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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JULY 6, 2021
Tragedy strikes immigrant family again
By ANDREW SELSKY
and NATHAN HOWARD
Associated Press
ST. PAUL — On his 38th birthday,
Sebastian Francisco Perez, an immigrant
from Guatemala, played chess with his
nephew. The next day, he went to work at a
nursery in a rural town as the thermometer
soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Perez collapsed that day, June 26, as a
heat wave baked the Pacifi c Northwest in
all-time, record-high temperatures. The
workers had been moving irrigation lines
when they noticed Perez wasn’t there and
found him. They called his nephew, Pedro
Lucas, who arrived to fi nd his uncle uncon-
scious and dying.
Paramedics tried to revive him, but Perez
didn’t make it. A database of the Oregon
Occupational Safety and Health Adminis-
tration listed his death as heat-related.
Hundreds of people are believed to have
died in the historic heat wave that hit Ore-
gon, Washington state and British Colum-
bia. The death of Perez underscores the
dangers that farmworkers, most of them
immigrants, face as they work under the hot
sun, driving rain and snow, often packed in
vans to travel to job sites.
In 2019, two of Lucas’ cousins and a
third person were killed when a pickup
truck slammed into a van near Salem carry-
ing them and 10 other Guatemalans home
from work at a Christmas tree farm.
The fact that tragedy has struck Lucas’
family again leaves him in disbelief.
“I don’t understand the things that some-
times happen,” Lucas said in a phone inter-
view in Spanish.
Last time, he used donations to pay a
funeral home to have the bodies of his two
cousins and the other man returned to Gua-
temala from Oregon.
Lucas said the family is awaiting an
autopsy report on Perez. Lucas said Perez
had worked in the heat before and did fi ne.
Perez had lived in the United States
before, and returned about four months
Nathan Howard/AP Photo
A worker, who declined to be named, looks at a photo of Sebastian Francisco Perez, who died in June while working in an extreme heat wave.
ago. He supported his wife, who stayed
home in Ixcan, Guatemala, a town near the
Mexico border.
“He liked to be in the United States,”
Lucas said. “In Guatemala, the economy is
not good. There’s a lot of poverty, so you
look out for your welfare and your future.”
Reyna Lopez, the executive director of
a northwest farmworkers’ union, known
by its Spanish-language initials, PCUN,
called the death “shameful” and faulted
both the nursery and Oregon OSHA for not
adopting emergency rules ahead of the heat
wave.
Aaron Corvin, a spokesman for Oregon
OSHA, said the state is “exploring adopt-
ing emergency requirements, and we con-
tinue to engage in discussions with labor
and employer stakeholders.”
He added that employers are obligated
to provide ample water, shade, additional
breaks and training about heat hazards.
An executive order issued in March 2020
by Gov. Kate Brown would formalize pro-
tecting workers from heat, but it is coming
too late for Perez. Brown’s order focuses
on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and
also tells the Oregon Health Authority and
Oregon OSHA to jointly propose standards
to protect workers from excessive heat and
wildfi re smoke.
They had until the end of June to sub-
mit the proposals, but due to the coronavi-
rus pandemic, the two agencies requested
the deadline be pushed back to September.
Lucas remembers his uncle’s last night
as one of joy as they played games.
“He was happy with me that night,” he
said.
West gets hotter days, East gets hot nights
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
As outlandish as the killer heat wave that
struck the Pacifi c Northwest was, it fi ts into
a decadeslong pattern of uneven summer
warming across the United States.
The West is getting roasted by hotter
summer days while the East Coast is get-
ting swamped by hotter and stickier summer
nights, an analysis of decades of U.S. sum-
mer weather data shows.
State-by-state average temperature trends
from 1990 to 2020 show America’s sum-
mer swelter is increasing more in some of the
places that just got baked with extreme heat
in June: California, Nevada, New Mexico,
Arizona, Utah, Oregon and Colorado.
The West is the fastest-warming region in
the country during June, July and August, up
3 degrees on average since 1990. The North-
west has warmed nearly twice as much in the
past 30 years as it has in the Southeast.
That includes Portland, which set a record
116-degree high that was 3 degrees warmer
than temperatures ever recorded in Okla-
homa City or Dallas-Fort Worth.
Although much of the primary cause of
the extreme heat was an unusual but natural
weather condition, scientists see the fi nger-
print of human-caused climate change, citing
altered weather patterns that park heat in dif-
ferent places for longer periods.
“The ridiculous temperatures in the Pacifi c
Northwest may on one hand be considered a
black swan (ultrarare) event, but on the other
hand are totally consistent” with long-term
trends, said meteorologist Judah Cohen of the
private fi rm Atmospheric and Environmen-
tal Research. “So I am not going to predict
when is the next time Portland will hit 116
but I believe hotter summers for the broader
Nathan Howard/Associated Press
A farmworker wiped sweat from his neck while working in St. Paul as a heat wave baked the
Pacifi c Northwest in record-high temperatures.
region are here to stay.”
Climate change is altering and weakening
the jet stream, narrow bands of wind that circle
the Earth fl owing west to east. Those changes
allow key weather-producing patterns of high
and low pressure to stall in place. High pres-
sure is stalling more often in the West in sum-
mer, said Pennsylvania State University cli-
mate scientist Michael Mann. High pressure
brings hot and dry weather that, when stalled,
can create what are known as heat domes.
Low pressure brings wet weather.
Another factor is higher water tempera-
tures in the Pacifi c Ocean that also gener-
ate more so-called high-pressure ridges the
West, said Gerald Meehl, a National Center
for Atmospheric Research scientist who stud-
ies heat waves.
These patterns are showing up so often
that their eff ects can be seen in long-term
data. The U.S. Northwest, western Canada
and Siberia, which also just saw a stunning
heat wave, are among Earth’s fastest warm-
ing land areas during summer since 1990,
Cohen said.
The Midwest is warming slower during
the summer than either coast. That’s because
stalled low pressure areas often drive cooler
air into the Great Lakes region, said North
Illinois University climate scientist Victor
Gensini.
Water explains the big diff erence between
western and eastern heat trends, scientists
said.
“In western states where drought has been
expanding and intensifying during the past
decade, soil moisture has been declining. Dry
soil heats up faster than moist soil during the
day because all the solar energy goes into
heating rather than into evaporating mois-
ture,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scien-
tist at the Woodwell Climate Research Cen-
ter. “Dry soil also cools off faster at night.”
That’s partly why the West, which is get-
ting drier by the decade and is mired in a
20-year megadrought, is seeing those crazy
triple digit daytime temperatures.
The East is getting wetter by the decade,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration records show, and the East Coast is
seeing its biggest warming increase at night.
The overnight lows in New Jersey and Dela-
ware have warmed 3 degrees since 1990, the
biggest increases in the nation.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, Francis
explained, “So at night it traps more of the
heat.”
Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state cli-
matologist, attributes the trends to human-
caused warming. “There’s no other explana-
tion,” she said.
She added that while the extreme daytime
highs may be eye-popping, warmer nights
can also be dangerous. “Warm nights may
not sound like a problem but they are a pub-
lic health risk for people who lack suffi cient
cooling,” she said.
And hiding from the heat is becoming
harder and harder: “All my places to go for
a quick break were absurdly hot — Oregon,
North Carolina, even upstate New York?
Where is left to go? Even Canada isn’t safe.”
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