David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseous before heading out to hang laundry in 100-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s relentless, record-setting July heat wave.
His family found the 73-year-old man lying on the ground, with his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, with a core body temperature of 107 degrees.
The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the highest number in 45 years of records, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the Centers for Control and Prevention. of Diseases. With May already breaking heat records, 2024 could be even deadlier.
And more than two dozen doctors, public health experts and meteorologists told the AP that last year’s toll was just a fraction of the real death toll. Coroner, hospital, ambulance and weather records show America’s heat and health problems on a whole new level.
“We can be sure that 2023 was the worst year we’ve had since then… we’re starting to get reliable reporting on that,” said Dr. John Balbus, director of the Department of Health’s Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. and Human Services.
Last year, ambulances were dispatched tens of thousands of times after people collapsed in the heat. He was relentless and gave people no rest, especially at night. The heat of 2023 kept coming and people kept dying.
“These are people who live a hot life. These are the ones who are dying. People who work outside, people who can’t air-condition their homes,” said Texas A&M, climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was in hard-hit South Texas. “It’s really very, very dark.”
Dallas postal worker Eugene Gates Jr. loved working outside and at 7:30 a.m. on June 20, the 66-year-old texted his wife that it was close to 90 degrees. He continued working in heat that felt like 119 degrees with humidity considered and finally passed out in someone’s backyard. He had a fever of 104.6 degrees and died, with the medical examiner saying the heat contributed to his death.
“The way my husband died, this could have been avoided,” said Carla Gates.
“There is little awareness that heat kills. It’s the silent killer,” said Kristie Ebi, a public health scientist at the University of Washington who helped write a United Nations special report on extreme weather. That 2012 report warned of future dangerous heat waves.
Ebi said that in recent years the heat “seems like it’s coming faster. It looks like it’s more serious than we expected.”
Last summer’s heatwave killed differently from previous ones, which caused mass deaths in northern cities, where people were not used to high temperatures and air conditioning was not common. Several hundred have died in the Pacific Northwest as of 2021, in Philadelphia in 1998, and in Chicago in 1995.
Nearly three-quarters of heat deaths last summer occurred in five Southern states that should have been accustomed to heat and planned for it. Only this time they couldn’t handle it and it killed 874 people in Arizona, 450 in Texas, 226 in Nevada, 84 in Florida and 83 in Louisiana.
These five states accounted for 61% of the country’s heat-related deaths over the past five years, quickly surpassing their 18% share of U.S. deaths between 1979 and 1999.
At least 645 people have died from the heat in Maricopa County, Arizona alone, according to the medical examiner’s office. People died in their cars and especially on the streets, where homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness made the situation worse.
Three months after being evicted from her home, 64-year-old Diana Smith was found dead in the back of her car. The cause of death was methamphetamine and fentanyl, aggravated by heat exposure, the Phoenix medical examiner ruled.
“Over the past five years, we have seen this consistent and unprecedented upward trend. And I think it’s because the heat levels that we’ve seen in recent years have exceeded what we’ve seen in the last 20 or 30,” said Balbus of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Climate Change and Health Equity.
Phoenix saw 20 consecutive days of extreme heat stress in July, the longest string of dangerously hot days in the city since at least 1940, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Phoenix was not alone.
Last year, the U.S. had the most heat waves since 1936. In the South and Southwest, last year was the worst on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It was crazy,” said Brian McNoldy, a tropical meteorology researcher at the University of Miami who spent the summer documenting how Miami broke its daily heat index record on 40% of days between mid-June and mid-October.
Houston’s Hobby Airport broke daily high temperature marks 43 times, meteorologists said. Overnight lows set heat records 57 times, they said. This didn’t give people’s bodies a chance to recover.
In five Southern states, the average rate of emergency department visits for heat illness in the summer of 2023 was more than double that of the previous five summers, according to a CDC data analysis.
Experts have warned that counting heat mortality based on death certificates leads to underestimates. Heat illnesses may go unnoticed or may not be mentioned.
They pointed to “excess deaths” studies for a more realistic count. These are the type of long-accepted epidemiological studies that look at overall death totals during unusual conditions – such as hot days, high air pollution or a spreading COVID-19 pandemic – and compare them to normal times, creating a line of expected trend.
Texas A&M’s Dessler and his colleague Jangho Lee published one such study early last year. According to their methods, Lee said, about 11,000 heat deaths will likely occur by 2023 in the U.S. — a number that would represent a record since at least 1987 and is about five times the number reported on death certificates.
Deaths have also increased because of better reporting and because Americans are getting older and more vulnerable to heat, Lee said. The population is also slowly moving to cities, which are more exposed to heat.
In some places, last year’s heat already rivals the worst on record. By the end of May, Miami was on track to be 1.5 degrees warmer than the hottest May on record, according to McNoldy. Murphy, of Dallas, pointed to maps that say conditions in scorching Mexico are “eerily similar to what we saw last June,” so he’s worried about “a very brutal summer.”
Texas A&M’s Dessler said last year’s heat was “a taste of the future.”
“I just think in 20 years, you know, 2040 will come… we’ll look at 2023 and say, man, that was cool,” Dessler said. I haven’t pushed you over the edge yet, just wait.
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Borenstein reported from Washington, Wildeman from Hartford, Connecticut, and Snow from Phoenix. Kendria LaFleur contributed from Dallas.
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Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment
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Follow Seth Borenstein on X at @borenbears and Anita Snow at @asnowreports
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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