On Tuesday morning, Seattleites woke to a breezy sixty-four degrees. And then, just when you’d have sworn that this inferno had become our only way of being, the fever broke. Power went out in pockets around the city, leaving even those with A.C. on Monday, the temperature remained in the triple digits until about 8 P.M. In 2014, asked where people might consider moving as global temperatures rise, a climate researcher told the Times, “The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades.” That no longer seems like a sure bet.Īfter spiking at a hundred and eight degrees just before 6 P.M. Until recently, Seattle seemed less influenced by climate change than, say, the Gulf States or the Southwest before this past weekend, the city hadn’t experienced a hundred-plus-degree day in more than a decade.
Fire crews distributed bottled water and ice. Senior centers, community centers, and libraries were converted into mass public cooling stations. Seattle has one of the highest rates of people living with homelessness in the country many would be left exposed in the deadly, sweltering boil. Crews recovered two bodies from lakes and one from a river, presumably taking a swim to escape the heat.Īffordable-housing advocates warned of the threat to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Dozens of heat-stroke victims entered local emergency rooms.
#SEATTLE UNHERD CRACKED#
In Seattle, pavement along Interstate 5 cracked and buckled. Thirty miles outside that city, an Oregon farmworker died, reportedly owing to heat-related conditions. In comparatively well air-conditioned Portland, temperatures hit a hundred and sixteen, an all-time high. The city was stuck beneath a heat dome, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as happening “when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure ‘dome.’ ” The heat dome first blistered the West for almost two weeks-a hundred and twenty-three degrees in Palm Springs, a hundred and fourteen in Las Vegas-and then, in late June, it sat atop the Pacific Northwest. Except, for three days here, there was no cool air. The same fans perched on an open windowsill can blow in the cool air after the sun goes down.
#SEATTLE UNHERD SKIN#
Two strategically stationed box fans create a small tempest, swooshing the parched, artificial wind across the skin in multiple directions. The placement of fans becomes its own kind of science. Or, the only endurable variety, and it’s barely even that: air pushed around by a fan. Then, beginning on Saturday, June 26th, the region surpassed that figure for three straight days, breaking the all-time record on Sunday, June 27th, at a hundred and four degrees, and obliterating that new record a day later, at a hundred and eight.Īnd so, window blinds down, Seattle residents endured varieties of heat: the still, hot air that sits in the dark bedroom corner like an apparition the diffuse heat that strikes every part of the body and never lets up the penetrating heat that holds you by the throat. Seattle had clocked temperatures above a hundred degrees only three times in the history of recording temperatures here, which began in the late eighteen-hundreds.
In the verdant, cloud-covered upper-left corner of the U.S., it’s not uncommon for temperatures to stay in the sixties through much of June or even July-or for Seattleites to feel completely robbed of summer altogether, the skies a slate gray seemingly all season long.Ī heat wave like the one tormenting the Northwest right now upends all that. because, until a few years ago, we rarely needed it. Here in Seattle, which hit a hundred and eight degrees on Monday night-the highest local temperature on record-and where a majority of residents don’t have air-conditioning, box fans are the only defense that most of us have. What I mean is a sort of personal thermodynamics-a study in the varieties of heat conspired against you, and how that heat can be tamed or not (mostly not) with a fan. Maybe not thermodynamics, exactly no physicist is going to applaud the lessons here. You can learn a lot about thermodynamics while sitting indoors without air-conditioning on a hundred-plus-degree day.
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