She happens to work for a heating and cooling contractor. RYAN: Julia Kitch is at a light rail station in Seattle. JULIA KITCH: Washington state isn't really designed to take on this kind of heat. The Seattle area has long had a mild climate. Goss says it was a difficult decision because of the cost, adding diesel cooling was also a setback for the hospital's efforts to be carbon-neutral by the end of the decade. RYAN: The chillers are big diesel-powered units sitting on trailers outside the main hospital building. GOSS: It really led to us, this year, making a difficult decision to rent portable chillers to be ready. RYAN: Goss says last year's difficulties led the hospital to make some changes. Having several days over 100 degrees - that really - that was tough for us. CEO Darin Goss says that's what it took to keep patients' rooms cool.ĭARIN GOSS: It was a wake-up call for the impacts of climate change. Peter Hospital in Olympia had to send more than 100 staff home last year to reduce the load on its air conditioners. RYAN: The region's hospitals have ramped up their system for redirecting ambulances toward less crowded emergency rooms and made other preparations. MITCHELL: But we are not taking any chances. This week's temperatures aren't expected to match last year's heat dome. Since then, health care officials have been aiming to avoid a repeat. Another cooled heat stroke patients in body bags filled with ice. He says last summer's extreme heat pushed hospitals to their limits. RYAN: Emergency physician Steve Mitchell runs the ER at Seattle's Harborview Hospital. STEVE MITCHELL: They saw a career's worth of heat-related severe illness and, sadly, people dying within 8 hours. Heat-related visits to emergency rooms shot up 70-fold. RYAN: More people in the Seattle area made medical calls to 911 than ever before. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: We've been extremely busy everywhere today 'cause of the weather, so it could be quite a while before we get out there. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Incapacitated individual that's kind of passed out, sleeping. I just drove past the Kenmore Park & Ride, and there was a person laying on the ground. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: 911 - what are you reporting? JOHN RYAN, BYLINE: Seattleites are hoping this time around isn't as bad as the last time, when the 911 calls poured in. Since that wake-up call, the region has been trying to prepare itself for a hotter future. It comes just over a year after the region endured its most extreme heat ever. So Philip says there’s an urgent need to limit global warming and make sure that a once-in-a-thousand-year heat wave remains extremely rare.The Pacific Northwest is feeling its first heat wave of the year. The researchers found that if average global temperatures rise to about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial times, an event like this would occur roughly every five to 10 years in that future world. “Yet it would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change,” Philip says.Īnd if global warming continues, such extreme heat waves could grow more common. The researchers estimate that this year’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest was about a one-in-a-thousand-year event, so it was extremely unlikely. She’s part of the World Weather Attribution Initiative, a group that analyzes extreme weather events. “Many people do not realize that heat waves are actually one of the deadliest natural hazards,” says Sjoukje Philip of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute. Hundreds of people died across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. But in 2021, they reached more than 110 degrees. High temperatures in Portland are usually in the seventies that time of year. In June 2021, a record-breaking heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest.
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