We have a problem, America, and we’re just now figuring out how bad it is. It's heat.
Last year I found myself in the blazing sun on a street corner in Los Angeles, deep in conversation with Gerardo Álvarez. He has lived on that corner in a tidy wooden shack for years. Over several visits, Álvarez had been educating me about his life there: how he got there, why he stayed and how he dealt with the many challenges that dotted his days. One of the big ones, he said in Spanish, was the heat. He had experienced some scary moments over the years when he got so hot he worried he would pass out or even die.
I could understand that viscerally. It was November, but it was still well over 90 degrees. Sitting on the sidewalk outside his shack, I was soggy with sweat within minutes. He told me to put my arm inside to feel the temperature; inside, it was even hotter.
I report on the ways climate change affects people’s health. And for years, I have heard stories similar to Álvarez’s. People would tell me about their loved ones who died after their air conditioner broke down. Or after they had been working outside for hours on an oppressively humid day. Or because they were, like Álvarez, living on the street.
Yet official numbers didn’t reflect those experiences. And when I asked, experts, including doctors and epidemiologists, told me over and over that the official numbers on heat-related deaths didn’t square with their experience. The impacts of heat, they’d say, were bigger than any official counts suggested — and probably a lot bigger.
I wanted to know exactly how big. So for two years, I worked with researchers from Boston University and colleagues from NPR’s Investigations team to get a better estimate. Using sophisticated statistical modeling, we determined that heat contributes to the deaths of about 9,000 Americans each year — roughly five times as many as federal records say.
Álvarez does not count amongst those. But he is very aware that the next bad heat wave could put him in that category.
“Every heat death is preventable,” says Quinn Adams, an epidemiologist at Boston University and one of our partners in the research. The first step, she says, is seeing the scale and the scope of the problem clearly. Our investigation shows the true toll heat has on people at a time when human-caused climate change is making our summers hotter and more intense.
— Alejandra Borunda, climate and health reporter on NPR’s National Team
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