Heat Waves Don’t Have to Be So Deadly
This year may be the the hottest ever, but it's also one of the coolest we’ll ever enjoy again. We have to keep people safe.
Get used to it.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The early days of Covid-19 were a nightmare of packed hospitals and the constant wail of ambulances, the kind of apocalyptic scenes nobody wants to experience again. Now imagine them happening every summer but without a pandemic.
A week after Hurricane Beryl made landfall near Houston as a Category 1 storm, more than 200,000 households in the area were still without power. That meant hundreds of thousands of Texans had gone several days without air conditioning during a heat wave that relentlessly pushed heat indexes above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was a health-care emergency with uncomfortable reminders of Covid’s worst hours.