Tricia Wright said of her sister. “But no one is hard enough for that kind of heat.”
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AP scientific writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi and AP writers Frances D’Emilio in Rome and Ciaran Giles in Madrid have contributed to this report.
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