Extreme heat deaths are just beginning

July in Death Valley National Park’s Badwater Basin, where temperatures reached 129 degrees.
Photo: Kirby Lee/AP

In early July, a sweltering heat wave swept across the western United States: 120 degrees Fahrenheit (51.5 Celsius) in Palm Springs, 129 degrees Fahrenheit (49.9 Celsius) in Las Vegas, and 128 degrees Fahrenheit (48.1 Celsius) in Redding, in far northern California. Dan Berc, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, described the conditions as “abnormal … We’re talking 10 to 12 degrees above normal for the hottest part of the year.” That first week in July, 1,000 fish died in Lake Elizabeth in Fremont, California—asphyxiation; the warmer the water, the less oxygen it holds. Still, in western Arizona, in the foothills of the Mohave Mountains, Alyssa Wroblewski assumed that July 5 would be, as she later put it, “a normal, happy day” for her family. She and her husband, Matthew, a detective with the Riverside Police Department, were taking their infant daughters on a boat on Lake Havasu, a reservoir on the Colorado River.

The Wroblewskis did this all the time, putting life jackets on their young daughters. They went boating in April, just weeks after Tanna Rae was born. They went boating in May and June. That Fourth of July weekend, Alyssa and Matthew dressed their daughters in matching red, white and blue bathing suits. Tanna’s diaper poked out between the leg band of the suit and her bulging thigh.

Children’s bodies cool themselves less efficiently than adults’, and infants’ bodies cool themselves even less efficiently. By afternoon at the lake, the air temperature had climbed to 120 degrees. Around 5 p.m., Alyssa and Matthew realized Tanna wasn’t breathing. The parents performed CPR until firefighters arrived. Four-month-old Tanna was airlifted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, but it was too late.

July 2024 was the second-warmest month ever recorded. July 21 was the hottest day ever recorded. July 22 was even hotter. February 2023 to January 2024 was the first one-year period with average temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, a threshold that signatories to the Paris climate agreement had pledged to try not to cross.

So far this year, more than 800 people have died from extreme heat-related causes in the Western United States alone. This number is dramatically underreported: Medical examiners can’t always identify heat-related deaths and are slow to confirm suspected ones. In the coming weeks and months, this number — 800 — will double, triple, or even increase. In 2021, 1,602 Americans died from extreme heat; in 2022, that number rose to 1,722; in 2023, to 2,302.

Between 2000 and 2019, an estimated 489,000 people died each year worldwide from heat-related causes. This summer, in the five days from June 14 to 19, more than 1,300 people died in Saudi Arabia’s 49-degree heat, many of them pilgrims trying to reach Mecca for the hajj.

Every heat death is a failure, a vulnerability multiplied. Extreme heat plus poverty. Or extreme heat plus incarceration. Or natural disaster. Or substance abuse. Or hypertension. Or age, whether old or very young. Wealth saves most people, but not all. This June, six tourists died from heat while on holiday in Greece.

The day after Baby Tanna’s death, on July 6, six German men rode motorcycles through Death Valley National Park. The forecast high temperature was 128°F. It wasn’t just the temperature that was the problem. “You have to dress for the accident,” explained one experienced California motorcyclist. “You have to wear clothes that are comfortable and safe.”
Leather or Kevlar because if you fall, it’s over.” This clothing doesn’t breathe; the wind can’t cool you. One of the six riders died of heat stroke near Badwater Basin. No medevac helicopter came to pick him up. Once the temperature gets above 120, it’s too hot for helicopters to fly.

The next day, July 7, James Gerhardt ran from the mobile home he shared with his older brother, Kevin, at the Camp Resolution trailer park in North Sacramento. Kevin, 57, was caring for James, who was disabled. The brothers lived on Social Security checks and food stamps. The mobile home’s air conditioner didn’t work; they couldn’t afford to fix it. That afternoon, in 105-degree heat, Kevin had fallen asleep and then collapsed to the floor, unconscious. James called for help from a neighbor, who later said that entering the house “felt like he was walking into an oven.” Kevin wasn’t sweating. Kevin wasn’t breathing. “His organs shut down,” Kevin’s neighbor said. “He was pretty much cooked.”

On July 8, Trancita Ponce, an inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility, a prison in Chowchilla, made a phone call to a prisoner advocacy group. “There’s hot air inside our rooms, I have a terrible migraine and I feel sick, and other girls are throwing up. Not to mention someone died two days ago from heat exhaustion,” Ponce said. That person was Adrienne Boulware, 42, who had been serving a 15-year sentence for second-degree murder and, according to her daughter, was just seven months away from release. A few weeks earlier, in late June, California passed indoor heating regulations meant to keep citizens safe and cool during heat waves, but these regulations did not apply to prisons. “Please help us,” Ponce implored. “You’re not doing anything for us.”

That same day, much of Houston was without power, thanks to Hurricane Beryl. For 24, 48, 72 hours, more than a million residents were unable to run electric fans or air conditioners. Some were without power for more than a week. Temperatures reached 90 degrees; the heat index, more than 100. A somber ritual spread across the city: Neighbors checked on each other to make sure everyone was surviving. On July 16, a man went to check on 69-year-old Dorothy Mullan in her apartment in the Museum District. He knocked on the door. No one answered. He went inside and found her dead.

The mind wanders under the burden of worrying, of letting in the full weight of every life that has ended this way. The problem is too big. We don’t know how to live in a world this hot. As Alex Steffen, climate futurist, now climate realist, once told me, we live in a discontinuity. We are unprepared for what has already happened. We need to catch up with reality. We need to cross the gap of unpreparedness, as reflected in our public policies, in our infrastructure, in our decision-making. We need to integrate the world, not as we remember it or wish it to be, but as it actually exists.

Stacey Champion, a 53-year-old single mother and heat activist in Phoenix, has carried the burden of reality — the burden of caregiving — for the past decade, ever since the power company threatened to shut off her electricity in the summer of 2009. She used to spend hours driving to the Zone, once Phoenix’s largest homeless encampment, handing out umbrellas, ice packs, cooling towels and spray bottles of cold water. She often sits on the street with residents bleary-eyed from soaring core temperatures, waiting for emergency services to arrive. In 2018, she filed a legal complaint against Arizona Public Service, the power company, over a rate increase. She pushes for better policies: hotel voucher programs for heat waves and air travel emergencies.
Air Conditioning Repair Sends out an endless stream of public records requests in an attempt to read all of Maricopa County’s heat death reports.

Champion knows the extreme heat is burning her, too. “I did damage to myself,” she told me, the toll of all those summer days in the Zone. She meant the physical: The damage from heat stress to organs is cumulative. But the emotional toll is frying her, too. “It drives me crazy,” she said. You can feel the impact in her machine-gun responses to text messages and in the intensity of her dark eyes. “I troll the mayor, the county and different public entities constantly,” she told me with a mix of pride and shame.

It is bleak, the sixth extinction that now envelops us. Summer, which for so long was fertile and flourishing, is now scorching and chilling. The season of heat death has arrived.