Every heat death is preventable, but only if the people most at risk can be reached with the correct information in the correct language, be directed to public resources and be inspired to use them.
That was the conclusion made by Braden Kay, the new Extreme Heat Program Manager in Gov. Newsom’s Office of Planning and Research. He spoke this past Tuesday along with four community leaders to give a public update on California’s response to extreme heat, which was hosted by Ethnic Media Services, a nonprofit that works to enhance the capacity of diverse news outlets.
“I’ve gone across California, whether it’s farmworkers in Tulare County or a really interesting organization that works with indigenous farmworkers in Ventura County,” said Kay. “What we’re hearing over and over again is that people don’t have the information they need.”
Kay’s new Extreme Heat and Community Resilience Program has $180 million in grant funds to help tribes, cities, counties and businesses wanting to work on the challenges of extreme heat.
Party with a purpose
One of the grant recipients was El Concilio, a community social service agency serving the San Joaquin Valley. They received a $250,000 grant to promote vaccines and inform the public about safe drinking water. During the heat wave, they used some of the funds to go door-to-door and support a phone banking program to get heat-resilient messaging out to their community. Many of their residents work outdoors in the agriculture industry.
This summer, San Joaquin County hit 115 degrees, said Ines Ruiz-Huston, El Conilio’s Vice President of Special Programs.
“You know, everybody loves a good party,” she said. “So, when you throw a party, we educate the community, make the topic about extreme heat, and you turn it into something exciting to talk about.”
Ruiz-Huston hired a band to play music for people in line at an early morning food give away. Multilingual social media campaigns and videos are also effective at transmitting the message to drink water, go swimming or go to a cooling center, she said.
Just how many heat deaths has San Joaquin County seen in the past year? “I wish I knew,” said Maggie Park, a county public health officer based in Stockton.
“If the hospitals were made to share that data with Public Health, maybe we could use it.” When people die from heat complications at hospitals, they sometimes get recorded as something other than heat related, like cardiopulmonary arrest or severe dehydration, according to Park. The death certificate might not necessarily say it was heat related.
“So even if the hospitals were willing to share all that data with us, we don’t think it would be accurate,” she said.
“One of the challenges with climate change is that it’s not just change, it’s chaos. … What we know about the future is that over the long run, it’s going to get hotter and hotter and hotter.” Braden Kay, California Extreme Heat and Community Resilience Program Manager
Even without exact data, Park knows from research that lower income communities are hit the hardest, because they are less likely to live in shady, lower density areas. Although San Joaquin County has a lot of rural areas, most people live in crowded urban pockets, she said.
“It’s the lower income people in areas where there’s just concrete buildings and not a lot of this green infrastructure,” Park said. “So, we need a lot of urban planning for the future.”
Park’s public health agency brings a mobile shower into homeless communities and distributes information printed in multiple languages and pictures. She says the biggest problem is getting people into air-conditioned centers or getting people to turn on their own air conditioning.
“Some lower income houses are older and use the same amount of electricity as new, bigger homes, leaving them with a disproportionate power bill,” she said.
Aging into disability
Other presenters in the panel included Susan Henderson, executive director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, who called for accessible cooling centers, among other accommodations.
“Pretty much all of us age into disability,” she said. “Disabled people and older adults have a lot in common and we have intersecting functional needs. There are also tremendous attitudinal barriers toward older people with and without disabilities.”
Kay pointed to resources through the governor’s Office of Planning and Research, but he mostly spoke about his agency’s media campaign to change the public’s perception of climate change.
“One of the challenges with climate change is that it’s not just change, it’s chaos,” said Kay. “Chaos means that it’s not a linear path, not every summer is going to be hotter. It’s going to be very unpredictable. What we know about the future is that over the long run, it’s going to get hotter and hotter and hotter.”
