On a recent Thursday night, a formidable wind storm called a derecho (Spanish for “straight ahead”) hit Houston, a city of more than two million people and the center of the United States. fossil fuel industry in the US.
In just a few minutes, winds gusting up to 100 mph blew out windows from office buildings, uprooted trees, and toppled power poles and transmission towers. Nearly one million households lost power. That means not only is there no light, but there is also no air conditioning. The damage caused by the storm was so extensive that, five days later, more than 100,000 homes and businesses remained in the heat and darkness.
Luckily, on the day the derecho hit, temperatures in Houston, a city known for its swampy summers, were in the low to mid-80s. Hot, sure, but for most healthy people it was. not life-threatening. Of at least eight deaths reported as a result of the storm, none were due to exposure to high temperatures.
But if this storm had arrived a few days later, perhaps over Memorial Day weekend, when temperatures in Houston topped 96 degrees, with heat indexes as high as 115, it could have been a very different story. “Hurricane Katrina with extreme heat,” is how Mikhail Chester, director of the Metis Center for Sustainable Infrastructure and Engineering at Arizona State University, once told me, recalling memories of the disastrous storm in 2005 hit Louisiana, devastating New Orleans and killing more than 1,300 people.
Most of dead people in Louisiana during Katrina died of drowning, injuries or heart disease. But Dr. Chester is using Katrina as a metaphor for what could happen to a city unprepared for an extreme climate disaster. In New Orleans, the levee system is overwhelmed by torrential rains; eventually, 80% of the city was under water.
Instead, what if the power went out for several days during a severe summer heat wave in a city that depends on air conditioning during those months?
In Dr. Chester’s scenario, a compounded crisis caused by extreme heat and power outages in a major city like Houston could lead to a series of consecutive failures, exposing vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. area that is difficult to predict and could lead to thousands, if not thousands, of deaths. Tens of thousands of people died from the heat in just a few days. The risk to people in cities will be higher because all the concrete and asphalt will amplify heat, pushing temperatures to maximum levels. 15 degrees to 20 degrees mid-afternoon on surrounding vegetated areas.
The Derecho that occurred in Houston was a warning of how quickly the dangers are multiplying in our rapidly warming world. As if to prove this point, about 10 days after the Houston blackout, another wind storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in and around Dallas.
One of the most dangerous illusions of the climate crisis is that the technology of modern life makes us invincible. Humans are very smart. We have the tools. Yes, it will cost money. But we can adapt to whatever comes our way. For bleached coral reefs in hot oceans and howler monkeys that one is dead trees were lost during the recent heat wave in Mexico, which is sad but life goes on.
Of course, this is an extremely privileged perspective. For one thing, more than 750 million people There is no electricity on the planet, much less air conditioning. (In India, New Delhi experienced temperatures topping 120 degrees last week, leading to increased heatstroke, fears of power outages and possible water cuts.) But that’s also a naive view. , if only because our water bubble’s invincibility is much more fragile than we know. So what can we expect from hot Katrina?
Last year, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan published a study looking at the consequences of major power outages during extreme heat waves in three cities: Phoenix, Detroit and Atlanta. In the study, the cause of the blackout was not determined.
“It really doesn’t matter whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack or a real storm,” Brian Stone, director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech and lead author of the study, told me. topic. “For the purposes of our study, the effect was the same.” Whatever the cause, the study notes that the number of major blackouts in the US more than doubled between 2015-16 and 2020-21.
Dr. Stone and his colleagues focused on these three American cities because they have different demographics, climate, and reliance on air conditioning. In Detroit, 53% of buildings have central air conditioning; in Atlanta, 94%; in Phoenix, 99 percent. Researchers modeled the health consequences for residents of a two-day citywide blackout during a heat wave, then gradually restored power over the next three days.
The results are startling: in Phoenix, about 800,000 people – nearly half the population – will need emergency medical treatment for heatstroke and other illnesses. The influx of people seeking care will overwhelm the city’s hospitals. More than 13,000 people will die.
Under the same scenario in Atlanta, researchers found there would be 12,540 emergency room visits. Six people will die. IN Detroitwhich has a higher proportion of older residents and higher poverty rates than other cities, 221 people will die.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by these numbers. Researchers estimate 61,672 people died in Europe due to heat in the summer of 2022, the hottest season on record on the continent at the time. In June 2021, a heat wave result of nearly 900 excess deaths in the Pacific Northwest. And in 2010, one estimate 56,000 Russians died in a record summer heat wave
The hotter it is, the harder it is for our bodies to cope, increasing the risk of heatstroke and other heat-related illnesses. And it’s getting hotter across the planet. Last year was the warmest year on record and the 10 hottest years are all there happen In the century.
In their study simulating heat waves in those three cities, researchers found that Phoenix’s much larger death toll was explained by two factors. First, simulated temperatures during the Phoenix heat wave (90 to 113 degrees) were much higher than those in Atlanta (77 to 97 degrees) or Detroit (72 to 95 degrees). And second, having more air conditioners in Phoenix means the risk of losing power during a heat wave is much higher.
A lot can be done to minimize these risks. Building cities with less concrete and asphalt, more parks, greenery, and access to rivers and lakes would help. So will a more sophisticated national standard heat wave warning system. Large cities also need to identify their most vulnerable residents and develop targeted emergency response plans and long-term heat management plans.
Making the grid more resilient is equally important. Better digital firewalls at grid operations centers prevent hacker intrusions. Burying transmission lines protects them from storms. Batteries to store electricity for emergencies are getting cheaper and cheaper.
But the hotter it gets, the more vulnerable the grid becomes, even when demand for electricity spikes because customers are running their air conditioners at full throttle. Transmission lines sagged, transformers exploded, power plants failed. One research in 2016 found that the likelihood of a cascading grid failure across Arizona increases 30-fold with a 1.8-degree increase in summer temperatures.
“Most grid problems on hot days stem from problems at power plants or the grid itself,” said Doug Lewin, a power grid expert and author of the book Texas. heat caused or due to difficulty in meeting high cooling demands”. Energy and Power news, speak to me. The best way to fix that, Mr. Lewin argues, is to encourage people to reduce their home’s electricity needs with high-efficiency heat pumps, better insulation and smart thermostats, while also generating their own energy. with solar panels and battery storage.
The looming threat of Katrina is a reminder of how technological progress creates new risks even as it solves old ones. On a brutally hot day during a recent trip to Jaipur, India, I visited an 18th-century building with an indoor fountain, thick walls, and a ventilation system designed to channel wind through each building. room. There’s no air conditioning, but the building is as cool and comfortable as a new office tower in Houston.
Air conditioning may actually be a modern necessity that many of us living in hot parts of the world cannot live without. But it is also a technology of oblivion. Once upon a time, people understood the dangers of extreme heat and found ways to live with it. And now, as temperatures rise due to our overconsumption of fossil fuels, tens of thousands of lives may depend on remembering how it was done. Or find a better way to do it.
