Hundreds believed killed during historic heat wave
PORTLAND, Ore. — The heat took Sebastian Francisco Perez, 38, as the Guatemalanborn farmworker moved irrigation lines in a field in Marion County, Ore., on Saturday in record temperatures that soared to 104 degrees.
Debra Moore, 68 and recovering from chemotherapy, was found Monday on the blistering sidewalk in a community at the base of Mount Rainier, hours after she collapsed just steps from the house she was visiting, the police said.
Dorothy Galliano, 85, died from hyperthermia sometime over the weekend in Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood where she was a vibrant fixture. Emergency medical workers found her Tuesday in her home, which had no air conditioning.
“The temperature outside was so high, you could only stand it a minute,” said Galliano’s friend Ann Pinsky, who lives three blocks away and who has wished all week that she or some other neighbors had checked to see if the older woman, who lived alone, was safe from the record heat wave.
As the Pacific Northwest recovers from the dome of extreme heat that hit last week and spiked temperatures into the triple digits for days before starting to recede Tuesday, authorities are beginning to tabulate its awful toll.
Hundreds of heatrelated deaths have been confirmed in ordinarily cool Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The casualties — in overheated cars, stifling apartments, older homes, workplaces, homeless encampments — reflect the particular dangers of extreme heat and the potential for devastation as climate change dramatically amplifies normal temperature fluctuations.
The death toll in Oregon alone reached 79, the Oregon state medical examiner said Thursday, with most occurring in Multnomah County, which encompasses Portland. The chief coroner of British Columbia said at least 486 sudden deaths were reported in the province from Friday to Wednesday afternoon, a fiveday period in which 165 such deaths are typically reported.
Because global warming has raised baseline temperatures by nearly 2 degrees on average since
1900, heat waves like the one in the Pacific Northwest are now likely to be hotter than those recorded in past centuries. Over the past 30 years, extreme heat has led to more deaths in the United States than other extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and floods, although estimates for the number of heatrelated deaths have varied.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 505 heatrelated deaths in the United States in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. But the real numbers could be much higher. Another study, which looked at excess deaths in the country’s 297 most populous counties, found that approximately 5,600 deaths could be attributable to heat each year.
Last week, residents throughout the region expressed their alarm at the suddenness and severity of the heat, which struck just as they were beginning to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, anticipating the usual temperate summer.
Instead, slammed with temperatures more characteristic of Death Valley, Washington highways buckled and Portland’s TriMet public transit system ground to a halt as its overhead wires sagged and expanded. The University of Washington Medical Center treated more than 100 patients for heatrelated illness.
In Seattle, Pinsky said she watched, aching, as a nest of baby crows in her yard struggled to get out of the scorching sun, only to perish.
“I’ve been in this neighborhood almost 50 years,” she said, “and I’ve never experienced weather like this.”
On Thursday, officials in Oregon — which in the previous 20 years combined had recorded 72 official heatrelated deaths — updated its heatrelated death toll since Friday to at least 68. More than 50 of those deaths were in Multnomah County, which includes Portland. The average age of those who died there was 67.
“It’s really a tragedy, and a lesson that heat does kill,” said Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer.