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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JULY 6, 2021
HEAT WAVE LEFT A DEADLY TOLL
‘There will be a next time’
By ROB DAVIS, TED SICKINGER,
AIMEE GREEN, FEDOR ZARKHIN,
SAVANNAH EADENS, NOELLE
CROMBIE, JEFF MANNING
and KALE WILLIAMS
The Oregonian
It had never been hotter in Portland’s
recorded history when Nathan Williams found
the man dressed in black, lying on his back in
the searing afternoon sun.
Williams, 40, a n ortheast Portland resident
staying at a Lloyd Center-area hotel to escape
the heat, gave the man a cold Gatorade and
helped him fi nd shade across Northeast Sixth
Avenue. One of Multnomah County’s three
cooling centers, the Oregon Convention Cen-
ter, was less than half a mile away. But the
man’s sleeping bag had snagged on his shop-
ping cart, Williams said, and he was apprehen-
sive about walking in the scorching heat.
It was a Sunday afternoon, the second day
of the unprecedented late June heat dome, and
the temperature was breaking records at that
very moment: 112 degrees.
For days, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler,
Gov. Kate Brown and Multnomah County
leaders had been telling Oregonians that a
ride to cooling centers was a phone call away.
But when Williams tried to help the man and
called 211, a non emergency line, the promised
ride didn’t show up. After 90 minutes of wait-
ing, the man stayed on the street and Williams
left to help others. Williams saw the man a day
later still in the neighborhood.
“It was just heartbreaking,” Williams said.
The extreme heat that enveloped the Pacifi c
Northwest for three days in June was unprec-
edented for the region, and escaping without
any lives lost, in a state of 4.2 million residents,
would have been a miracle. But the record-set-
ting temperatures delivered a mounting death
count — at least 95 Oregonians had been iden-
tifi ed as suspected victims as of Sunday .
That toll, according to people who study
heat waves, could have been far lower.
“Nobody needs to die in a heat wave,” said
Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health
and the Global Environment at the University
of Washington. “It’s important for people to
understand that these deaths are preventable.”
Despite having days of warning about the
incoming heat — and years of warning that
extreme weather events are becoming more
likely — neither Portland nor Oregon was com-
pletely ready for the mother of all heat waves,
a review by The Oregonian
found. While elected lead-
ers, public health offi cials,
MORE
fi rst responders, emer-
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gency room physicians
Tragedy
and volunteers scram-
strikes
bled to sound the alarm
immigrant
and respond to residents
family
in distress, they were out-
again • B4
matched. And in several
instances, the eff ort was
hampered by inadequate
preparation and lacked collective urgency in
communications with the public.
The review found:
• Hundreds of callers gave up when they
couldn’t get through to people staffi ng 211,
leaving ailing Oregonians stranded in the heat
or forcing them to call 911, another strain on a
health system that was quickly overwhelmed.
The 211 system wasn’t fully operational in
Multnomah County or statewide until the after-
noon of the second day of record-breaking heat
because of bureaucratic and technical missteps.
• While state and city leaders brought atten-
tion to the coming heat wave, they stopped short
of delivering clear messages about how deadly
the event could be. Wheeler, Brown and Mult-
nomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury did not
hold a unifi ed press conference to warn people
in the state’s most populous region about the
heat wave, and the state played a largely hands-
off operational role in what will go down as
one of Oregon’s deadliest tragedies.
• Multnomah County health offi cials
sounded a clear alarm, telling residents the
heat could be life-threatening. But no heat-re-
lated deaths were announced in the metro area
until after cool weather had returned Wednes-
Mark Graves/The Oregonian
While Portland reached record temperatures in June, people gathered at Keller Fountain Park to take a dip and cool off .
‘DEATHS ARE OFTEN … THE RESULT
OF GOVERNMENT FAILURE. GOVERNMENTS
HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY TOO PASSIVE.’
Michael Oppenheimer | Princeton University professor
and climate scientist who has spent decades studying heat events
day, missing an opportunity to reinforce the
confi rmed lethal dangers of the heat before the
worst of it arrived.
• Oregon’s state emergency planners are
years behind in getting ready for extreme heat
events. The state does not have a plan for han-
dling extreme heat, treating it as any other
major weather event, and it completed a sep-
arate risk assessment only last year acknowl-
edging the looming potential for heat disasters
amid climate change.
A full accounting of the tragedy will likely
take months. And because details are still
emerging, it’s diffi cult to draw meaningful
comparisons to Washington state, which has
reported far fewer heat-related deaths amid
lower temperatures, and British Columbia,
which reported hundreds more unexpected
deaths that have not yet been conclusively
linked to heat.
‘Governments have
been entirely too passive’
Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton Uni-
versity professor and climate scientist who has
spent decades studying heat events, said the
government response to extreme heat should
be no diff erent than the frenzy prompted by
forecasts of incoming hurricanes.
In order to save lives, governments must
take extreme heat seriously and, just as impor-
tantly, clearly explain to residents the deadly
dangers of staying inside without air condition-
ing in prolonged triple-digit weather, he said.
That’s especially true in Oregon, where a typ-
ically temperate climate and lack of air condi-
tioning and experience with extreme heat left
many residents vulnerable.
“Deaths are often … the result of govern-
ment failure,” Oppenheimer said, emphasiz-
ing the importance of strong offi cial warnings
about heat events. “Governments have been
entirely too passive.”
More than 60% of the 95 suspected heat
deaths in Oregon occurred in Multnomah
County, dwarfi ng the numbers from neigh-
boring Washington and Clackamas counties.
Local offi cials say they discovered many bod-
ies in homes without fans or air conditioning.
Dr. Jennifer Vines, the lead health offi -
cer for the tri county region, said she went into
the weekend with “a generic sense of dread,”
knowing the heat wave had the makings of a
disaster.
CONCEALED CARRY
PERMIT CLASS
“I used the words ‘life-threatening’ on pur-
pose last week to point out the full threat,” she
said of a warning issued June 23, three days
before the fi rst day of record-setting tempera-
tures. “But as it went on, into Monday, there
was a very, very heavy feeling that it was bad.”
Multnomah County spokeswoman Julie
Sullivan-Springhetti said no heat-related
deaths were reported Saturday, and that there
were less than fi ve Sunday, below the thresh-
old that the county would typically announce
publicly. That represented the fi rst opportu-
nity to alert the public about known fatalities
that could have helped underscore the threat to
those still inside sweltering homes.
Vines said the mounting toll quickly
became evident Monday, the third and hottest
day, when the offi cial temperature at Portland
International Airport hit 116 degrees. She was
informed early that calls to the county medi-
cal examiner had tripled, and by evening it
was clear emergency departments and hospi-
tals were very near capacity. The county two
days later announced 45 deaths related to the
heat, a number that has since grown to 64 as
of Sunday.
Offi cials on Saturday said 30 of the fatal-
ities have been offi cially ruled as death by
excessive heat. The majority of suspected vic-
tims died in homes. Offi cials are working to
determine how many were houseless.
Vines said it’s not clear to her that stronger
messaging from elected offi cials would have
changed the outcome. Vines was interviewed
dozens of times by local and national media
outlets, and frequently stressed the deadly
threat of the heat wave.
Vines said a deeper analysis of the tim-
ing and circumstances of the deaths will be
important. Among her questions: where and
how people were found, was there a demo-
graphic pattern or geographic clusters, had out-
reach workers already contacted them but been
rebuff ed, and what were the circumstances that
may have prevented them from getting to a
cooling center?
“None of those things was immediately
clear as this disaster unfolded, but I hope
there’s something there that will clue us in so
we can do things diff erently next time,” she
said. “I have to assume there will be a next
time.”
‘Elderly people are invisible’
Mary Rita Hurley, chairwoman for the
state’s Commission on Senior Services, was
alarmed by the numbers. She said the share
of deaths among the elderly is unsurpris-
ing because they are more susceptible to heat
and less likely to have transportation or online
access to information.
The average age of victims in Multnomah
County: 68 years old.
“Elderly people are invisible,” she said.
“We’re in a city, and unfortunately, there are
people who fall through these cracks.”
Triple-digit heat waves that last three days
or more are rare in Portland’s recorded history
— it’s happened only eight times in the past 83
years, the last in 2009. Usually, the tempera-
ture reaches no more than 103 degrees.
June’s heat wave hit historic highs for Port-
land for three consecutive days, starting Satur-
day at 108 and rising by four degrees each day
until Monday, when the city’s offi cial tempera-
ture — a blazing 116 — fell just one degree
below Las Vegas’ record. Compounding the
problem, overnight lows remained extremely
high, not dropping below 80 one night in some
parts of the city.
Initial summer heat waves are always the
deadliest because people aren’t acclimated to
the temperatures, said Jennifer Vanos, an assis-
tant professor in the School of Sustainabil-
ity at Arizona State University. And the great-
est number of deaths in a heat wave occur,
on average, two to three days after it begins
because of the cumulative eff ects on those who
cannot escape the heat, she said.
“If you don’t know that people are dying
or you don’t know the number in the hospital
in real time, it’s very out of sight, out of mind
for people,” she said, adding: “It might never
occur to someone that they’re vulnerable until
it’s too late.”
That appears to be what happened in
Oregon.
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