Comment: For some in cities, there’s no escape from the heat

By Petula Dvorak / The Washington Post

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I paid 19 cents a minute to sleep the other night.

That’s because the 33-year-old air conditioning unit in our house finally gave out, and the sweaty repairman wiped his face and delivered the grim prognosis: “July 9. That’s the soonest I can get you a new one. We’re so backed up.”

We didn’t take the news gracefully, and we didn’t make it without wimping out.

“I have nothing left to peel off except my skin!” a melting, sweaty, miserable child moaned in the middle of the second week of our bake-off.

So after nights of box fans, oscillating fans, a YouTube-sourced contraption involving a five-gallon bucket and dry ice, stories about people in the 1800s, cold showers, and cold-air breaks in the car, I broke down and checked us all into a mediocre suburban hotel room for $80 on the hottest day of this adventure, which at that point was a bargain for a solid seven hours of sleep (and quiet).

There are at least 1,600 people in Washington, D.C. who don’t have that luxury.

The tent cities have sprouted around the District like mushrooms after the rain, and as the city heads for another week of humid, scorching heat, the city’s homeless folks are facing another dangerous week.

“They’re at risk of heat stroke and sunburn all day; and dehydration, which can be serious,” Colleen Cosgriff, a lead outreach team member for nonprofit Pathways to Housing D.C., told Street Sense Media. “If they’re worried about losing belongings they might have all their clothing on or with them. So it’s definitely difficult, especially downtown where there are no trees and the pavement gets quite hot. That’s where people sleep so it can be quite distressing and dangerous.”

The folks living in those hot little tents are more vulnerable. Annually, more people in the United States die of hyperthermia (more than 600, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) than from any other weather event. And the poorer you are in D.C., the hotter you are.

That’s because parts of the District are urban heat islands, spots within a city that are hotter than the reported temperature based on landscaping and architecture. And that’s usually the same map that shows the disparities in income, crime and health.

Let’s take Aug. 17, 2015. It’s a random date, but the one that the D.C. Policy Center uses to illustrate the temperature gaps in D.C. That day, the official high was 95 degrees. But when a weather map homes in on the city, the hottest spots got up to 102. Waterfront areas clocked in at a comfortable 75 degrees; Beaujolais spritzer weather.

“Research shows that people tend to be more affected by a heat wave if they have a low income, if they are under the poverty line or if they don’t have insurance,” Yesim Sayin Taylor, executive director of the D.C. Policy Center, told WTOP. “These things correlate with each other and explain certain responses residents have to heat waves, especially the seniors. They don’t always understand what a heat wave might do to them.”

There are cooling centers in the city, splash parks and pools. But let’s be honest, hours of muggy humidity, especially at night, can’t be cooled by a splash. I know it didn’t help my family.

Now imagine if you’re older or vulnerable, or your life’s belongings are in a tent that you’re nervous about leaving. So you don’t, and the possibility of being baked to death rises.

Here’s the really scary part. The urban heat island studies were using hot days from August because, even just six years ago, that’s when the dangerously hot days came.

We’re at the beginning of July. And the region already saw a couple of record-breaking high temperatures in June.

Some people have turned to their brethren for help. More than 1,200 people and groups in the Washington region have set up GoFundMe accounts to try to raise money for air conditioners, describing 110-degree temperatures in their homes and no way to cool off.

This is the impact of climate change on a deeply personal level.

It’s more stark in the Pacific Northwest, where hundreds of people have died of the heat this summer as temperatures stayed in the triple digits. Or in Siberia, where the high temperature in one location clocked in at 118, a number that used to be record-breaking in Arizona.

The sweaty repairman is wiping his face and looking at our entire nation. The prognosis isn’t good.

Sure, my family will eventually get cool air running through our home again. But for those folks living in the poorest areas of the city, in tents or less, there’s no relief from the heat island. It will take more than a repairman to bring them any comfort.

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Post’s local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.