Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Northwest heat wave turns inland
Death toll grows, strained power provider starts blackouts
SPOKANE, Wash. — The unprecedented Northwest U.S. heat wave that slammed Seattle and Portland, Ore., moved inland Tuesday, prompting an electrical utility in Spokane, Wash., to warn that people will face more rolling blackouts amid heavy power demand.
Officials said more than a half-dozen deaths in Washington and Oregon may be tied to the intense heat that began late last week.
The dangerous weather that gave Seattle and Portland consecutive days of record high temperatures exceeding 100 F was expected to ease in those cities. But inland Spokane saw temperatures spike.
The National Weather Service said the mercury reached 109 F in Spokane— the highest temperature ever recorded there.
About 9,300 Avista Utilities customers in Spokane lost power Monday and the company said more planned blackouts began on Tuesday afternoon in the city of about 220,000 people.
Heather Rosentrater, an Avista vice president for energy delivery, said about 2,400 customers were without power as of shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday. About 21,000 customers were warned Tuesday morning that they might experience an outage, she said.
Avista had to implement deliberate blackouts on Monday because “the electric system experienced a new peak demand, and the strain of the high temperatures impacted the system in a way that required us to proactively turn off power for some customers,” said Dennis Vermillion, company president and chief executive. “This happened faster than anticipated.”
Rosentrater said the outages were a distribution problem, and did not stem from a lack of electricity in the system
Meanwhile, authorities said multiple recent deaths in the region were possibly related to the scorching weather.
The King County Medical Examiner’s office in Washington said two people died due to hyperthermia, meaning their bodies had became dangerously overheated.
The heat may have caused death to a worker on a nursery in Oregon, the state’s worker safety agency, known as Oregon OSHA, said on Tuesday.
Officials in Bremerton, Wash., said heat may have contributed to four deaths in that Puget Sound city. But Vince Hlavaty, Bremerton’s medical officer, told the Kitsap Sun that firefighters cannot say definitively whether the heat was the cause of death.
In Bend, Ore., authorities said the deaths of two homeless people in extreme heat may have been weather-related.
The United Farm Workers urged Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to immediately issue emergency heat standards protecting all farm and other outdoor workers in the state with a strong agricultural sector. The state’s current heat standards fall short of safeguards the United Farm Workers first won in California in 2005 that have prevented deaths and illnesses from heat stroke, the union said in a statement.
Seattle was cooler Tuesday with temperatures expected to reach about 90 F after registering 108 F on Monday — well above Sunday’s all-time high of 104 F. Portland, Ore., reached 116 F after hitting records of 108 F on Saturday and 112 F on Sunday.
President Joe Biden, during an infrastructure speech in Wisconsin, took note of the Northwest as he spoke about the need to be prepared for extreme weather.
“Anybody ever believe you’d turn on the news and see it’s 116 degrees in Portland, Oregon? 116 degrees,” the president said, working in a dig at those who cast doubt on the reality of climate change. “But don’t worry — there is no global warming because it’s just a figment of our imaginations.”
The heat wave was caused by what meteorologists described as a dome of high pressure over the Northwest, and worsened by climate change, which is making such extreme weather events more likely and more intense.