The skin blistering heat that has enveloped large swaths of the American southwest began last week during the end of spring and the start of the summer solstice. Cooler temperatures, by desert standards, are expected this week. But that doesn’t mean the fires are slowing down anytime soon, nor is a severe drought or ease the rapid evaporation of water stores throughout the South West.
The conditions have spread to the Pacific NW.
“Record-Breaking and Dangerous Heatwave coming to the West,” tweeted the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center Wednesday. “Over 80 sites are forecast to break daily high temperature records starting this weekend.”
Highs on Sunday could approach 100 degrees in Seattle and 107 in Portland, cities where a significant portion of the population lacks air-conditioning. Seattle has only previously reached the century mark twice in more than 75 years of records. If Portland hits 107, it would match its highest temperature ever recorded.
Even the high plains which grow our cereal are in danger.
This heat dome's reach is remarkable, too: It has set record highs stretching from the Great Plains to coastal California. And these aren't just records for that specific date or month, but in a few spots, they are records for the singularly hottest day in the entire period of record, sometimes stretching back 100 to 150 years. "That's a pretty big deal," Swain says.
Not only are the high temperatures inconvenient and just godawful to experience, but they also can cramp you and give you heat exhaustion and/or stroke.
What is particularly alarming is our power failures; these failures can be lethal, as we saw this winter in the MAGA paradise of Texas.
This brings me full circle back to Phoenix and Jeff Goodell, who wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine.
In his article Can We Survive Extreme Heat? Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come. Goodell writes:
Still, the multiplying risks of extreme heat are just beginning to be understood, even in places like Phoenix, one of the hottest big cities in America. To Mikhail Chester, the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University, the risk of a heat-driven catastrophe increases every year. “What will the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat look like?” he wonders aloud as we sit in a cafe near the ASU campus. Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, resulting in nearly 2,000 deaths and more than $100 billion in economic damage, demonstrated just how unprepared a city can be for extreme climate events.
“Hurricane Katrina caused a cascading failure of urban infrastructure in New Orleans that no one really predicted,” Chester explains. “Levees broke. People were stranded. Rescue operations failed. Extreme heat could lead to a similar cascading failure in Phoenix, exposing vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the region’s infrastructure that are difficult to foresee.”
In Chester’s view, a Phoenix heat catastrophe begins with a blackout. It could be triggered any number of ways. During periods of extreme heat, power demand surges, straining the system. Inevitably, something will fail. A wildfire will knock out a power line. A substation will blow. A hacker might crash the grid. In 2011, a utility worker doing routine maintenance near Yuma knocked out a 500-kilovolt power line that shut off power to millions of people for up to 12 hours, including virtually the entire city of San Diego, causing economic losses of $100 million. A major blackout in Phoenix could easily cost much more, says Chester.
But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, energy-efficient buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps.) Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If a blackout during extreme heat continues for long, rioting, looting, and arson could begin.
And people will start dying. How many? “Katrina-like numbers,” Chester predicts. Which is to say, thousands. Chester describes all this coolly, as if a Phoenix heat apocalypse is a matter of fact, not hypothesis.
“How likely is this to happen?” I ask.
“It’s more a question of when,” Chester says, “not if.”
I’ll have a lot more to share as the news about the climate has taken a drastic turn for the worst. This is what every single one of us needs to be outraged about.
