Unlike other natural disasters, extreme heat doesn’t topple buildings, flood streets or turn road signs into missiles. It doesn’t provide a dramatic backdrop for daredevil weather reporters. What it mostly does is kill people, quietly and efficiently. It’s long past time we respect its destructive power, which will only grow as a warming planet makes heat waves more frequent and intense.
This discussion is particularly relevant this week, as a “heat blob” that has punished Mexico and the Southwestern U.S. for months creeps into the Midwest, Northeast and Canada, subjecting possibly 150 million people to unseasonably high temperatures for a miserable stretch of days.
For many Americans, a heat wave is just a nuisance. We’ll sweat through our work clothes and blow out our power bill running the air conditioning. Roads and sidewalks will buckle.
But for hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year, heat is deadly. In the U.S., it takes more lives than hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or floods. It contributed to the deaths of more than 2,300 Americans last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most in 45 years of record-keeping. The number of such heat-related deaths has more than doubled in just the past five years.
Though this week’s heat wave will have all the hallmarks of a discrete natural disaster like a named hurricane or serious earthquake, including the threat to human life and health, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will not treat it as such. That’s because it doesn’t consider heat waves or wildfire-smoke events “major disasters” worthy of federal relief.