B.C. bracing for extreme heat
VICTORIA — British Columbia is better prepared to withstand the return of a hot weather emergency that resulted in more than 600 deaths last summer, but more must be done to help people and communities, says the chief medical officer at BC’s Coroners Service.
A death-panel report released Tuesday provides a road map for the province and calls for a co-ordinated heat-alert system in B.C. to prevent deaths in future heat emergencies, Dr. Jatinder Baidwan said at a news conference.
“It’s about eliminating risk,” he said. “You are never going to live in a society where you eliminate all risk. But we have to do our utmost to ensure that we absolutely, actively eliminate as much risk as we can understand.”
Record temperatures surpassed 40 C for days in last summer’s so-called heat dome across the province, resulting in 619 heat-related deaths, most of them elderly and vulnerable people living in buildings without air conditioning.
The panel report says 98 per cent of those who died last summer were indoors and most victims “lived in socially or materially deprived neighbourhoods” compared with the general population.
“Are we where we need to be? No,” said Baidwan. “Can we get better? Absolutely. I can honestly say we are in better shape today than we were at the time of the heat dome last year.”
The BC Coroners Service report comes a day after the provincial government announced a two-stage heat response system to help people and communities stay safe as temperatures rise and the threat of heat-related emergencies increases.
The recommendations from the report include ensuring vulnerable people are identified and supported during heat emergencies, implementing longer-term prevention and mitigation strategies and introducing the heat alert and response system.
“Coroner investigations found that those who died were predominantly older adults with chronic health conditions and relatively compromised overall health,” says the report.
“These conditions may have impacted their ability to seek assistance or cooler environments. The majority of those who died lacked access to cooling or ventilation, and were often living in areas of higher material and social deprivation.”
The report says 67 per cent of the people who died were 70 years and older and 90 per cent of the people were over 60 years old.
Baidwan said the panel recommended the immediate and long-term focuses of government, communities and health agencies should involve helping people stay cool in their homes or getting them to cooling facilities to escape the dangers of the heat.
“If we can’t get something to somebody, get them to a cooling centre,” he said.
“Essentially, if you think about it, people dying from heat, it’s a failure of the way we live.”
Baidwan said communities should consider heat-protection initiatives that range from building homes that stay cool in hot weather, to planting more trees to provide shade and fewer open concrete areas to attract heat.
Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth announced on Monday that B.C.’s heat response system will include alerts broadcast to mobile devices.
The Opposition Liberals called on the New Democrat government to start working on the report’s recommendations.
“Today’s recommendations from the coroner must be implemented immediately to prevent such a heat dome tragedy from occurring again,” B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon said in a statement.
Extreme heat is a deadly consequence of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
The amount of heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone — more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times — and is at levels not seen since millions of years ago when Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, American scientists announced on Friday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its long-time monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, averaged 421 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide for the month of May, which is when the crucial greenhouse gas hits its yearly high. Before the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, CO2 levels were at 280 ppm, scientists said, so humans have significantly changed the atmosphere. Some activists and scientists want a level of 350 ppm.